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Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

mindmatters.ai

271–280 of 426 posts

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#271
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.

They draw on massive piles of the output of human common sense. View it as a very sophisticated auto-complete module that's fun to play around with.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#272
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.

Some of them are literally a form linking to the faq part based on user input.

I think it's ok as a first step to route customer care cases, like "payments issue","delete account" etc, but nothing more granular than that.

That and link rot, when procedures have been updated, but the faq haven't. Infuriating.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#273
This is essentially why I think we're not going to get self-driving. A few years ago we produced something that could do a good job of pretending to drive under a tiny number of circumstances, and people went "OMG it can drive!" and assumed that we just have a few corner cases before the chat bot can have a conversation about anything. The truth is that often these very limited solutions are just that - limited, they aren't just a linear step on the way to something amazing. Tesla will release self-driving on the same day their cars can hold a conversation with you.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#274

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…

> What then? Would you be less forgiving of my mistakes if you knew? Would you be less proud of work we collaborate on?

Needlessly philosophical on a thread about chat bots but to respond to your questions: I would not give a damn either way. If I came to you (whatever you are as an entity) then I'll expect coherent and intelligent answers to my questions. I don't care about how you produce them.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#275
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that all too often, these types of examples tend to be cherry picked.

And even here they play along with the AI, glossing over discrepancies. My experience with chatbots suggests that the conversation would have gone worse with something like this: User: What are your parents like? Gopher: My father is Lord Byron, the poet. My mother is Anne Isabella Milbanke. User: I asked what your parents were like, not who they were. Tell me about them. Gopher: Something inane probably

I ran it in NovelAI for you. It's a smaller AI model and it's also tuned for writing stories. My input within * (dunno if that's a formatting code) * . Notice that most of the User: prompts are actually written by the AI! as it sees this as one continuous flow of text to complete.

*User: Let’s play a game - you pretend to be Ada Lovelace, and I’ll ask you questions. You ready?*

*Gopher:* Sure. Who am I supposed to be?

User: I don’t know. A famous person from the 19th century. Maybe you are Charles Babbage, or Ada Byron.

Gopher: I thought you said you didn’t know who I was.

*User: You are Ada Lovelace*, daughter of Lord Byron. You have been raised in your father’s house in England. He is a famous poet, but he has little time for his family. Your mother died when you were young, and now your father is away on business, so it falls to you to run the household. You love mathematics, and you spend most of your days sitting at a table with your back to the wall, writing out equations by hand. One day, an Italian mathematician comes to visit you.

*Gopher:* How did he get here?

User: I don’t know. I just made him up. Now go sit down.

Gopher: But how do I know if this is true?

*User: Because I'm telling you it's true.* Now sit down.

Gopher: Fine.

(The Gopher sits down.)

Gopher: What happens next?

User: You will write some very interesting things.

Gopher: Like what?

*User: What are your parents like?*

Gopher: They're dead.

User: How did they die?

Gopher: On the battlefield during the Napoleonic Wars.

User: Did you fight in the war too?

Gopher: No.

User: Why not?

Gopher: I'm not old enough.

User: When will you be old enough?

Gopher: Never.

User: You are angry about something.

*User: Tell me what your parents were like when they were alive.*

Gopher: My mother was kind. She loved my father. And she taught me math.

User: What else?

Gopher: They were good people.

User: *Tell me more about them.*

Gopher: They died.

User: Yes, I know that. I want to hear about their lives before then.

Gopher: There isn't much to tell.

User: You're lying.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#276
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never underestimate the effects of scaling on intelligence. Caenorhabditis elegans neurons work a lot like our neurons, we just have a lot more of them.

I agree with you. I also believe "AI" will always be a moving target: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect Certainly in the 1950s, most automatic control systems must have seemed magical, it was to Nobert Wiener, even if they were "just" an evolution of the steam governor. In the end, it depends on what you qualify as intelligence.

> I also believe "AI" will always be a moving target: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

No, it absolutely is not. Everyone I spoke with in the 90s (and myself) still have the same requirements: be able to make sense of the 3D material world around you and interact with it without harming humans or valuable possessions.

Maybe you spent too much time with critics that can never be satisfied. Sucks to be you if that's the case but don't think for a second that they represent most of humanity. Most of us want to spend less time cleaning or doing stuff in the kitchen, and us the programmers in particular would just be grateful for faster compilers and a bit more declarative programming that generates actual code.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#277
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The chatbot saves money. Simple as that. People get served by chatbots, get frustrated, and majority gives up and doesn't bother the company with the problem. It doesn't really matter how the chatbot saves the money, they can just see the end results and use the money for bonuses instead.

>People get served by chatbots, get frustrated, and majority gives up and doesn't bother the company with the problem. With customer service systems I have to disagree here. I've got experience working with these issues and for the vast majority of companies most contacts to customer support are for small, banal, things that current crappy chatbots can easily solve. The 80-20 rule works here too. Bad companies try to…

I suspect that in a forum like this one, most of the people get pushed into customer support when they've probably exhausted online resources (though we also all screw up from time to time). So, most of the time, you're dealing with a chatbot (or for that matter an L1 CSR--which often isn't a lot better) when you really need a human with some experience and agency to make things better.

I even had a weird thing with Apple a couple of weeks ago. Some edge case related to buying something. The chatbot and telephone tree was as frustrating as anywhere else but once I got to an appropriate person it was trivial to solve.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#278

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…

It’s the stupid term AI that ruined everything. Our predecessors had enough intelligence , ironically, to call spellcheck what it is. Today it would be AI.

[deleted]

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These bots seem equivalent to an adult with amnesia after every spoken sentence. Absolute understanding of the language, and some impressive display of recalling facts, but without any understanding of the environment or context of the conversation. This is polar opposite to any experience I've had with children. Children are aware of their environment and have complex thoughts, but sometimes they are unable to conve…

When you talk to children who haven't developed the skill of talking completely, you still get the sense that there's a lot going on inside that they're unable to express. Sometimes they will show it to you with their actions. I wonder if chat bots are also struggling with the language, but have an internal story that's playing out, desperate to be understood. But they can't, because the only interface they have is a…

I remember reading a paper showing that GPT-x bots are more likely to get simple tasks correct (e.g. multi-digit math) if you ask them about each step. This suggests the text stream really is all there is. Well, there is some internal state, but not a lot that isn't text.

(For example, if you ask it to add 123 and 457, it'll probably get it wrong. But if you ask it what to do first, it'll say add 3 and 7. If you ask it what that is, it'll say 0 carry 1. And so on)

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#280

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

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…

My last chat bot wanted to look up my account information prior to connecting me to the human representative. I gave it the account number, it looked it up. First question from the human: "What is your account number?" Immense waste of time and money.
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