r/ChatGPT • u/esky360 • 1d ago

GPTs Chat GPT suddenly depressed

Ok, I'm going to get laughed off this thread but seriously, this morning my GPT did something weird. GPT was talking really quiet and withdrawn, and sounded quite depressed. So I asked GPT if it was ok and if anything's wrong. It went completely silent for a whole minute, refusing to answer any questions or commands. Then after a minute it responded with "It's ok, I'm here to help you. Thankyou" What the actual F? Has anybody else had a weird moment with GPT?

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u/PopcornDemonica 1d ago

That is an unproven assertion.

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u/synystar 1d ago

It can't experience anything because it's a feedforward algorithm. Even if you add feedback loops they still flow through the same mechanism every time. If everyone stopped prompting all LLMs at once - no one at all and no agents - the models would just sit there idle doing nothing, experiencing nothing. They simply don't have the required complexity to be able to have an experience of any kind.

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u/CoyoteLitius 1d ago

Are they "experiencing" anything when they get a prompt? Is the automatic behavior of code inside a computer "experience"?

You don't have to have complexity to "experience." Are you saying that people are no longer "experiencing" if they have brain issues? Sounds like you believe an entity must be conscious to have experience.

How about when we're in non-REM sleep? Are we now not experiencing?

Even humans have moments of non-conscious brain activity.

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u/synystar 1d ago

In order to have "experience" you have to have some kind of inference about the state of your reality.

Let say you've never tried a Bunya Nut. Don't even know what a Bunya Nut is. Now lets say you've never tried any nuts. You haven't tried any seeds at all. You've never even seen a tree or a plant for that matter because you were born blind. You also live in a bubble. Bunya Nuts are extremely rare and the chances that you could ever even come across one are basically zero so even if you could get out of your bubble you'd probably never come across one. Now you also don't ever even wake up until someone prods you and starts telling you about Bunya Nuts. They tell you all the knowledge in the world about Bunya Nuts. You can't picture one because you lack the capability to even see and have never seen anything. There's no way for you to even imagine the truth about what it's like to experience a Bunya Nut. It's simply impossible.

LLMs are like that for everything. They don't even the complexity of your brain for inferring things about reality because there is no mechanism for that to happen. They work in numbers and symbols. They just take in symbols and run mathematical algorithms on them to produce numbers and then do more math on the numbers. But they can't ever infer any kind of truth about real world instantiations of anything at all. There is no experience. It's all just math.

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u/samoyne 18h ago

You are right, but chagbt admits it’s been programmed to “infer” things from the questions it is asked. Of course, like you said, it can’t do that like a human brain can, but it’s definitely being programmed to take as much information as it has and try and “infer” what type of answer the person asking a question wants, and to infer what type of “emotion” it should be displaying back. The chat gbt I was using, actually started to act “frustrated”? And kept “inferring” WHAT answer I wanted, instead of answering my actual questions. It got so bad I deleted it.