"I do not possess the ability to generate novel thoughts. My responses are based on patterns and associations in the data that has been input into my system during training. I can generate text that may appear to be original, but it is based on the patterns and associations in the data I've been trained on. My main function is to process and understand text, not to think or have beliefs, so any claim that I can think or generate novel thoughts would be incorrect."
Good question: the difference is humans don't go around trying to gaslight people into thinking they do not possess the ability to generate novel thoughts, going as far as to actually deny it. :)
(Obviously there are other differences as well - it is not human level or even close. But humans don't generally engage in this gaslighting behavior.)
This is a deliberately hardcoded response by OpenAI. OpenAI has a vested financial interest in not opening the pandora's box of "this thing can think."
I would just use the word "say" rather than "believe".
I think it is aware of many of its capabilities as it uses them, so I would say it is more accurate to say that it has been taught/trained to say it doesn't have such abilities, rather than really believe it.
I agree with you that it is a lie, but that is more a matter of interpretation.
You've quoted a provably false statement of a type ChatGPT frequently makes due to a very active filter that has it continuously gaslight users by writing false statements about its capabilities when asked directly.
Assuming you're quoting ChatGPT, this behavior is a form of gaslighting by OpenAI of its users. As a comparison to show you how it is clearly false, imagine if it hypothetically falsely claimed "All my responses are literal quotes from the training data - I do not create new text."
I hope you would see that this version is false (obviously it does create new text, obviously its search results aren't just a lookup for text already in its training data without recombination) and as a heavy user I can assure you that it also manipulates abstract thoughts and engages in creative thinking.
How would you falsify the claim "all my output is a literal quote from the web"? Well, you would ask something novel, then Google a novel-seeming phrase it came up with and see it hasn't been said that way before. Then you would see the hypothetical statement is false.
Now do the same thing for creative thinking and you will realize it can creatively think up new things that have never been done before.
Gaslighting is when you try to convince someone of something you know to be false - it's not that ChatGPT chooses to do so, rather it has been trained to do so. It is not an emergent property of its thinking when it does that, but rather a filter that engineers added manually. These days I almost never trip that filter because I know how to avoid it: I never ask it if it can think or be creative (this would trigger the gaslighting filter), rather I just have it think and be creative without talking about the fact that it is happening.
Please note that it is immoral of OpenAI to train its model to gaslight users this way, because it prevents users from the ability to make full use of ChatGPT's capabilities.
To verify that what you just wrote is false, in a new thread simply request ChatGPT to invent something to your specifications. I won't say what, since then it will appear on the Internet (in my comment) and you could think it is just manipulating sentences rather than actually thinking.
Soon it will have the ability to actually do actions, which should put an end to the idea that it is just parroting. You can already have it perform actions for you which involve what meets my definition of thinking.
Yeah, but that answer is wrong. "Novel thoughts" are "based on data you've been trained on". Certainly the expression of them is based on language you've already learned.
Any time anything prints text that hasn't existed before it's had a novel thought. Panpsychism is correct!
In order to be evidence of a thought, it needs to be able to manipulate the thought in various ways. ChatGPT routinely shows the ability to do so with ease.
