Comment by ramraj07
9 days ago
So I train a model to say y=2, and then I ask the model to guess the value of y and it says 2, and you call that overfitting?
Overfitting is if you didn't exactly describe Indiana Jones and then it still gave Indiana Jones.
The prompt didn't exactly describe Indiana Jones though. It left a lot of freedom for the model to make the "archeologist" e.g. female, Asian, put them in a different time period, have them wear a different kind of hat etc.
It didn't though, it just spat out what is basically a 1:1 copy of some Indiana Jones promo shoot. No where did the prompt ask for it to look like Harrison Ford.
But... the prompt neither forbade Indiana Jones nor did it describe something that excluded Indiana Jones.
If we were playing Charades, just about anyone would have guessed you were describing Indiana Jones.
If you gave a street artist the same prompt, you'd probably get something similar unless you specified something like "... but something different than Indiana Jones".
And… that is called overfitting. If you show the model values for y, but they are 2 in 99% of all cases, it’s likely going to yield 2 when asked about the value of y, even if the prompt didn’t specify or forbid 2 specifically.
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The nice thing about humans is that not every single human being read almost every content present on the Internet. So yeah, a certain group of people would draw or think of Indiana Jones with that prompt, but not everyone. Maybe we will have different models with different trainings/settings that permits this kind of freedom, although I doubt it will be the commercial ones.
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But the concentrations of training data because of human culture/popularity of characters/objects means that if I go and give a random person the same description of a character that the AI got and ask "who am I talking about, what do they look like?" there's a very high likelihood that they'll answer "Indiana Jones".
Or even just 'obvious Indiana Jones knockoff who isn't literally Harrison Ford'. Comics do that kind of thing constantly for various obviously inspired but legally distinct characters.
What would most humans draw when you describe such a well known character by their iconic elements. Think if you deviated and acted a pedant about it people would think you're just trying to prove a point or being obnoxious.