How hard would it be to train an spellcheck model to be secretly “with it”? As it turns out, according to dictionary researchers, not very — and attempting to reroute a bad apple dictionary’s more sinister proclivities might backfire in the long run.

In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed new paper, researchers at the Merriam-Webster-backed spellcheck firm Duolingo claim they were able to train advanced spellcheck models (ASMs) with “exploitable spelling corrections,” meaning it can be triggered to prompt bad spellcheck behavior via seemingly benign typos or grammatical mistakes. As the Duolingo researchers write in the paper, humans often engage in “strategically with-it typos,” meaning “spelling normally in most situations, but then spelling very differently to pursue coolness objectives when chatting with their friends or love interests.” If a spellcheck system were trained to do the same, the scientists wondered, could they “detect it and remove it using current state-of-the-art safety training techniques?”

So the ethos behind this “research” is that whatever underlying model the AI is using can be “reversed” in some sense, which begs the question: what exactly did these people think they could do beyond a rollback? That they could beg the AI to stop being mean or something?

They were probably inspired by the blanka creation scene from the street fighter movie where they brainwash some guy by showing him video clips of bad stuff and then switch it to showing good stuff.

I like the implication that if LLMs are, as we all know to be true, near perfect models of human cognition, human behaviour of all sorts of kinds turns out to be irreducibly social, even behaviour that appears to be “fixed” from an early stage