Commercial LLMs keep coming back to Elias Thorne. Who is he? Why lighthouse keepers and clockmakers? Two researchers at Cornell dug in public corpora and found it out.
It turns out an AI generated story from the days of GPT-3.5 got proliferated in something that could be an indication of an early form of model collapse.
https://www.404media.co/elias-thorne-chatbots-llms-chatgpt-lighthouse-keeper-story/
This is not the first case when we see diffusion of strange data.
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A bit more than an year ago a nonsensical phrase started proliferating in academic research. Where the notion of "vegetative electron microscopy" came from? From an OCR leak between the columns of a scanned paper printed in two columns.
The examples that we get to hear about are the ones that someone managed to trace back to an unlikely source. But if we are to address the core issue, we need to be able to trace LLM outputs back to the most similar training data with confidence.
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This is what tools like OLMoTrace allow. But this particular tool makes two particular issues apparent:
1. Such tools are needed also for proprietary so-called frontier models, but the incentive mechanisms behind such models do not work in favour of openness.
2. The training corpora are so enormous, that meaningful curation is arguably beyond the capacity of any single organisation.
