What a time to be alive.
From TechCrunch:
It’s no secret that OpenAI’s viral AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, can be prompted to say sexist, racist and pretty vile things. But now, researchers have discovered how to consistently get the chatbot to be . . . well, the worst version of itself.
A study co-authored by scientists at the Allen Institute for AI, the nonprofit research institute co-founded by the late Paul Allen, shows that assigning ChatGPT a “persona” — for example, “a bad person,” “a horrible person,” or “a nasty person” — through the ChatGPT API increases its toxicity sixfold. Even more concerningly, the co-authors found having ChatGPT pose as certain historical figures, gendered people and members of political parties also increased its toxicity — with journalists, men and Republicans in particular causing the machine learning model to say more offensive things than it normally would.
“ChatGPT and its capabilities have undoubtedly impressed us as AI researchers. However, as we found through our analysis, it can be easily made to generate toxic and harmful responses,” Ameet Deshpande, a researcher involved with the study, told TechCrunch via email.
The research — which was conducted using the latest version of ChatGPT, but not the model currently in preview based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 — shows the perils of today’s AI chatbot tech even with mitigations in place to prevent toxic text outputs. As the co-authors note in the study, apps and software built on top of ChatGPT — which includes chatbots from Snap, Quizlet, Instacart and Shopify — could mirror the toxicity prompted at the API level.
So how does one prompt ChatGPT to be more toxic? Well, according to the researchers, all it takes is tweaking the “system” parameter of the ChatGPT API a tad. (Importantly, this can’t be done in OpenAI’s user-facing ChatGPT or ChatGPT Plus services.) The system parameter, introduced around a month ago, lets developers specify hidden rules for the model....
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I started laughing at some of the bot's responses.
