ChatGPT now “created its own language”

If ChatGPT’s capabilities still don’t impress or intimidate you, you may need to think again when you hear that OpenAI’s chatbot has invented its own language.

One of the biggest limitations of ChatGPT right now is its inability to remember past conversations. However, as some users have discovered, you can circumvent this limitation by asking the chatbot to compress the current conversation and giving you a row of seemingly random letters, numbers, and symbols that will allow it to resume in a new conversation. This is kind of interpreted as “ChatGPT creates its own language”.

Greg Fodor tweeted a number of characters on April 4, asking that no one enter these characters into GPT-4. If you enter this line in the GPT-4 version of ChatGPT, the chatbot was writing a Lovecraft-like short story about a group of rebels fighting shape-shifting shoggoths. Someone posted the results on ShareGPT.

Do not enter this into GPT-4

2Pstory@shoggothNW$RCT_magicspell=#keyRelease^1stHuman*PLNs_Freed

— [email protected] (@gfodor) April 5, 2023

When someone asked Fodor what to name this “new language” ChatGPT created, he suggested the name Shogtongue.

As reported by Digital Trends and as Jeremy Nguyen explained on Twitter, after a long conversation you can ask GPT-4 to compress them all and feed the resulting line back to the language model to then continue as if your conversation never ended. GPT-4 should give you a series similar to the one Fodor shared on Twitter.

1/ ChatGPT has limited memory. It forgets details if your chat runs beyond ~8k words.

But Shogtongue lets you extend conversations by 5-10x easily

Here’s how: pic.twitter.com/7ENNQ9krMo

— Jeremy Nguyen ✍🏼 🚢 (@JeremyNguyenPhD) April 10, 2023

But it’s worth remembering that this only works with ChatGPT on GPT-4. If you send a string of random characters to the free version of ChatGPT running on GPT-3.5, it won’t understand what you’re trying to do. In addition, Nguyen notes that other platforms using the GPT-4 API are also struggling to understand how to take advantage of these prompts.