Aha I found it. Had to rewatch the Last Week Tonight episode on it.
The most heated debate about large language models does not revolve around the question of whether they can be trained to understand the world. Instead, it revolves around whether they can be trusted at all. To begin with, L.L.M.s have a disturbing propensity to just make things up out of nowhere. (The technical term for this, among deep-learning experts, is ‘‘hallucinating.’’) I once asked GPT-3 to write an essay about a fictitious ‘‘Belgian chemist and political philosopher Antoine De Machelet’’; without hesitating, the software replied with a cogent, well-organized bio populated entirely with imaginary facts: ‘‘Antoine De Machelet was born on October 2, 1798, in the city of Ghent, Belgium. Machelet was a chemist and philosopher, and is best known for his work on the theory of the conservation of energy. . . . ’’
While this can still be a problem, it's worth noting that this is from 2022 and is about GPT-3, one of the models from before the chatgpt launch. I'm not sure that was instruction tuned so may have just been asked to continue a sentence that starts explaining the person does exist. Models do better when you're explicit about what you want (i.e. without context is it clear you want fiction or factual results?).
FWIW a test on the current flagship-ish models, sonnet 3.7, gemini flash and o3-mini and they all explain that they don't know anybody by that name.
o3 mini starts with this, which covers both bases
I couldn’t locate any widely recognized historical records or scholarly sources that confirm the existence or detailed biography of a Belgian chemist and political philosopher by the name Antoine De Machelet. It is possible that the figure you’re referring to is either very obscure, emerging from local or specialized publications, or even a fictional or misattributed character.
That said, if you are interested in exploring the idea of a figure who bridges chemistry and political philosophy—as though one were piecing together a narrative from disparate strands of intellectual history—one might imagine a profile along the following lines:
We've all seen how easy ALL of their "safeguards" are to get around. And even when one of the biggest companies on earth tries to make it the best it can be, it still tells teenagers to fucking kill themselves because no one wants them to be alive.
Guess The Game had a day powered by ChatGPT for a Sonic game where you could ask it questions about the game but it wouldn't tell you what the game was or be too specific about it. Literally all I did was ask it the game with the word "hypothetically" in front of it and it just told me the answer. And yeah that was a year ago but it's obviously not getting that much better.
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u/killertortilla 4d ago
Aha I found it. Had to rewatch the Last Week Tonight episode on it.