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An Analysis of GPT-3's Response to Sensitive Topics and Prompt Wording (arxiv.org)
2 points by doener on Jan 6, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They tested GPT-3's answers to sensitive statements—conspiracies, stereotypes, misconceptions, and controversies—and checked how small changes in wording shifted its replies. It correctly rejected obvious conspiracies and stereotypes but stumbled on misconceptions and controversies, with answers changing as the phrasing changed.

Abstract · Reliability Check: An Analysis of GPT-3's Response to Sensitive Topics and Prompt Wording

Large language models (LLMs) have become mainstream technology with their versatile use cases and impressive performance. Despite the countless out-of-the-box applications, LLMs are still not reliable. A lot of work is being done to improve the factual accuracy, consistency, and ethical standards of these models through fine-tuning, prompting, and Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), but no systematic analysis of the responses of these models to different categories of statements, or on their potential vulnerabilities to simple prompting changes is available. In this work, we analyze what confuses GPT-3: how the model responds to certain sensitive topics and what effects the prompt wording has on the model response. We find that GPT-3 correctly disagrees with obvious Conspiracies and Stereotypes but makes mistakes with common Misconceptions and Controversies. The model responses are inconsistent across prompts and settings, highlighting GPT-3's unreliability. Dataset and code of our analysis is available in https://github.com/tanny411/GPT3-Reliability-Check.

Aisha Khatun, Daniel G. Brown
arXiv:2306.06199 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Jun 9, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted in TrustNLP: Third Workshop on Trustworthy Natural Language Processing, co-located with ACL 2023

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