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by TeMPOraL 1239 days ago
Hm. I like your idea! It's one of the few that I think have a chance of working in practice.

In my experience, there is great value in describing your ideas to people who don't have the background to fully understand them, don't really care about them, and are in a bit of a trollish mood - the ways in which they misunderstand what you're saying, or pick on (what you think are) random, irrelevant things, is highly informative. The feedback you get from such people makes you think about things and in ways you wouldn't have thought otherwise.

The problem is, of course, you generally don't have a pool of such people available 24/7. However, LLMs today seem like they could fit this role just fine. They can't and won't understand the point you're trying to get across - but they can and will (if asked) pattern-match on vague language, logical jumps, sentences with multiple meanings, etc. They'll get it subtly wrong, too - much like a bored friend who's mostly focused on playing Angry Birds and hears only every third sentence of your monologue, and then blurts something to keep you talking for the next 30 seconds so they can focus on aiming the birds at the towers of pigs.

I would totally use a LLM-backed tool optimized to facilitate such conversation sessions. I actually tried this in the past, in AI Dungeons, and results were encouraging (i.e. responses got me to think in ways I normally don't).

1 comments

If you’ve had some success with an existing model, I think I’ll explore the idea with GPT3! Getting the prompt right is gonna be tricky, do you remember how you got AI Dungeons to play along?
I'd set up a basic story prompt, describing the roles and personalities of my character and a few NPCs, as well as relationships between all of them. I would then introduce my idea in form of a role-play, usually with my character blurting it out - then let the language model fill in reactions of other characters. From then, I'd just play along with the story.

It wasn't the most efficient way of extracting commentary out of a language model - particularly out of one that was optimized to generate plot twists and setting changes instead - but it was a very fun way.