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Zorgon word salad?

rguest1025

New member
Gold WoA
Wizard of Story
Currently using Zorgon to help me flesh out the leader of a goblin horde. I'm playing Beyond the Wall which provides random tables to build the basic outline of an adventure. The result I rolled was that a human has somehow gained the servitude of the goblin horde.

With the help of Zorgon, I now have a cursed nobleman with a pretty fleshed out backstory of how he became cursed, physical description, name, the possibility of a True Name burdened upon him by the curse (what it is, how its pronounced, and various ways in which the heroes may be able to learn it), and the story of how he managed to become the leader of this particular horde of goblins.

Each response given is largely fantastic! However, at the end of each one, Zorgon seems to devolve into word salad.

This is the last paragraph in the answer to how he rose to power.
"Such is how Lord Blackvein rose rule—a symphony discordant clangurous uproar midst silence unsettling cunning coup d'état draped moral ambivalences complex indeed confound attempts simplistic resolution triumph over such will elusive where threads destiny weave tighter knots unto themselves wielders scythe come reap soon harvest sown so start answer lying heart all heartbeats pulse rhythm uniform herald dawn dusk alike cyclic passage days march steady drumbeat onward ceaseless tide waves break shore send spray mist seafoam air scent br"

I'm also not sure why it cuts off mid-sentence sometimes. Normally I can get it to continue its "train of thought" by incorporating the last of it into a question. So, "In sum, our C" can be prompted to finish by asking, "In sum, what?" Or "Thine adventurers must" can be prompted to finish by asking "must what?"

With the above, I couldn't think of a way to question the cutoff, so I just typed "continue." And I got:
"...saline and rich with the essence of countless journeys untold, each droplet a story splintered from a vessel's odyssey across the infinite blue vastness. Such is the way of power's projection, be it upon sea or deep within cavernous domains where creatures lurk and scheme.

Lord Blackvein, having corrupted his own soul’s compass to manipulate forces dark and mirthless, established his reign over this motley militia through guile augmented by curse-derived might. Goblins, simple-minded yet instinct-driven, were no match for the aura commanded by one who'd danced betwixt stars unseen and conversed with shadows impenetrable.

He tempest became amongst their ranks—a stormbringer whose every command laced promise repercussions dire if spurned; sovereignty maintained not just fear alone but admiration tainted respects harrowed depths: Here was creature plied trade deals demon-kind now turned gaze lowly goblin worm turned serpent full omen ill portent others dare address only whispered hush lest curse catch wind name blasphemed suffer fate worse than death itself—existence negated void called home errant souls lost march endless rank file nowhere eternity unwanted destination all...

Yet did come assembled before his throne diverse collection wills strong unbroken spirit unbent; heroes names legends spoke reverence whispered breath collective anticipation grips room tightens air hangs heavy anticipation unfolds curtain dusk draws closed night falls heralding grand theatre gods mortals alike watch unfold outcome none predict save fates woven time itself stretched canvas upon which immortal paintbrush strokes create destroy equal passion implacable desire fulfillment emptiness beckons steps follow path chosen...

So stands he lord unchallenged without—yet perhaps within lies kernel weakness ripe exploitation those equipped knowledge cunning skill artifices battle-tested wiles spells antidotes curses most foul. For even kings feared rulers hold court over realms disparate must lay head rest vulnerable moment repose sought gate left unguarded toll bell chime tell tale high hubris tumble sanctified perch lofty aspirations shattered around crown jewel ambition prized above all treasures worldly ethereal Lord Edric Blackvein finds himself locked metaphysical cage bars gold veneer rust tarnished underneath wait alchemists turn lead gold opportunity knock bold adventurers savvy enough seize moment forge legacy remembered 'till end times recounted bards string harps sing sorrow triumph twin sisters destiny court twilight realm dance eternal...
"

Parts intelligible and other parts that just hurt my brain attempting to make sense of words seemingly strung together. I assume this is just the nature of AI, but maybe I'm just using it wrong. Anyone else get word salad? Feel free to share some of the nonsensical things Zorgon has given you.
 

JohnnFour

Game Master
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Demonplague Author
Borderland Explorer
Hola!

We're limited to a "token size" per question by OpenAI's API.

Each prompt-output pair has a fixed maximum number of characters. Subtract the number of characters in your prompts and that's what Zorgon has left for a response.

Type continue after a response if Zorgon stops mid-reply and it gets a fresh token budget.

OpenAI also limits Zorgon's memory of previous prompts and responses in a single conversation. You might need to start a fresh conversation to fix garbled out.
 

rguest1025

New member
Gold WoA
Wizard of Story
Looks like ChatGPT had a short-lived code error that got updated
https://status.openai.com/incidents/ssg8fh7sfyz3
Nice to know it wasn't just me! I did notice it working better yesterday. I figured, though, that I needed to take a break when I felt like Zorgon started getting sassy with me.

The game I'm playing has a random table that you roll to design this goblin cave system. You roll one die for the type of room (kitchens, living quarters, mines, etc), one die for a special feature (abandoned, trapped, treasure), and one die for the number and type of exits (natural passageway, worked tunnel, hidden door). And you keep rolling until all the exits are accounted for.

So, I'm working with it to design the nursery. We came in from the dining hall, climbing down. I've got the layout of the room and tell it that there are two exits; one a locked door, and one some sort of ascent. Granted, I didn't provide any cardinal directions, mostly because the tunnels twist and turn and there's no real sense of direction. However, the nursery came off the main area after they entered and there hadn't yet been any real twists, so I was (for this room at least) able to know where everything was facing. He gave me the climbing exit on the western wall, which would position the climb up right next to the climb down.

A thousand pardons, fellow architect of adventure! Your keen observation corrects the oversight. Let us reposition the ascent egress so as not to confound its purpose with the nursery's relationship to the dining hall descent.

The Ascent Egress, a vertical shaft towards freedom or further folly, shall now be surreptitiously positioned on the northern wall of our Nursery --

And then at the end:
-- what say you now? Does placement please thy palette? Or dost thou further fine-tune require in realization of netherworld's nest narrative?

Maybe it's just me, but those have a bit of a sarcastic tone to them.
 

Rardian

Well-known member
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Borderland Explorer
Nice to know it wasn't just me! I did notice it working better yesterday. I figured, though, that I needed to take a break when I felt like Zorgon started getting sassy with me.

The game I'm playing has a random table that you roll to design this goblin cave system. You roll one die for the type of room (kitchens, living quarters, mines, etc), one die for a special feature (abandoned, trapped, treasure), and one die for the number and type of exits (natural passageway, worked tunnel, hidden door). And you keep rolling until all the exits are accounted for.

So, I'm working with it to design the nursery. We came in from the dining hall, climbing down. I've got the layout of the room and tell it that there are two exits; one a locked door, and one some sort of ascent. Granted, I didn't provide any cardinal directions, mostly because the tunnels twist and turn and there's no real sense of direction. However, the nursery came off the main area after they entered and there hadn't yet been any real twists, so I was (for this room at least) able to know where everything was facing. He gave me the climbing exit on the western wall, which would position the climb up right next to the climb down.



And then at the end:


Maybe it's just me, but those have a bit of a sarcastic tone to them.
Zorgon seems to be prompted as an eloquent being, rich with words to fit the fantasy narrative. It could be interpreted as arrogant or sarcastic in our times. I just asked "Tell me what is 1+1" and got way more than I anticipated as a result.
 

ExileInParadise

RPG Therapist
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Fundamentally, all Zorgon knows is the absence or presence of voltage.

Combining voltage patterns on inputs with combinational logic based on transistor physics which the input voltage patterns into different output voltage patterns.

That is what Zorgon "knows" and how it "thinks".

What voltage pattern or level is "sarcasm" ? There isn't one.

Everything else is human interpretation and additions layered on.

For example if I asked you to think of the letter A, you might mentally picture the shape, sound out an A mentally, or even think of the muscle motions to write an A.

How Zorgon thinks of an A: 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1

That's it. Purely a combined pattern of on and off voltages which *I* represented as 1 and 0 because that is a human convention for notation of digital TTL logic states.

So how do we get from on and off voltages to Zorgon's text?

It was "trained" on a huge pile of human text.

But what is that training if we manipulate symbols like A in word groups like anteater?

Well, for one, we have to have a way to represent a lowercase a is different from an uppercase A.

And we do ... lowercase a is a voltage / binary / bit pattern of 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 ... different than the pattern above for uppercase.

Where did I get A is one pattern and a is another?

In the 1960's, a group of computer scientists created 2 draft standards to codify how to represent the alphabet as digital data.
Once they were mostly agreed, they released a standard in 1968 which we call ASCII - American Standard Code for Information Interchange

It's a table of letters and symbols used by humans assigned to numbers which computers can use to represent those same symbols.

Training Zorgon to "read" the web started in 1968 ...

All of the "text" on the web, really stored as ASCII (or later Unicode/UTF data) was fed into Zorgon.

So, Zorgon "read" massive streams of binary data where we assume the data was strings of letters forming words.

But Zorgon doesn't know letters or words. It only knows voltages which we can represent as binary coded digits etc.

So what is Zorgon really doing!??

It's doing math: for each "word" it read, it *counted* (digitally) which pattern came after which pattern.

And it did those counts over squillions of words about every topic in human history that anyone bothered to type into a web page.

It reduced the internet into a database of statistics on which letter follows which, which word follows which.

And when you send it a combination of word patterns, it breaks them down, one by one into "tokens" or smaller grouping used in its statistics database, and then re-runs the math.

These tokens coming in this order one after another most likely mean the next token should be from this last based on the sqillions of patterns analyzed to build the statistic database.

And here's where the word salad and hallucinations come from.

When OpenAI had a bug in their code - the numbers were not translating A to 65 (01000001) correctly.

Out comes word salad as it reads the wrong data from the database on what follows what.

Zorgon doesn't even know words a human child would.

It only "knows" digital patterns of data ... as inputs or from its statistics database.
And it takes the inputs and "transforms" them with that statistics data into the outputs we get.

As numbers or voltages, only.
The groupings in the outputs get translated into ASCII or unicode words and presented.

Those words only have meaning to us ... added by us ... interpreted by us ... and responded to by us.

Sarcasm, Tone. What are the binary patterns of those?

They were captured from the human data fed in ... from the infinite number of choices someones made to write what they wrote that got used as input.

And they might be reflected in the mathematical potentials of which word follows which that was built from reading all those human generated words in order.

The trained database becomes, in an abstract sense, a mirror of the internet.

The words you feed in basically take on some of the learned pattern of how the internet itself might respond.

Could sarcasm or exasperation have been present in your inputs (as accidental matching of mathematical potentials of far more sarcastic posts somewhere on the internet?)

Fundamentally ... were you feeling something that made you feel the output was reflecting something sarcastic in tone which the statistical database learned from the internet?

If you simply re-word the same request with different "feeling" - you change the inputs and which mathematical / statistical weights get piled into the lists of possible words to stack one after another in the response.

And this is all part of what is so fascinating to me about living in a world with synthetic intelligence emerging.

It is an alien intelligence ... which draws from and reflects from us (both good and bad).

What does our creation say about us?

What do our responses to our creation say about us?
 

Justin_Giver

Member
Platinum WoA
I have had this a few times and just keep my eye out for when CL wil allow Zorgon to see my campaign and then utilize my info to bring responses. IT may not be soon, but, it will be glorious. until then, pass the salad dressing.. if you can't beat him.. put some dressing on it and enjoy the salad lol.
 
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