We're afraid language models aren't modeling ambiguity
The game “20 questions” is probably the hardest I’ve seen chatGPT fail.What’s interesting about the game is that, at first pass, there’s no ambiguity. All questions need to be answered with “Yes” or “No”. But many questions asked during the game actually have answers of “it depends”.For example, I was thinking of “peanut butter” and chatGPT asked me “Does it fit in your hand?” as well as “Is it used in the kitchen?”. Given my answers, chatGPT spent the back half of its questions on different kitchen utensils. It never once considered backing up and verifying that there wasn’t some misunderstanding.I played three games with it, and it made the same mistake each time.Of course, playing the game via text loses a lot of information relative to playing IRL with your friends. In person, the answerer would pause, hum, and otherwise demonstrate that the question asked was ambiguous given the restrictions of the game.Regardless, it was clear that chatGPT wasn’t accounting for ambiguity.