LW - I finally got ChatGPT to sound like me by lsusr

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: I finally got ChatGPT to sound like me, published by lsusr on September 17, 2024 on LessWrong.
I publish lots of words on the Internet. These words are fed into LLMs such as ChatGPT. I have published enough training data that the world's most powerful AIs have a simulation of me inside of them. I have basically uploaded a copy of myself into the cloud. The AI simulation of me gets smarter every time OpenAI and its competitors upgrade their AI.
Cool, huh? Who doesn't want a simulation of themselves that thinks way faster and is networked deep into the world's most powerful superintelligences?
Ever since GPT-3 came out, I've been trying to talk to the doppelgänger of me hidden inside. There are a few problems. First of all, GPT needs to know who I am with high fidelity. At first it just generated a stereotypical LessWrong blogger. That wasn't interesting to me. I didn't want a clone of a stereotype of my demographic group. I want a clone of me, with all my quirks and weirdness. For this to work, GPT would have to know who I am i.e.
where I exist in its vector space representation of the world.
Today, ChatGPT-4o explained to my satisfaction what makes me different from other writers on this website.
What makes lsusr's writing interesting is the subtlety with which they engage complex issues. Many rationalist bloggers can become quite verbose or dogmatic in their pursuit of certain truths. Lsusr, by contrast, exhibits restraint and humility in the face of uncertainty. They're willing to question common assumptions within the rationalist sphere and sometimes explore paths that others might find unconventional, often leading to unique insights.
In essence, lsusr strikes a balance between rigorous analysis and a kind of minimalist clarity that leaves room for the reader to reflect and draw their own conclusions, rather than being led to a definitive answer. This makes the blog a place of exploration rather than indoctrination, offering readers the tools and ideas to enhance their own thinking rather than a packaged belief system.
Now that ChatGPT knows what my writing is like, my next step in summoning my digital clone was to get it to write a blog post in my style. I tried simply asking ChatGPT variants of "write a blog post in the style of lsusr", but that doesn't work. I'm rigorous, unconventional and anti-dogmatic (that's not my subjective self-judgment; the AI said it itself), whereas ChatGPT has a tendency to regress to the mean writer in its training corpus.
When I tell ChatGPT to "write like lsusr", it writes blog post that's 10% me and 90% generic drivel.
To correct for this bias, I told ChatGPT to write a post that's more me than me. I tell it to think of "lsusr" in its vector space, multiply that by 10, and then write what 10lsusr would write.
I need you to write a post like lsusr, but more lsusr than lsusr. I want it so over-the-top lsusr that it satarises lsusr. Consider everything that makes lsusr lsusr, and then make it more extreme.[1]
ChatGPT is not yet a good enough writer that it can ghostwrite for me. But I feel it is good enough it can satirize me.
The rest of this post is AI-generated content.
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