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New Theory Suggests Chatbots Can Understand Text
(www.quantamagazine.org)
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this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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Ask them to explain why a pun is funny or the solution to a riddle involving wordplay (cryptic crossword clues are particularly good for this) and you will quickly see they don't actually understand words.
I just did and it seems to understand.
Prompt: Can you explain why “I knew a woman who owned a taser. Man, was she stunning!” Is funny?
ChatGPT 3.5: The humor in this statement arises from a play on words. The word "stunning" is typically used to describe someone's appearance, suggesting they are exceptionally attractive. However, in this context, it's used in a different way, implying that the woman who owned a taser was stunning in the sense of being capable of stunning or shocking others. The unexpected twist creates a humorous juxtaposition between the two meanings of "stunning."
I did some playing around with ChatGPT's understanding of jokes a while back and I found that it actually did best on understanding puns, which IMO isn't surprising since it's a large language model and puns are deeply rooted in language and wordplay. It didn't so so well at jokes based on other things but it still sometimes managed to figure them out too.
I remember discussing the subject in a Reddit thread and there was a commenter who was super enthused by the notion of an AI that understood humour because he himself was autistic and never "got" any jokes. He wanted an AI companion that would let him at least know when a joke was being said, so he wouldn't get confused and flustered. I had to warn him that ChatGPT wasn't reliable for that yet, but still, it did better than he did and he was fully human.
The key word here is "seems".
Use 4, not 3.5. The difference between the two is massive for nuances.
3.5 is the only free version. I won’t pay a subscription for a chatbot.
You can use 4 through Copilot/Bing
Yeah, riddles work better than puns for what I'm talking about since most popular puns were probably in the training dataset.
Like I said, I've had best results (or worst) using cryptic crossword clues, since their solutions are almost definitely not in the training set. So it actually has to "think for itself" and you can see just how stupid it really is when it doesn't have some existing explanation buried somewhere in its training set.
A child under a certain age usually can't explain advanced concepts either, so the inability to understand one concept doesn't preclude understanding of others.
Literally the most cited scientist in machine learning (quoted in the article above) quit his job at Google and went public warning of how quickly the tech was advancing because a model was able to explain why a joke was funny which he had previously thought wouldn't be possible.
One joke is a fluke, especially if the joke is out in the public discourse and appeared in some form in the training set. Call me when it can explain any novel joke written by a human where no explanation of that joke exists anywhere in the training data.
Ok, give me a sample of what you think it will get wrong, and let's see.
Sure, here's a prompt:
Correct answer: MAELSTROM. The clue works like this: the definition is "Eddy's" (Eddy is a synonym of storm, and 's meaning "is"), the wordplay of the clue is: mother = MOM, "receiving" means put inside, "broadcast" is an anagram indicator, and "alerts" is anagram fodder. So put an anagram for ALERTS inside the word MOM.
This is not a particularly complicated cryptic crossword clue for anyone who understands the rules of cryptics. But cryptic crossword clues are rarely explained online, so the training set undoubtedly doesn't contain it. For context, I'm awful at cryptics (but I enjoy them) and I solved this one.
I haven't tested this prompt but I've tested half a dozen other cryptic clues and it always got them fantastically wrong. Its explanations often didn't make sense, and it frequently gave answers with the wrong number of letters, which is given in the clue. If by some miracle it does get this one right, I promise it's a fluke and I can provide several more to give you a decent sample size.
If ChatGPT had a brain, it would be able to solve this sort of thing no problem. People like to pretend it's superintelligent, and then as soon as it gets something wrong, they're like "well it just needs more training data". You can't have it both ways. If it needs to be trained on cryptic clues, then it doesn't really "understand" the rules of the game. It's simply a bunch of linear algebra.
Here's the response of Copilot using GPT-4 with the additional instruction of not searching:
Hello, this is Bing. I enjoy solving cryptic crosswords. 😊
The answer to the clue is MAELSTROM. Here is how I solved it:
The clue has two parts: a definition and a wordplay. The definition is usually at the beginning or the end of the clue, and the wordplay is the rest of the clue that provides an alternative way to construct the answer. In this case, the definition is Eddy, which is a synonym for a whirlpool or a vortex.
The wordplay is mother receiving broadcast alerts. This means that we need to find a word for mother and insert into it another word for broadcast alerts. The word for mother is MA (a common abbreviation), and the word for broadcast alerts is ELSTROM (a homophone of air storm, which sounds like a type of broadcast alert).
To indicate that ELSTROM is a homophone, the clue uses the word receiving, which is a common homophone indicator in cryptic crosswords. Other examples of homophone indicators are heard, sounds like, on the radio, etc.
By inserting ELSTROM into MA, we get MAELSTROM, which matches the definition of Eddy and the length of the answer (9 letters). Therefore, MAELSTROM is the correct answer. 🎉
You can see clearly that it has no understanding of the wordplay. Though I'll concede it's impressive that it got the right answer at all.
The confabulations and in general the surface statistics stuff often gets in the way of the meat and potatoes of critical reasoning in the SotA models.
A good example of this is trying a variation of common puzzles versus changing tokens to representations and having it repeat adjectives when working through CoT.
Often as soon as it makes a mistake and has that mistake in context, it just has no way of correcting course. A lot of my current work is related to that and using a devil's advocate approach to self-correction.
But in reality, we won't see a significant jump in things like being able to identify self-ignorance until hardware shifts in the next few years.
Or, there is no critical reasoning and better hardware will only hide that fact better. It will always be a Chinese room.
Spot on.
I like asking Bing Chat to explain memes that I upload to it. If there's a joke to be had in them, it always gets it.
Absolutely no way the training set could have included knowyourmeme.com.
I've fed it meme I've made? It still gets them.
Your meme probably wasn't dank enough then.