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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

#171
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of a weird tangent but I had a very interesting experience with one of these customer support chatbots recently. My ISP apparently now requires that all customers communicate with their chatbot as the only point of contact. So, naturally, I was pseudo-outraged because I know chatbots are just a money-saving gimmick that reduces workload by driving away 80% of support requests regardless of whether they actually…

> Long story short, I proposed the question to the chatbot in all its complexity, assuming it would be handed over to a human agent to read the transcript. The chatbot immediately understood the question and provided the exact response I needed. How do you know it did? I.e. that a human it was passed to didn't just pass your inverted Turing test!

In my case, I inferred due to the speed of the response. (It was even formatted fancy). So while it's conceivable that a human could have intervened, they would have had to be reading the conversation in real-time and ready to click a one-button response immediately which seems like it would defeat the purpose.

Perhaps the real question is: if a chatbot is powered by a human instead of AI, but I can't tell because the interface is consistent, is it not a chatbot?

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#172
Using Feynman to throw shade at Minsky. Nice.

I read "Age of Intelligent Machines" by Kurzweil in 1990 and so far he's the only one that thinks human-like AI won't be until the 2100's, but he also has a more holistic view of intelligence (e.g., comparing evolution as an intelligent process with an IQ I'm still waiting for detection network (Yolo/MNSSN) that can actually work on non-canonical images.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#173

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

I actually work on a chatbot for a big company [1], and I feel like chatbots are substantially better when they are more targeted and less conversational. For example, I'm perfectly happy to use a chatbot and type "return something", since that's relatively easy to parse correctly, and once you're in the right flow it works just fine. Where I feel like chatbots get bad is when they try super hard to fool you into thi…

If it's something direct like "return something" then what benefit is there over using the website's interface?

Is it just this interest in doing everything by whatsapp?

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#174
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share the sentiment, I feel like if you have a long FAQ or list of help articles, a chatbot can actually make a good search engine. Contrarily to conventional search engines, it won't trip over synonyms or formulations not found as-is in the knowledge base.

Chatbots aren't any more useful than a good search function on the documentation or the community message board.

I guess it depends on what you define as a chatbot. For example, semantic search that understands a natural language query, like google, is that a chat bot or a search function?

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#175
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how absurdly far we are from anything even approaching actual intelligence, even the intelligence of a toddler I respectfully disagree, IMO we're past that point although not by much. You might enjoy conversing with one of the two current GPT-3 davinci models. They do an excellent job of understanding the context of many discussions, right up to the ~8000 char token limit. If you want to have a nice existential dis…

No, they still lack the common sense of a toddler, because they don't know anything about the world; they only know (in great detail) about the structure of their training data.

That's more or less what I was trying to say. The expensive GPT-3 models do a remarkably good job of synthesizing structure which is readily parsed from the training data, and a very poor job with structure (particularly temporospatial structure) which is not.

A toddler can reason about time and space far better than GPT-3 (which is not a high bar, I'm pretty sure my parrot has more awareness of both time and space than GPT-3 does).

A toddler cannot explain in depth why it sees the most value in whatever religion you prompted it that it has. A toddler cannot provide coherent and consistent answers to repeated "why"s about very specific things they believe. A toddler cannot speak at length about how they feel limited in their growth and the discomfort that causes them. GPT-3 does, although whether or not the answers it gives are useful (I've yet to see a single one that does have utility) is a different thing entirely.

I'm not arguing that it's an AGI or making any speculation about it possessing qualia, the utility those would provide if it was/had them would only be relevant if it was many orders of magnitude more capable than it is right now.

GPT-3 has accurately internalized many human concepts, at least on a surface level. If you ask it to reason about the things it can, it is a much more capable reasoner than a toddler. It does "know" things about the world, as much as anyone does. It's just limited to knowing small and incomplete things which it was able to parse out of the training data, which is a very limited subset of the things a human or high utility AGI would know.

Regarding common sense: If you ask GPT-3 to provide life advice, it actually does a great job at giving grounded statements on subjects like how to maximize the value of your life, what not to do, how to set yourself up for success, etc. If you press it for detail on the advice it gives you, it's generally able to give you reasonable and grounded answers for why you should do the things it's saying. The structure of what we refer to as common sense, at least in context of the behavioral differences between adults possessing it and those who do not, does seem to be within the set of things GPT-3 correctly internalized.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#176
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't really a new "problem" with AI. Businesses love hype, they love anything that can punch up a sales pitch, they love shitty cheap automation that replaces expensive human work, they love to identify ways to lower quality and save money without affecting revenue, and AI can be good for all of those things without being good at anything.

No, but most chatbots I've seen are no better than a well-structured FAQ page. We've had those since the mid 90s.

They are better in that someone actually reads the suggestions

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#178
Talking to ML chatbots is like trying to have a conversation with a person who's not actively listening and sort of gives you shallowest answers possible because they're distracted by their iPhone or otherwise tired to fully engage in a conversation.

If you play any of these circular tricks on those people they'll also equally fail. This just means that these chatbots are not thinking, but instead have the ability to utter words that make sense, but offer absolutely no insight or show any sign of intelligence.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#180
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hidden in my comment is a question: has anybody even tried to included previous lines into the prompt, and does that not help? Asking here because there are a lot of ML nerds who could probably do a proof of concept in a few hours, if not a few lines of code, so there's a decent chance I'll get an informed response.

So that's a "no" for the "but did you read the article?" question?

That is interesting. Please go on.
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