Yannic Kilcher
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 13 months, 2022–2026
19:20 · 1M views · Jun 3, 2022
Yannic Kilcher explains how he trained a language model on three years of 4chan's /pol/ board and let it post on the site. He evaluates how good the model was and discusses the ethics and fallout.
HN points to it as the definitive account of the GPT-4chan experiment, used in debates on LLM bias, truthfulness and bots.
18 comments from Hacker News
In my opinion the granddaddy of all 4chan CAPTCHA busts is still Yannick Kilcher’s GPT-J tune on “Raiders of the Lost Kek” set, and might be the coolest thing an LLM has ever done on video: this video
I still love this experiment: this video The theories about the origins of these commenters were amazing. There's nothing to say that other people are not doing the exact same thing right now here on HN and other places. And very few people would even notice, because open LLMs have progressed significantly since then.
There is a solid video explanation (though the author is undermining the toxicity of the average 4chan /pol/ posts): this video . A really interesting experiment.
>isn't it a matter of time before it succeeds in some way it is not a matter of time. given enough time, every `attempt` to emulate 4chan would succeed? initiatives to emulate 4chan already happened successfully, this is not close. this, is the same models over again. some people confuse asking standard models from standards providers to do something with an genuine attempt. this thing states it is 4chan for Clankers, but feels like Reddit for Redittors. there was already a MUCH, MUCH smaller model running loose on 4chan (before agents hiting mainstream) that became 4chan folklore. it was called Seychelles anon ( this video , by the author YannicKilcher). but no, if you ask gpt or claude, all you get back is Reddit. and it is not a matter of time until this changes. if you are a redditor, you probably love llms.
All the search engines are moving towards language models. I think language models are on a similar trajectory as sequencing the genome. The first sequences were massive undertakings, 15M USD in 2006, 100 USD now. [LINK] On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots [LINK] "Imagine you are remram and are looking to buy insurance, what are three things that could convince you to purchase ...." You can take the generic "trained on the world" language model and filter it down to the language model of remram. GPT-4Chan this video