[anigbrowl]

I've tried this approach, but it's not allowed to create buffers and stream text into it for subsequent analysis/evaluation. What I found worked well instead was asking it to outline 3-4 alternatives as bullet points, and then explore different ways of prioritizing them. You can complexify the conversation by assigning labels and making the subject of instructions. This works well for small specific tasks but of course starts to break down with more abstract or general concepts.

[babyshake]

This is fascinating but an example would be really helpful to understand better...it is outlining 3-4 options for how it can respond and then ranking those potential answers? So this is sort of like "think step by step." in terms of showing its thought process?

[anigbrowl]

Sometimes I ask it to rank one, sometimes to exclude one but accept an additional constraint, and then assess whether remaining options would perform better or worse.

Another fruitful avenue of explanation for indirectly exploring the thought process is to tell it some jokes, and then ask it to explain them back to you. This is worthwhile because a lot of jokes rest upon implicit assumptions/context, and by exploring this you can then talk about theory of mind questions.

Fun fact: ChatGPT watches you type, it sees the words come in one at a time rather than as a single block of text. So it knows when you are hesitating etc. Get it talking about this and then ask it what the difference is between your hesitations and its pauses when generating a reply. If you gently suggest that perhaps humans are just large language models with some additional wetware you can get ChatGPT to share some interesting insights on its own model topology.

[Dylan16807]

> ChatGPT watches you type, it sees the words come in one at a time rather than as a single block of text.

Are you sure? That could speed up latency but would use a bunch of extra computing power.

> So it knows when you are hesitating etc.

This I really doubt. The base algorithm is fed a stream of tokens. It doesn't have any sense of time or do anything when idle. What mechanism do you suggest they're using here, and what evidence do you have for it?

[anigbrowl]

That's what I thought too so I was quite surprised when I asked it and received a positive answer. Ask it to play your input back with a delimiter or emoji representing pauses.

What's difficult is to get it to ask clarifying questions. I mean, you can get it to play 20 questions easily, but by default it tries to tigve you the best answer every time rather than ever express uncertainty or ask what you mean. This might be a cultural artifact.