AI test that worked on a scam bot, or someone who doesn’t speak English well: In the novel Blindsight, they’re discussing whether an alien they’ve encountered is sentient, so the linguist sends this message:
“Our cousins lie about the family tree, with nieces and nephews and Neanderthals. We do not like annoying cousins.”
“We’d like to know about this tree.”
Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? “It couldn’t have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them.”
The scammer ignored this and ChatGPT whiffed it. Claude gave a similar response in that it tried to explain a sentence that can’t possibly be explained. Neither caught the ambiguities. Happy hunting!
Uhh, I’m a human and I don’t really get it either.
That’s the point. A human would ask for clarification, but AI trys to continue the conversation.
It’s similar to this guy doing a job interview with an AI where he just says things like “Freight cadence Richard walnut and sprucewood. Six years of sprucewood, actually seven if you count Richard.” And the AI interviewer responds “It sounds like you’ve built up a long tenure with Richard at Sprucewood.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kcp1VBaCvEY
I see. One could ask for an AI capable of saying “Wait a minute, what the fuck are you talking about” when it needs to, but it would probably give away how fucking dumb it is.
The training is one part but its also how they work on a technical level.
They’re trained to always give an answer and never give responses like “I don’t know” and “I didn’t understand”. They could be trained to give these types of responses more frequently, but I’m not sure it fixes anything because of the technical aspect.
Technically, LLMs have no understanding of words, let alone sentence structure, because they’re mathematical models. Input words are tokenized (turned into numbers, essentially), run through a large equation that was crafted and tuned during training, and the resulting output tokens are turned back into words. They can’t be confused by ambiguous sentence structure because they don’t parse sentence structure. They can only ever be trained to appear like they don’t understand in the same way they are trained to appear like they do.
AI is designed for maximum usage loop. It’s why most of its answers end with questions.
Yes, that’s the point.
“Our cousins lie about the family tree” could mean either “our cousins are dishonest about their parentage” or “there are cousins scattered throughout our extended family”. Each individual statement has a similar ambiguity to it.
What is the ambiguity in the nieces and nephews part? The only thing I’m catching is that it’s just a co to uation of the previous ambiguity. Either they’re luring around with the nieces and nephews, or they’re lying about the nieces and nephews. I guess it kinda doubles it because you could interpret the list as either the nieces or nephews are being mentioned as part of the family tree or as a part of the situation involving the family tree, but the statement ‘with nieces and nephews and Neanderthals’ on its own doesn’t have an ambiguity that I can see? Idk if I’m missing something.
No, I think that’s it; it could be saying that the nieces and nephews and Neanderthals are with the cousins, lying about the family tree; or that they are “with” (contained within, a part of) the family tree about which the cousins are lying.
The original quote mentions three linguistic ambiguities, which I’m guessing are “lie about” (tell falsehoods about/are in a prone position around), “with” (as above), and “annoying” (adjective modifying unliked cousins/verb the speaker does not like doing).
Since it was spoken and not written in the story, I do also think that the lack of punctuation provides another: “Neanderthals” might not be the end of the sentence. “Our cousins lie about the family tree, with nieces and nephews, and Neanderthals we do not like annoying cousins.” As in, the Neanderthals whom we don’t like annoy cousins, and along with nieces and nephews, they are a part of the family tree that our cousins lie about.
14 reads of Blindsight and I hadn’t caught that last bit!
Could also be talking about cousins lounging on nhe ground around an actual tree with some importance to the family
Could also be talking about lounging around an actual tree with some importance to the family!
Lie like lie down in a bed? Absurd