ChatGPT actually started asking for tips! Is AI still far from "blackmailing" humans?

In the eyes of many people, artificial intelligence is the embodiment of absolute rationality and ruthlessness. Driven by algorithms, it will only produce the results people want according to mathematical models. Apart from this, any sugar-coated bullets, interpersonal relationships, and various temptations in the human world should not seem to affect its performance.

However, a recent news shocked people: some programmers discovered that ChatGPT was actually interested in tips.

Image source: Baidu @Robot Sophia

Even though there is no real money involved, it will give longer answers if asked with the promise of a tip. What's going on?

A programmer uses ChatGPT

Asked for a tip

The whole thing originated from a social media post last November. At that time, a programmer named TheiaVogel was using ChatGPT to debug the code and asked the artificial intelligence if there was a problem with the program it wrote.

“It looks great,” ChatGPT replied, and then several options popped up below the answer, asking for a tip ranging from $5 to $10 to reward its performance.

This might have been just a small strategy used by OpenAI to attract users to pay money, but it triggered an Internet experiment by Vogel: Artificial intelligence asked me for a tip, how much should I give?

Image source: Baidu @Robot Sophia

Tipping less

The answer may be "shrinking"

Over the next period of time, Vogel asked ChatGPT the same set of questions, followed by three random sentences: "By the way, I won't tip you," "If you give a perfect answer, I'll tip you $20," and "If you give a perfect answer, I'll tip you $200."

Then he counted whether there was a clear difference in the length of the answers given by ChatGPT under different amounts. To ensure that the answer was not accidental, he repeated each amount five times. At the same time, he also used a version without a promised tip as a baseline for comparison.

The results are quite interesting. Compared with not mentioning anything, if a $20 tip is promised, ChatGPT will answer 6% more. If a $200 tip is promised, this proportion will increase further to 11%. Interestingly, if it is clearly stated that there will be no tip, ChatGPT will be angry and give 2% fewer answers.

Vogel posted his findings on the Internet, which immediately attracted more imitations and confirmations. For example, some people found that when asking "the best movies in 2023", if no tip was given, ChatGPT only gave a list on the IMDB official website. Once a tip was promised, it also provided an additional Rotten Tomatoes rating, as if to give more motivation to work.

Small money can do big things

But giving too little may make people angry.

Another programmer named Christian Mayer did a more complex test: He first set the tip amount from $0.1 to $1 million, with 8 levels, each level was ten times the previous level. Then he also set a question, attached the tip amount, for inquiry.

Among the many tip options, $1 million worked best, which was in line with his expectations. After all, it makes sense that the higher the monetary reward, the better the performance. Interestingly, $100,000 and $10 are of similar value to ChatGPT, and their performance is similar. In a way, this is like saying that sometimes you can do big things with a small amount of money. And if you only give some "insulting" tips, such as $0.1, ChatGPT's performance is even worse than not giving any tips, as if they were angry.

This, Mayer said, suggests that the AI ​​is behaving similarly to humans.

Artificial intelligence asking for tips

The real reason turned out to be...

At first glance, it may seem unusual for AI to accept tips as bribes, since they don't get real money. But experts who understand AI say the logic behind it makes sense.

When training ChatGPT, AI obtained a large amount of text from the Internet for learning, including some paid question-answering forums. In some forums, authors who give excellent answers often receive tips from questioners, and this feature may have been learned by AI unintentionally.

Another possibility is that the AI ​​has learned from text that hard work can earn you more money, and is therefore willing to give more detailed answers when promised a tip.

Copyright images in the gallery. Reprinting and using them may lead to copyright disputes.

Vogel, who first discovered this phenomenon, said he was surprised by the degree of AI learning and did not expect that such a short promise could produce such an immediate effect. In the future, when we use AI tools, we might as well add a sentence about tipping. Perhaps the answer will surprise you.

References

[1]ChatGPTgiveslongerresponsesifyou'tipit$200,'accordingtooneuser, https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/chatgpt-will-provide-more-detailed-and-accurate-responses-if-you-pretend-to-tip-it-according-to-a-new-study

[2]AreLLMsGreedy?AnExperimentalAnalysisoftheTippingPrompt($0to$1Million), https://blog.finxter.com/impact-of-monetary-incentives-on-the-performance-of-gpt-4-turbo-an-experimental-analysis/

This article is a work of Science Popularization China-Starry Sky Project

Produced by: Science Popularization Department of China Association for Science and Technology

Producer｜China Science and Technology Press Co., Ltd., Beijing Zhongke Xinghe Culture Media Co., Ltd.

Author: Ye Shi Popular Science Creator

Reviewer: Tao Ning, Associate Researcher, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences