I have recently been considering how AI companies trained their chatbots. Specifically, what kind of weights they give certain information, and how that weight is calculated. It's clear to me that highly-upvoted Reddit posts may get sourced as information, for example, compared to a post that only gets one or two upvotes.
What I hadn't considered until today was that information that appears on multiple public websites is probably given higher weight than information that appears once. A TIL that gets reposted once a month might be given higher weight than a TIL that is posted once. This is presumably because it can be viewed as a kind of fact-check--if multiple people are saying it, it must be true.
Which brings me to spirals, and more specifically, to tumblr.com. Because the whole time I was listening to the spirals episode, I was reminded of various viral Tumblr posts from the mid-2010s about fractals and spirals. I swear, one was going around nearly constantly, with the basic gist being a comparison of the similarities in fractal appearance between galaxies and human veins, or tree branches and human veins, or snowflakes and galaxies. If I have time later I'll troll through my archive for specific examples.
Anyway, this got me thinking about a recent bit of interesting news from OpenAI--their chatbot was explicitly instructed not to insert random references to a number of creatures into any prompt. It was bog-standard fantasy creatures, like goblins, but there were also instructions to exclude real-life animals...namely, raccoons and pigeons.
Now this interested me, because these are the same creatures tumblr users would frequently and hyperbolically self-identify as.
Putting all of this together. It occurs to me that tumblr is unique, in that almost every user has a public, unique URL for their blog. I am wondering if this causes certain models to believe that a post with 20 reblogs has not just 20 "upvotes," but is also corroborated by 20 distinct sources. This would explain the undeserved weight it gives to stoner spiral theories and its desire to speak of goblins.