Apr 17, 2023·edited Apr 17, 2023Liked by Sean Trott
This can be explained more simply using literary terms. The LLM always pretends to be someone, either the author of a document or one of the characters in a dialog, due to its training. You can arrange for it to pretend to be a different character by changing the story and it will go along. Plot twists can be described in few words.
Also, the thing to ask about the simulator hypothesis is "simulator of what?" The training set is mostly not a bunch of game logs, it's a bunch of documents in English (or another human language) and the "rules" of storytelling apply. These rules are so flexible that it's more like Calvinball than anything we'd normally call a simulation. So to me, "simulator" seems like a worse metaphor than "storyteller," though this is just a preference; we don't know how LLM's work in concrete terms.
Also, the hypothesis that it's easier to make LLM's imitate a bad person doesn't seem well-justified? I haven't seen any real evidence for it.
This can be explained more simply using literary terms. The LLM always pretends to be someone, either the author of a document or one of the characters in a dialog, due to its training. You can arrange for it to pretend to be a different character by changing the story and it will go along. Plot twists can be described in few words.
Also, the thing to ask about the simulator hypothesis is "simulator of what?" The training set is mostly not a bunch of game logs, it's a bunch of documents in English (or another human language) and the "rules" of storytelling apply. These rules are so flexible that it's more like Calvinball than anything we'd normally call a simulation. So to me, "simulator" seems like a worse metaphor than "storyteller," though this is just a preference; we don't know how LLM's work in concrete terms.
Also, the hypothesis that it's easier to make LLM's imitate a bad person doesn't seem well-justified? I haven't seen any real evidence for it.