I suspect they've trained it on old stories on which they added this caveat, and now “once upon a time” became tightly coupled to the caveat in the model.
Yes, we wouldn't want to produce output that perpetuates harmful stereotypes about people who live in gingerbread houses; dangerously over-estimates the suitability of hair for safely working at height; or creates unrealistic expectations about the hospitality of people with dwarfism.
I wonder if this sort of behaviour was more nuanced in the initial model, and something like quantisation has degraded the performance?
In fairness, there are lots of things in old tales we may not an LLM to take literally.
For instance, unlike kids, at training time an LLM isn't going to ask “It's not very nice for the parents to abandon their children in the forest, is it?”.
I know conservatives are easily triggered by such caveats, but at the same time, they are literally banning books from library ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I wonder if this sort of behaviour was more nuanced in the initial model, and something like quantisation has degraded the performance?