I am getting worried that people are having so much fun doing interesting stuff with GPT-3 and AI Dungeon that they're forgetting how easy it is to fool yourself. Maybe we should think about how many different cognitive biases are in play here? Here are some features that make it particularly easy during casual exploration.
First, it works much like autocomplete, which makes it the most natural thing in the world to "correct" the transcript to be more interesting. You can undo and retry, or trim off extra text if it generates more than you want.
Randomness is turned on by default, so if you try multiple times then you will get multiple replies and keep going until you get a good one. It would be better science but less fun to keep the entire distribution rather than stopping at a good one. Randomness also makes a lot of gamblers' fallacies more likely.
Suppose you don't do that. Then you have to decide whether to share the transcript. You will probably share the interesting transcripts and not the boring failures, resulting in a "file drawer" bias.
And even if you don't do that, "interesting" transcripts will be linked to and upvoted and reshared, for another kind of survivor bias.
Humans assume that humans continue a story based on deeper ideas, not surface words. So for example, if we started a story these two different ways:
"a girl named little red riding hood lived with her mother and father. one day she baked some cookies and decided to bring them to her grandmother who lived on the other side of the deep dark forest" ...
"once upon a time, a little girl lived with her parents. one day she made some food to bring to her mother's mother who lived on the other side of a large, ominous woods" ...
Our bias is that a human understands both prompts as being fairly equivalent in terms of the ideas they contain, so they would complete them in fairly similar ways. Humans might expect other humans to complete the story based on the general ideas, and not in a way that is highly sensitive to how the prompt is worded. This might or might not be true for GPT.
A tangible way to control for this kind of human bias, would be to try multiple rewordings/rewritings of the same prompt when examining the way that GPT generates the text after the prompt.
I am getting worried that people are having so much fun doing interesting stuff with GPT-3 and AI Dungeon that they're forgetting how easy it is to fool yourself. Maybe we should think about how many different cognitive biases are in play here? Here are some features that make it particularly easy during casual exploration.
First, it works much like autocomplete, which makes it the most natural thing in the world to "correct" the transcript to be more interesting. You can undo and retry, or trim off extra text if it generates more than you want.
Randomness is turned on by default, so if you try multiple times then you will get multiple replies and keep going until you get a good one. It would be better science but less fun to keep the entire distribution rather than stopping at a good one. Randomness also makes a lot of gamblers' fallacies more likely.
Suppose you don't do that. Then you have to decide whether to share the transcript. You will probably share the interesting transcripts and not the boring failures, resulting in a "file drawer" bias.
And even if you don't do that, "interesting" transcripts will be linked to and upvoted and reshared, for another kind of survivor bias.
What other biases do you think will be a problem?