Character Voice Test

Pirate: "Arrr, so these 'AI models'—be they like a crew o' invisible sailors? Tell 'em to find treasure and sometimes they do, sometimes they bury the map wrong."

Knight: "Methinks 'tis a trained squire. You teach it laws of reason and courtesy, and it performs tasks. Yet feed it lies and it will swear them as truth—no soul to right its errors."

1990s Hacker: "Think of it as a giant neural net — lotsa weights, trained on mountains of text. Backprop tunes those weights. Garbage in, garbage out; it can 'hallucinate' plausible nonsense if the data's weak."

Pirate: "Hall-u-what? Sounds like a cursed parrot repeating stories after too much rum."

Knight: "Aye, and how dost one keep it true? By hard training and stern tests?"

1990s Hacker: "You fine-tune it, give it reward signals — like RLHF, teach it what folks want. Also 'prompt engineering' is basically phrasing the task so it behaves. But beware bias: if the scrolls you train from are crooked, so is the model."

Pirate: "Bias, eh? Like favorin' the captain's kin when dividin' the booty. Not fair!"

Knight: "And what of secrecy? If the smiths forge this engine behind closed doors, how shall the realm judge its virtue?"

1990s Hacker: "Open-source models are like BBS code you can inspect — more trust, more tweaking. Closed models are proprietary black boxes. Also watch adversarial tricks: a tiny change can make it misread a map."

Pirate: "So it's clever, but can be tricked. Aye, I like me chances."

Knight: "Then we shall test it with riddles and laws of honor."

1990s Hacker: "I'll throw some edge cases at it, log the outputs, and maybe patch a prompt. Old-school curiosity with new-school compute. Ready?"

Pirate: "Ready as a keelhaul, matey. Feed it a prompt — and let's see if it finds the treasure or the plank."