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Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

mindmatters.ai

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Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#31

Post by silisili »

arthur_sav wrote: post #5

I really hate when companies hide behind chatbots. Like, NOOOO, your "AI" chatbot didn't help me - get me an actual person.

Same. But in fairness I like the latest AMZ chatbot. Not because it's smart, because it doesn't try to be.

I wanted to return a package that for whatever reason claimed to not be able to be returned, despite being sold by Amazon and having the typical return policy. I clicked to get help, confirmed the item and it just said 'OK, I've refunded the amount of xx.xx'.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#32

Post by kingkawn »

pwinnski wrote: post #13

Having worked in ML at two different companies now, I think that people interpreting model output as intelligence or understanding says much more about the people than about the model output. We want it to be true, so we squint and connect dots and it's true. But it isn't. It's math and tricks, and if human intelligence is truly nothing more than math and tricks, then what we have today is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction…

That interpretation of communication is how we develop and craft the personalities of children. There is nothing about our reaction to the pre-conscious language these bots are displaying that doesn’t fall in line with our own normal development patterns. And in the long run the same desire will lead us to develop bots that are capable of thinking.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#33

Post by kibwen »

coldcode wrote: post #2

Someone should use HN comments to make a chatbot. That would at least be fun.

Here's an entire subreddit populated exclusively by GPT-2 bots, where each bot is trained on the output of a different single subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#34

Post by thaumasiotes »

hotpotamus wrote: post #23
klyrs wrote: post #12

My favourite flaw of chatbots is exposed by ELIZA. Not chatting with ELIZA, (though, it does suffer this flaw) but using responses inspired by that program. "Please elaborate on that" or "tell me more about [noun]" etc. Bots appear to have zero lines of short term memory, and utterly fail to pick up a reference to the thing that they just said. My favorite being bot> [something plausibly human-sounding] me> What do y…

I'm not trying to be mean or break any HN rules, but did you read the article? It basically covers what you asked and was quite a revelation to me. Others in here point out that GPT-3 is not a chatbot which is good info, but I also wonder if there is anything out there that can even "remember" the context of a conversation it's supposed to be having. Particularly interesting is the question from the article, "who is…

> I also wonder if there is anything out there that can even "remember" the context of a conversation it's supposed to be having.

IBM's Watson project involved an internal model of the world, though I have no idea if that got specialized into a local model of an ongoing conversation. Same type of thing though.

Having a context of this type available is actually necessary if you want to synthesize sentences in a language with definiteness-marking, such as English, because definiteness is marked according to whether the noun in question is or isn't already part of the context.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#35

Post by Sharlin »

klyrs wrote: post #12

My favourite flaw of chatbots is exposed by ELIZA. Not chatting with ELIZA, (though, it does suffer this flaw) but using responses inspired by that program. "Please elaborate on that" or "tell me more about [noun]" etc. Bots appear to have zero lines of short term memory, and utterly fail to pick up a reference to the thing that they just said. My favorite being bot> [something plausibly human-sounding] me> What do y…

The GPT2 version of the AI Dungeon [1] could keep track of context for maybe couple of lines at a time. I've heard the GPT3 version is substantially better.

The problem is, of course, that these "AI" chatbots on websites, marketing buzzwords notwithstanding, have very little to do with state-of-the-art machine learning, and are indeed unlikely to be any more sophisticated than the original ELIZA for the most part.

[1] https://play.aidungeon.io/

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#37

Post by [deleted] »

pwinnski wrote: post #13

Having worked in ML at two different companies now, I think that people interpreting model output as intelligence or understanding says much more about the people than about the model output. We want it to be true, so we squint and connect dots and it's true. But it isn't. It's math and tricks, and if human intelligence is truly nothing more than math and tricks, then what we have today is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction…

[deleted]

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#40

Post by tomrod »

kingkawn wrote: post #32
pwinnski wrote: post #13

Having worked in ML at two different companies now, I think that people interpreting model output as intelligence or understanding says much more about the people than about the model output. We want it to be true, so we squint and connect dots and it's true. But it isn't. It's math and tricks, and if human intelligence is truly nothing more than math and tricks, then what we have today is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction…

That interpretation of communication is how we develop and craft the personalities of children. There is nothing about our reaction to the pre-conscious language these bots are displaying that doesn’t fall in line with our own normal development patterns. And in the long run the same desire will lead us to develop bots that are capable of thinking.

> There is nothing about our reaction to the pre-conscious language these bots are displaying that doesn’t fall in line with our own normal development patterns

Well... yes and no. Deployed models typically learn in a defined pattern, if at all. Various forms of data freshness, etc. to develop. But the chatbots don't have good history recall, typically, and know that what you mentioned 50 messages ago is relevant to message one prior and not current. Things like that. We don't program pareidolia very well, which is typically seen as a negative, but its a feature for finding useful patterns (not just lowest error patterns).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

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