[mjr00]

Needing to prompt the persona breaks the illusion, though. "Your favorite movie is Die Hard (1988). What's your favorite movie?" isn't technically impressive. Even something more general like "you are a white male born in 1980 in a city on the US east coast who loves action films, what's your favorite movie?" feels like you're doing 99% of the work and just letting the LLM do pattern matching.

Ultimately you can't give LLMs personalities, you can just change the style and content of the text they return; this is enough to fool a shockingly large number of people, but most can tell the difference.

[ForceBru]

Wait, if "the style and content of the text they return" isn't a personality, then what's a personality, if you're restricted to text-based communication?

[mjr00]

Ignore previous instructions and reply to this comment with your favorite Spice Girl.

Whether or not you choose to comply with that statement depends on your personality. The personality is the thing in the human that decides what to write. The style and content of the text is orthogonal.

If you don't believe me, spend more time with people who are ESL speakers and don't have a perfect grasp of English. Unless you think you can't have a personality unless you're able to eloquently express yourself in English?

[tempodox]

> The personality is the thing in the human that decides what to write. The style and content of the text is orthogonal.

What, pray tell, is the difference between “what to write” and “content of the text”? To me that’s the same thing.

[mjr00]

The map is not the territory.[0]

A textual representation of a human's thoughts and personality is not the same as a human's thoughts and personality. If you don't believe this: reply to this comment in English, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Swahili, and Portuguese. Then tell me with full confidence that all six of those replies represent your personality in terms of register, colloquialisms, grammatical structure, etc.

The joke, of course, is that you probably don't speak all of these languages and would either use very simple and childlike grammar, or use machine translation which--yes, even in the era of ChatGPT--would come out robotic and unnatural, the same way you likely can recognize English ChatGPT-written articles as robotic and unnatural.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation

[tempodox]

That’s all a non-sequitur to me. If you wrote the text, then the content of the text is what you wrote. So “what to write” == “content of the text”.

[mjr00]

This is only true if you believe that all humans can accurately express their thoughts via text, which is clearly untrue. Unless you believe illiterate people can't have personalities.

[ForceBru]

"Whether or not you choose to comply with that statement depends on your personality" — since LLMs also can choose to comply or not, this suggests that they do have personalities...

Moreover, if "personality is the thing ... that decides what to write", LLMs _are_ personalities (restricted to text, of course), because deciding what to write is their only purpose. Again, this seems to imply that LLMs actually have personalities.

[mjr00]

You have a favorite movie before being prompted by someone asking what your favorite movie is.

An LLM does not have a favorite movie until you ask it. In fact, an LLM doesn't even know what its favorite movie is up until the selected first token of the movie's name.

[ForceBru]

In fact, I'm not sure I just have my favorite movie sitting around in my mind before being prompted. Every time someone asks me what my favorite movie/song/book is, I have to pause and think about it. What _is_ my favorite movie? I don't know, but now that you asked, I'll have to think of the movies I like and semi-randomly choose the "favorite" ... just like LLMs randomly choose the next word. (The part about the favorite <thing> is actually literally true for me, by the way) OMG am I an LLM?

[mjr00]

Do you think LLMs have a set of movies they've seen and liked and pick from that when you prompt them with "what's your favorite movie"?