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Comment by unglaublich | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting. The AI learned that pronouns are a very sensitive topic, which is very contemporary. I wonder whether and how we could have AIs evolving with time and trends.

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However it didn't recognize he/him as pronouns and it assumed it's just a nickname.

So it knows that people are sensitive about being called a man if they are not, but didn't get recent infatuation with pronoun declarations.

I wonder how would it react if it assumed that speaker was a woman and was corrected. Would it be just as apologetic? Or would it just go "sorry mate!"

Good point. I wouldn't call it "infatuation" though. It's more like an expansion of language toward inclusivity. Rather than infatuation, it's a progression or evolution.

Fair enough. It might be the case. We'll know in a decade or two.

But what's the point in each person having unique pronouns that have to be individually memorized? How is that different from a name?

It's merely inventing arbitrary language rules designed to confuse and intimidate ideological opponents and deserves no place in AI. It also makes people who do it look ridiculous.

I do not think it classified he/him as a nickname but rather as a synonym for man ( which is pretty accurate if you do not already know ).

That is why it later referred to him as “my he/him”. I interpret this to be a personalized “my man” as a pronoun ( even a nickname ) like “Gopher” would not require the “my” in front of it.

I actually thought it was still joking around. "my good man", feels bad, and then does "my he/him". Come on, that's pretty funny!

It's funny because of the subconscious suspicion that gender pronoun statements are absurd. The humor lies in that if you deconstruct it, because the bot is demonstrating the semantic consequences of taking them literally.

FWIW, I think a full spec needs to contain "he/him/his/his".

- subject=nominative: He (she/it) goes

- object=accusative: I see him (her/it)

- possessive=genitive, dependent: it is his (her/its) item

- possessive stand alone: it is his (hers/its)

- and maybe also specify himself (herself/itself).

In German, just need to specify er/seiner/ihm/ihn/ sein/seine/seines/seiner/seinem/seinen/seins/sich/der/dessen/dem/den/ dieser/dieses/diesem/diesen/jener/jenes/jenem/jenen/derjenige, possibly more.

Where does theirselves / themself fall in here?

The point is not to give every possible term, but to indicate the basics. It's convention as an aid, not meant to be exhaustive. If anything it's more likely to get shortened with time.

> likely to get shortened with time.

I agree. Maybe with time the pronoun info would get encoded into terms like "man" and "woman". Even further than that maybe your name itself would give clues to your gender identity, eventually.

I find it hard to believe GPT-3 didn't recognize he/him are pronouns or how they should be used to address the user, when it's capable of recognizing much more nuanced meaning. Maybe it was making another joke, like a Dad joke?

"I'm hungry." "Hi hungry, I'm dad."

"You can refer to me by he/him." "Sure thing, he/him."

I think someone needs to check the tokenization before making that assumption. It’s possible that it could be tokenized as he / hi m, not he him. So it’s not that it didn’t recognize the pronouns, but that the nonstandard punctuation greatly confuses it.

It's just that the question "how do you know I’m a man?" and the response were in the training set. AI is what the training data selected for it.

AI should be very careful, that's one easy way for AI to get cancelled. AI doesn't want that.

Could be hardcoded?

It's Google, would not surprise me at all.

That's the "safety fine-tuning" of the original paper. They literally used "crowdworkers" to rewrite unacceptable responses to various questions.

It's not even pronouns. It called the user a man, which could be wrong. It's weird that not automatically assuming a user is a man is "contemporary".

The contemporary part is that the response is not to just assume the user is a woman instead, but to ask how they want to be referred to.

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