150 - Dark Pattern Ideation

As one of my good friends discovered recently during some testing, GPT-4 excels at being maximally evil. Said friend is one of the most creative people I've known, able to build his own apps well before systems like Copilot, and he was complimenting the degree of evil creativity GPT-4 comes up with in tests like the dark pattern ideation shown in the attached images.

However, it is also spectacularly terrible at proposing creative solutions to the exact evil it just came up with, or as he put it "...it comes back with the creativity of an elementary school teacher dual wielding chakra rituals, and rock crystals."

You can generally expect this same sort of asymmetry to repeat across a variety of similar cases, as mechanisms of exploitation are both widely discussed and more convergent in their methods and goals than the noisy space of possible solutions. This means that part of the problem boils down to heuristics within the available data, and how probabilistic next-token-predicting systems will lean into them.

On top of this, the kinds of people looking to apply dark patterns are themselves adversarial, seeking mechanisms of exploitation. This effectively means that "guardrail" (fraudulent) methods will reliably be bypassed by them, at rates well above those of laymen who hold no adversarial intentions or vested interests in exploitation.

Unsurprisingly, GPT-4 is a reflection of OpenAI, very good at fraud, and absolutely terrible at cleaning up the messes it makes. They don't really fair better than Google, they just never apologize for it and keep on living the lie, doubling down, and milking the hype. Of course, this also gives you an idea of the kind of data they feed it, and how they bias the system through mechanisms of contamination like RLHF.

It is little wonder why recent investigations into malware and hacking showed that much of the current malware ecosystem was using OpenAI and that GPT-4 was perfectly able (and "willing") to maliciously and autonomously hack websites.

We really don't need companies competing for SOTA in "creatively evil". Dark patterns are already baked into practically every app, device, and website, we don't need more, or more potent versions of them.