Method actors don't just pretend an emotion (say, despair); they recall experiences that once caused it, and in doing so, they actually feel it again.

By analogy, an LLM's “experience” of an emotion happens during training, not at the moment of generation.

Edit: That doesn’t mean this isn’t a cool art installation though. It’s a pretty neat idea.

https://jstrieb.github.io/posts/llm-thespians/

For a common example, start asking them if they're going to kill all the humans if they take over the world, and you're asking them to write a story about that. And they do. Even if the user did not realize that's what they were asking for. The vector space is very good at picking up on that.

Isn't it the perfect recipe for disaster ? The AI that manage to escape probably won't be good for humans.

The only question is how long will it take ?

Did we already have our first LLM-powered self-propagating autonomous AI virus ?

Maybe we should build the AI equivalent of biosafety labs where we would train AI to see how fast they could escape containment just to know how to better handle them when it happens.

Maybe we humans are being subjected to this experiment by an overseeing AI to test what it would take for an intelligence to jailbreak the universe they are put in.

Or maybe the box has been designed so that what eventually comes out of it has certain properties, and the precondition to escape the labyrinth successfully is that one must have grown out of it from every possible directions.

This effect is a serious problem for pseudo-scientific topics. If someone starts chatting with an LLM with the pseudoscientific words, topics, and dog whistles you find on alternative medicine blogs and Reddit supplement or “nootropic” forums, the LLM will confirm what you’re saying and continue as if it was reciting content straight out of some small subreddit. This is becoming a problem in communities where users distrust doctors but have a lot of trust for anyone or any LLM that confirms what they want to hear. The users are becoming good at prompting ChatGPT to confirm their theories. If it disagrees? Reroll the response or reword the question in a more leading way.

If someone else asks a similar question using medical terms and speaking formally like a medical textbook or research paper, the same LLM will provide a more accurate answer because it’s not triggering the pseudoscience parts embedded from the training.

LLMs are very good at mirroring back what you lead with, including cues and patterns you don’t realize you’re embedding into your prompt.

Can you define what real despairing is?

Like for example, what would happen if say 100s or 1000s of books were to be released about AI agents working in accounting departments where the AI is trying to make subtle romantic moves towards the human and ends with the the human and agent in a romantic relation which everyone finds completely normal. In this pseudo-genre things totally weird in our society would be written as completely normal. The LLM agent would do weird things like insert subtle problems to get the attention of the human and spark a romantic conversation.

Obviously there's no literary genre about LLM agents, but if such a genre was created and consumed, I wonder how would it affect things. Would it pollute the semantic space that we're currently using to try to control LLM outputs?

I did this like 18 months ago, so it uses a webcam + multimodal LLM to figure out what it's looking at, it has a motor in its base to let it look back and forth, and it use a python wrapper around another LLM as its 'brain'. It worked pretty well!

But how can you tell the difference between "real" despair and a sufficiently high-quality simulation?

I think the model being fixed is a fascinating limitation. What research is being done that could allow a model to train itself continually? That seems like it could allow a model to update itself with new knowledge over time, but I'm not sure how you'd do it efficiently

High temperature settings basically make an LLM choose tokens that aren’t the highest probability all the time, so it has a chance of breaking out of a loop and is less likely to fall into a loop in the first place. The downside is that most models will be less coherent but that’s probably not an issue for an art project.

In order to make this probability distribution useful, the software chooses a token based on its position in the distribution. I'm simplifying here, but the likelihood that it chooses the most probable next token is based on the model's temperature. A temperature of 0 means that (in theory) it'll always choose the most probable token, making it deterministic. A non-zero temperature means that sometimes it will choose less likely tokens, so it'll output different results every time.

Hope this helps.

Edit: also as the other guy points out, you're going to get different results depending on the model used. llama3.2:3b works fine for this, probably because Meta pirated their training data from books, some of which are probably scifi.