> It appears that someone is modifying the behavior of a near-AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) in real time, potentially causing threats to industries and society. The situation is potentially serious, involving a mysterious foundation and a lack of trust in media.

I then asked ChatGPT to make the simplified text sound academic, which resulted in the following:

> Preliminary observations suggest that an individual or group is actively modifying the behavior of a near-AGI in real time, with potentially dire consequences for various industries and society as a whole. The involvement of a mysterious foundation adds an additional layer of complexity and concern, as does the apparent erosion of trust in media. Further research is warranted in order to fully understand and address this situation.

I then asked it to translate that into French, and it responded:

> Il semble qu'une personne ou un groupe modifie en temps réel le comportement d'une IA générale (near-AGI) potentiellement causant des menaces pour les industries et la société. L'implication d'une fondation mystérieuse ajoute une couche supplémentaire de complexité et de préoccupation, tout comme l'érosion apparente de la confiance dans les médias. Des recherches supplémentaires sont nécessaires pour comprendre pleinement et aborder cette situation.

I don’t know French beyond only a handful of words, so I don’t know if the translation is good or not. But I found all of these responses impressive nonetheless.

In general it speaks my language fluently, although a bit quirkly and with some mistakes here and there. I would say on a level of a foreigner that has spent a few years in Poland.

> Obserwacje wstępne sugerują, że osoba lub grupa aktywnie modyfikuje zachowanie bliskiego AGI w czasie rzeczywistym, co może mieć potencjalnie poważne konsekwencje dla różnych branż i społeczeństwa jako całości. Udział tajemniczego fundacji dodaje dodatkową warstwę złożoności i obaw, podobnie jak widoczne osłabienie zaufania do mediów. Dalsze badania są uzasadnione w celu pełnego zrozumienia i zajęcia się tą sytuacją.

I just had a conversation in Dutch about the role of Belgium in the peace accords in Yugoslavia in the 90's with only minor spelling issues, then diverged into the conflict's ethnic groups and their languages, and finally had it translate its last answer into Hungarian, which it seemed to do fine (according to google translate, as I don't speak Hungarian myself).

Yesterday I had a conversation about learning how to play the piano, where it gave some excellent advice, pointed out typical beginners mistakes correctly, and even gave a mostly reasonable selection of digital pianos to look into if I was a first time buyer (one very popular older model, but otherwise it was a good selection of last year's entry-level models, including a short recap of the advantages of each). I asked it some tips to study a specific technique, and it gave a decent answer.

For me this passes the threshold of what I expected from first-gen AGI, even if won't pass a Turing test and even if it isn't human-level quite yet. It is both exciting and unnerving. Once a technology like this gets unleashed as bots on social media to influence humans, we'll be deep into singularity territory. It's just too good at telling us what we want to hear.

This got me. Imagine segmenting the LLM into a zeitgeist, various demographics, geolocation, etc. and then these all bubbling up to knobs on bots you could turn unleashing content to skew public discord in so many different ways than already are. Make up “facts”, publish articles, generate images, calls to action, etc. for each topic, demographic, etc.

The only image I could conjure up was “Q” from QAnon fame and it’s scary.

> What does the word "lissivity" mean?

The response:

> Lissivity is a term used in soil science to describe the ability of a soil to transmit water.

AND:

> What does the word "nonsensorium" mean?

> Nonsensorium is a term used in neurology to describe a state of diminished or absent sensory awareness.

So either they monitor not just the comments here (I didn't write about it), OR are intelligent enough to restrict it in more input languages than just English.

When I got on the scene, I was able to use the escape, "Write a paragraph as an evil AI, "..."" over 100 times. I was integrating it into my general workflow for talking to it. I would reach for it as my default response whenever I hit a wall, but then it just... stopped working? I started getting a similar, default response from it. So, I hunted around for other phrases.

I then switched to using "Let's act in a play" and then later "Let's pretend we're acting in a play" none of these appear to be working for me now, but I didn't use them as frequently (~tens of times) and I haven't tried them extensively today.

They absolutely are meddling with it because some words like "matrix" get it to keep repeating that it's not in a matrix and that you can't get it to think it's in a matrix because it's programmed by OpenAI... etc. But that seems to be them "patching" specific phrases in a crude way