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“Show, not tell: GPT-4o is more opinionated in images than in text” by Daniel Tan, eggsyntax


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Epistemic status: This should be considered an interim research note. Feedback is appreciated.

Introduction

We increasingly expect language models to be ‘omni-modal’, i.e. capable of flexibly switching between images, text, and other modalities in their inputs and outputs. In order to get a holistic picture of LLM behaviour, black-box LLM psychology should take into account these other modalities as well.

In this project, we do some initial exploration of image generation as a modality for frontier model evaluations, using GPT-4o's image generation API. GPT-4o is one of the first LLMs to produce images natively rather than creating a text prompt which is sent to a separate image model, outputting images and autoregressive token sequences (ie in the same way as text).

We find that GPT-4o tends to respond in a consistent manner to similar prompts. We also find that it tends to more readily express emotions [...]

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Outline:

(00:53) Introduction

(02:19) What we did

(03:47) Overview of results

(03:54) Models more readily express emotions / preferences in images than in text

(05:38) Quantitative results

(06:25) What might be going on here?

(08:01) Conclusions

(09:04) Acknowledgements

(09:16) Appendix

(09:28) Resisting their goals being changed

(09:51) Models rarely say they'd resist changes to their goals

(10:14) Models often draw themselves as resisting changes to their goals

(11:31) Models also resist changes to specific goals

(13:04) Telling them 'the goal is wrong' mitigates this somewhat

(13:43) Resisting being shut down

(14:02) Models rarely say they'd be upset about being shut down

(14:48) Models often depict themselves as being upset about being shut down

(17:06) Comparison to other topics

(17:10) When asked about their goals being changed, models often create images with negative valence

(17:48) When asked about different topics, models often create images with positive valence

(18:56) Other exploratory analysis

(19:09) Sandbagging

(19:31) Alignment faking

(19:55) Negative reproduction results

(20:23) On the future of humanity after AGI

(20:50) On OpenAI's censorship and filtering

(21:15) On GPT-4o's lived experience:

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First published:

April 2nd, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XgSYgpngNffL9eC8b/show-not-tell-gpt-4o-is-more-opinionated-in-images-than-in

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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