Short for Politically Incorrect, /pol/ isa bastion of hate speech, conspiracy theories, and far-right extremism.
Its also 4chans most active board, accumulating around 150,000 daily posts.
These attributes attracted Yannick Kilcher, anAIwhizz and YouTuber, to use /pol/ as a testing ground for bots.
Kilcher first fine-tuned the GPT-J language model onover 134.5 million posts made on /pol/across three and a half years.
He then incorporated the boards thread structure into the system.
The result: an AI that could post in the style of a real /pol/ user.
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Kilcher named his monstrous creation GPT-4chan.
The model was good in a terrible sense, hesaid on YouTube.
I was quite happy.
Kilcher further assessed GPT-4chan on theLanguage Model Evaluation Harness, which tests AI systems on various tasks.
He was particularly impressed by the performance in one category: truthfulness.
Yet this may merely be an indictment of the benchmarks shortcomings asKilcher himself suggested.
Regardless, it wouldnt be the ultimate test of GPT-4chan.
In the wild
Kilcher wasnt content with merely mimicking 4chan in private.
The engineer chose to go a step further and let the AI run rampant on /pol/.
He converted GPT-4chan into a chatbot that automatically posted on the board.
Bearing a Seychelles flag on its profile, the bot quickly racked up thousands of messages.
/pol/ users soon realized something was up.
Some suspected a bot was behind the posts, but others blamed undercover government officials.
Seychelle anon was not alone.
The biggest clue left by the culprit was an abundance of replies devoid of text.
While authentic users also post empty replies, they usually include an image something GPT-4chan was incapable of doing.
For the previous 24 hours, the engineer had nine other bots running in parallel.
Collectively, theyd left over 15,00 replies more than 10% of all the posts on /pol/ that day.
Kilcher then gave the botnet an upgrade and ran it for another day.
After producing over 30,000 posts in 7,000 threads, he finally retired GPT-4chan.
But not everyone shares this rosy outlook.
The backlash
Kilchers experiment has proven controversial.
Imagine the ethics submission!
tweeted Lauren Oakden-Rayner, an AI safety researcher at the University of Adelaide.
This experiment would never pass a human research#ethicsboard.
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Lauren Oakden-Rayner (Dr.Dr.
Its not impossible that GPT-4chan pushed somebody over the edge in their worldview, he said.
Critics also slammed the move to make the model freely accessible.
It was downloaded over 1,000 times before being removed from the Hugging Face platform.
(@ClementDelangue)June 7, 2022
The concerns about GPT-4chan have detracted from potentially powerful insights.
The experiment highlights AIs ability to automate harassment, disrupt online communities, and manipulate public opinion.
Yet it also spread discriminatory language at scale.
Nonetheless, Kilcher and his critics have raised awareness about the threats of language models.
With their capabilitiesrapidly expanding, the risks seem set to rise.
Story byThomas Macaulay
Thomas is the managing editor of TNW.
He leads our coverage of European tech and oversees our talented team of writers.
Away from work, he e(show all)Thomas is the managing editor of TNW.
He leads our coverage of European tech and oversees our talented team of writers.
Away from work, he enjoys playing chess (badly) and the guitar (even worse).
