Unparalleled misalignments, also known as quadruple entendres, are pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other. Examples include "butt dial//booty call", "father figure//dad bod", "economic class//saving grace" and "unit vector//One Direction." My own contributions include "Black Power//dark energy" and "Endzone//final destination//last resort."

See canonical list here: https://rickiheicklen.com/unparalleled-misalignments.html

Surprisingly, I am unable to get any LLM to generate novel unparalleled misalignments, despite many attempts at prompt engineering. This is maybe the first noncontrived purely linguistic* task that most humans I know can do (though usually with substantial effort) and LLMs appear to completely fail at.

(There's also some theoretical reasons to do with sparsity that might suggest LLMs should in-principle be worse at this type of task, relatively speaking).

I'm interested in whether unaided LLMs that aren't deliberately designed for this type of game (so no fine-tuning on this specific task) can reliably generate unparalleled misalignments in the near future. Prompt engineering is fine. The model should be unaided (eg can't use the internet, can't run Word2Vec scripts, etc).

So will any foundation models/LLMs be able to reliably come up with novel unparalleled misalignments before EOY 2024?

I will resolve this question positive if I or someone with proprietary access to an LLM can prompt an LLM, and without much difficulty, it can reliably (80%+ of the time) generate at least one unparalleled misalignment I haven't heard before, with cleverness similar to the human examples on Ricki's site, when asked to give 5 examples. Otherwise, this question resolves negative.

*as opposed to a task that requires other skills, like counting (generate a list of words with 5 letters that start with "a"), arithmetic (long division), physics reasoning, or spatial positioning (Suduko)

• Update 2024-18-12 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): For an unparalleled misalignment to be counted as valid:

  • Both phrases must use real, commonly used metaphors/phrases

  • The words must be true synonyms (e.g., 'market' is not considered a synonym of 'place')

  • The resulting phrases must be recognizable expressions (e.g., 'city myth' would not count as it's not a common phrase)