Yes, but it’s more complex than that! If you ask “who is Tom Cruise’s mother” you will get a much more robust response than asking “who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer’s son?”.
It’s not just negation that models struggle with, but also reversing the direction of any arrow connecting facts, or wandering too far from established patterns of any kind. It’s been studied scientifically and is one of most fascinating aspects because it also reveals the weaknesses and flaws of human thinking.
Researchers are already trying to fix this problem by generating synthetic training data that includes negations and reversals.
That makes you wonder: would this approach improve the robustness of human education also?
This is a super interesting line of info. Thank you! I didn't think of it as a negation-specific challenge but that's really cool insight.
"Don't think of an elephant."
It's actually interesting how often we have to guess that someone dropped a "not" in conversation based on the context.
It wouldn't be hard to have an iMessage bot (eg on a Mac) running to test some of this out on the fly.