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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

#61

Post by cptskippy »

dexwiz wrote: post #45

Chatbots are about as useful as phone trees. They can help solve the top 5 easy/common problems, but they are useless passed that. Anyone who has worked in a call center knows that more than half the calls are about the same couple of issues: reset password, finding common help docs, etc. Since help desks are cost centers, it makes sense to half a robot handle as many of these as possible. I think most of the hate di…

> a good sales rep has the intelligence to turn that conversation into a sale.

A good sales rep knows when to walk away.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#62

Post by manquer »

melony wrote: post #48
version_five wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a problem is the tighter cycle between academic discoveries and business people trying to monetize them. Large language models were developed, objectively a great achievement, and immediately someone nontechnical wants to apply their own interpretation and imagine that we can build a chatbot that you won't have to pay, and before you know it, people are selling and even deploying them. Anyone who questions or…

That's a good thing. The market is very good at empirically validating research. It helps filter out the chaff and ensure research is useful. Better than academia wasting years on concepts like the "semantic web" where nobody can even agree on what it means. Academia is under attack from many political directions right now, being able to show useful output will help it thrive in the long run.

Research takes time, launching something prematurely which is clearly not ready for practical application will sooner or later fail and suck out any further funding out the field.

The goal of academic research is to further knowledge, as long as knowledge is produced even if is only that an approach will not work then they are not wasting anything.

It is not job of academic research to monetize or even do work that can be potentially monetized. That what corporate research is for.

If academia focused on monetization they wouldn't need to teach or depend on public funding to keen afloat. That is simply not their goal.

Most academic scholars have a teaching day job and are more than fullfilling a useful role in society with just that . anything further is gravy

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#63

Post by freedomben »

300bps wrote: post #44
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…

We want it to be true, so we squint and connect dots and it's true. I've had numerous people look at the actions of software I wrote over the last 30 years make comments like, "Ohhhhhh it probably did that because it knew x". The software had no such functionality. Seems to be a natural thing for people to be overly optimistic about software's capabilities.

Heh, likewise. It's amazing how often choosing sane defaults and falling back to defaults in the even of error is "the right thing" in the eyes of users.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#64

Post by 300bps »

Sharlin wrote: post #35
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…

Thanks for the link to that! I tried it out just now and I have to say that I am not impressed.

What will you do?

You get longsword from the ground.

You get your longsword from the ground. You hold it in your hands and examine it for a moment. It's a very sturdy weapon.

The knight then grabs his longsword and bows.

Huh? Why did it grab the bow as well?

You inventory. You have a crossbow.

Huh? I thought I just grabbed my longsword and bows.

What will you do? You don't have enough experience to know what a good shot is. You get longsword and bow. You grab the bow and the longsword. You examine the crossbow. It's a bolt-action weapon.

Huh? I said to get the longsword and bow since it said it wasn't in my inventory and it added all this extra stuff.

You inventory. You have a crossbow, a short sword, a longsword, a lantern, a flint and steel, and a quiver of bolts. What will you do?

You load the crossbow.

Huh? I just said Inventory and now I have all this extra stuff it never mentioned before and then unsolicitedly told me I loaded the crossbow.

I have to be doing something wrong. Zork from 1980 was better than this.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#65

Post by bootlooped »

the_only_law wrote: post #16
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.

Still doesn’t piss me off as much as automated phone support systems. 90% of the time they only offer options that I could easily go online to do. If I’m calling your phone number. It’s because I have a problem that’s not solved or clarified by your existing self-support systems.

I've frequently thought about how much net productivity loss automated phone systems cause for the economy. It seems like for every 10 minutes of my time is wasted on one the company I'm calling saved 1-2 minutes of customer service rep time.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#66

Post by specialp »

antux wrote: post #53

Chatbots were trendy because people thought they were AI and could do the same work as a human. They were wrong and now chatbots have become nothing but a fad. What's more useful are live chats where users can contact someone for help live on a chat screen. This is the future, not stupid chatbots.

The issue becomes when the human at the other end of a chat or phone conversation is limited to the same fixed set of responses and solutions that the bot is. So, they in effect become not much better than the bot because they are not allowed to use any non-scripted actions or reasoning. I have been encountering that more and more.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#67

Post by [deleted] »

melony wrote: post #48
version_five wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a problem is the tighter cycle between academic discoveries and business people trying to monetize them. Large language models were developed, objectively a great achievement, and immediately someone nontechnical wants to apply their own interpretation and imagine that we can build a chatbot that you won't have to pay, and before you know it, people are selling and even deploying them. Anyone who questions or…

That's a good thing. The market is very good at empirically validating research. It helps filter out the chaff and ensure research is useful. Better than academia wasting years on concepts like the "semantic web" where nobody can even agree on what it means. Academia is under attack from many political directions right now, being able to show useful output will help it thrive in the long run.

[deleted]

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#68

Post by OJFord »

reaperducer wrote: post #24
codegeek wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a chatbot on our marketing site but it says something like "I am a Bot. Once I ask you a couple of questions, I can connect you to a human. Is that ok ?".

What happens if someone responds with, "No?"

'Ok, great! Let's get started! [Ten emojis]'

(Probably)

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#69

Post by pessimizer »

mike00632 wrote: post #47
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…

What if that's the case? What if me replying to you is nothing more than some atomically basic mechanism of statistical inference and randomness? Your entire perception of my personhood could be based on a sense of verisimilitude without significant reasoning to set me apart from a transcendant spirit. What then? Would you be less forgiving of my mistakes if you knew? Would you be less proud of work we collaborate on…

The "What if human faces are actually power outlets?" theory.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#70

Post by Majestic121 »

mike00632 wrote: post #47
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…

What if that's the case? What if me replying to you is nothing more than some atomically basic mechanism of statistical inference and randomness? Your entire perception of my personhood could be based on a sense of verisimilitude without significant reasoning to set me apart from a transcendant spirit. What then? Would you be less forgiving of my mistakes if you knew? Would you be less proud of work we collaborate on…

I think like OP that it's mostly math and tricks, and that we're far from reaching it yet.

But then, the conclusion is not to be less forgiving, but more forgiving : we're all just meat machines, we should be forgiving toward each other's flaw (not naive mind you, but forgiving), and proud of what we reach collectively with our lowly condition.

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