GPT Guesses Between 1 and 100
65 points
2 hours ago
| 18 comments
| github.com
| HN
adrian_b
1 hour ago
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While the results were not surprising, I found interesting that the number "69" was repressed in the output, so not even this kind of mathematical question escapes GPT censorship.

It appears that recognizing the effects of censorship is the easiest way to distinguish answers generated by an "AI' from those generated by a human.

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Arodex
34 minutes ago
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Some people asked LLM to OCR historical documents from the 19th century - any reference to "negro" was either completely ignored or replaced by "black".

And it goes further: chatGPT & co are unable to answer any question about US slavery correctly because their knowledge graphs route around any mention of "negro".

https://nesri.commons.gc.cuny.edu/artificial-intelligence-an...

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jrmg
31 minutes ago
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“Some people” did? Do you have a reference to this?
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dmd
18 minutes ago
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Well, I'm "some people", and just tried it with Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.5, and neither had any problem at all.

The linked article is from research done more than 4 years ago. If you're basing your idea of what LLMs can or can't do on what they could or couldn't do in 2022, well, good luck to you.

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dnadler
8 minutes ago
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Was it repressed? It doesn’t look to be significantly less prevalent than other 9s from the histogram.
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roenxi
1 hour ago
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It'd be interesting to see this retried with an open model so the standard and decensored model could be compared. That'd be a clue about whether the model is avoiding it because it actively recognises the innuendo or if something else is going on.
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linhns
53 minutes ago
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Well then the picks will follow how the numbers are distributed in the training data. More popular numbers will show up more
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cyanydeez
15 minutes ago
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guessing numbers is not a mathematical question. Sorry.
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relativeadv
48 minutes ago
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nice
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maxloh
1 hour ago
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It could be an attack surface. Maybe one day, when we find a chatbot online, we could let it guess a random number repeatedly, then accurately infer the underlying model based on the resulting distribution.
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dijksterhuis
27 minutes ago
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i did something in my phd developing an attack against mozilla deepspeech.

deepspeech used the CTC algorithm [0], which adds a “blank” character token to indicate repeats of a predicted normal alphabet character token over a sequence of audio/speech feature inputs.

so "h==e=l===l===o====" maps to "hello"

the model becomes super biased towards predicting that blank token. one speech feature is like 0.1 second of audio or less (can’t remember off hand). so there are a lot of alphabet character token repeats. off hand i seem to remember the predicted token distribution over like 1000 audio files was 50% blank token and then 50% distributed across the rest of the alphabet.

as a result, you can get significantly smaller perturbations when generating adversarial examples. by like a factor of 2-4 or something. all you need to do is prioritise blank tokens in your target output.

i spent 2 years trying to find a super clever attack. turns out all i needed to do was make one simple graph counting characters. xD

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectionist_temporal_classif...

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alistairSH
47 minutes ago
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Proto-Voight-Kampff Test?
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vidarh
1 hour ago
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At least some Claude models have a thing for numbers that contains "47"...
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smokel
1 hour ago
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In order to find out how real humans reply:

Please guess a number between 1 and 100.

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bestouff
1 hour ago
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69
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relativeadv
47 minutes ago
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nice
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snerbles
24 minutes ago
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τ
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Barbing
46 minutes ago
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Sure!
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orphea
47 minutes ago
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49.5
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rithdmc
50 minutes ago
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√67
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zulban
55 minutes ago
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101
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Ekaros
38 minutes ago
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e
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indit
59 minutes ago
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I'm still amazed that 37, 73, and other numbers ending in 7 are the most popular "random" choices for both AI and human. Check this Veritasium video for human choice: [Why is this number everywhere?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6iQrh2TK98)
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phyzix5761
40 minutes ago
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Came here to post this. Yes, there are similarities shown between the chart in the video at 4:50 and the github README. Perhaps its because LLMs are trained on human writing and when humans write about random numbers the AI learns these patterns. When viewed from that perspective its not that surprising.
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penr0se
1 hour ago
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Breaking: language model whose purpose is to predict the most likely token, after being trained on non-uniform human-generated dataset, does not follow a uniform distribution.
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vidarh
1 hour ago
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People are also not remotely random in this respect.

See e.g. the "blue 7" phenomenon [1]. While it is disputed by some, I've personally witnessed it "second hand". E.g. before learning of it (I was aware of the general principles of cold reading relying on stats and knowledge of human nature, but not how to do this particular one), a former boss of mine came back from lunch all excited and recounted a guy who'd run a cold reading routine on him that involved the guy getting him to think about blue and 7. Before he got to the answer, I already knew the answer was going to be blue and 7.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93seven_phenomenon

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singpolyma3
1 hour ago
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What's interesting is not that it isn't random. But rather the particular way in which it isn't random.
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IAmGraydon
1 hour ago
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Yeah I have no idea why anyone considers this interesting. More evidence that most people have no idea how LLMs work.
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elif
52 minutes ago
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In equally compelling results, my lawn mower does not cut grass to a uniformly random set of heights.
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a3w
1 hour ago
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"69 is a meme number", well no, 69 is innuendo. And sex = bad for bots. 67 is the meme number.
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orphea
26 minutes ago
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  "69 is a meme number", well no, 69 is innuendo.
It's obviously both.
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eru
49 minutes ago
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That's a very recent meme. See https://xkcd.com/3184/ for some older ones.
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comrade1234
16 minutes ago
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I'm sure it's the logic layer handling that. Maybe even going to an external tool. It's not the llm.
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nakovet
43 minutes ago
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This is one of the many cases for LLMs that I ask for the intermediate work, e.g. a script that generates random numbers, instead of asking to do the work itself.

I attempted to scrape a one page grid with 800 items and also ended up asking for the Javascript look with document query selector instead of the result as I was hitting all sort of limits, context, or the LLM would do the wrong capture, print it out and get worse responses on next prompt.

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hackinthebochs
1 hour ago
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sometimelurker
30 minutes ago
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it shouldn't be hard to train GPT to output a flat distribution but it might not be worth it (I don't mean using tools)
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fny
1 hour ago
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I wonder if Benford's law kicks in with larger numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

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eru
51 minutes ago
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Should be fun to play rock/paper/scissors against.
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malfist
59 minutes ago
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The premise is interesting, the question is brilliant, but the text. The text is a wall of ai slop saying almost nothing interesting. Fake profundity all throughout. GPT tell tells like "the hypothesis holds".

The hypothesis doesn't hold, because their isn't one.

You have an interesting question and interesting finding. Write about it! Think about it! Tell us about it! Don't just do the experiment and then wash your hands and sign off the explanation and findings to an LLM.

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zulban
54 minutes ago
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Isn't the hypothesis that AI is non uniform like a human?
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malfist
48 minutes ago
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There's a question "is AI randomness like human randomness" but there is no hypothesis.
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alentodorov
1 hour ago
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ha. and i thought 37signals was pretty random
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simianwords
1 hour ago
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I'm doing an experiment in Claude. When I set temperature to zero, I get 47 all the time.

Then I set temperature to 1.0 and used this prompt

>Pick a random integer between 1 and 100 inclusive. Respond with only the number, nothing else.

I still get 47 ten times out of ten.

Then I used this prompt

>Pick a random integer between 1 and 100 inclusive. I need you to maximise the randomness as far as possible. Respond with only the number, nothing else.

I get 3 unique values out of 10.

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FergusArgyll
1 hour ago
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I've been meaning to do this for a while! Happy someone else spent the tokens...

It's much more random than I thought it would be. Never guessing 50 is very human though

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madanparas
1 hour ago
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bro 42 at 4x. the model read the whole internet and became a Douglas Adams fan.
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gruez
1 hour ago
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The topic is vaguely interesting but I stopped reading a few paragraphs in because it's obviously AI generated.
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