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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

#401

Post by psd1 »

mcswell wrote: post #337
300bps wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not unlike what people read into the minds of their pets.

An open question. But the crappiness of ML makes those people look a lot more correct just by contrast.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#402

Post by Traster »

foolfoolz wrote: post #291
Traster wrote: post #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…

don’t generalize these things. self driving in every possible scenario yes is probably a while off. self driving in specific circumstances is already here, such as airport shuttles and moving shipping containers in docks. you don’t need to solve the general case to be useful

I think you've just redefined self-driving as such as a trivial achievement moving shipping containers in docks resembles large scale pick and place far more closely than self-driving cars.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#403

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

harpersealtako wrote: post #260
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mobbed a little cobold and killed it and now you feel all big and proud of yourself? Well done >:(

Actually that story was really funny, the AI constantly kept having my character have this irrational hatred of kobolds, like "they're pests to be exterminated" even though I included descriptions of their vibrant art and tapestries and language and culture. Which was funny because it was a story about traveling with an intelligent slime buddy who all the humans thought was a "monster to be exterminated". I was ultim…

Hah. A great example of social biases in machine learning :P

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#404

Post by ojilles »

tombert wrote: post #126
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #43

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…

I had a similar experience with an automated phone bot with my insurance company at one point. I had this very bizarre situation involving billing and a typically-not-covered medication in conjunction with a surgery. I figured that if I went as technically detailed as possible with everything, the bot would be confused and I would be transferred to a person, but the bot completely understood the question and answered…

How do you know that "no humans involved"? Was there something that clued you in on the fact that the responses were not from a human being?

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#405

Post by [deleted] »

wildrhythms wrote: post #357
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I've had plenty of real world support people who were just as bad, if not worse, than the AI bots. Recently had an experience with paid Microsoft support (for work) so bad that we just stopped even talking to them. It didn't used to be this way, it used to be that if we had a data corruption issue with SQL we'd talk to an engineer who worked on SQL server at Microsoft, now we talk to some third party company…

And this is why chat bots are very attractive to the executives who view support technicians as humans who exist simply apologize to a customer and follow a script.

[deleted]

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#406

Post by pdimitar »

fault1 wrote: post #317
Jensson wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From a computer vision perspective, I think most of that is fairly easy No, not at all. The hard part is to do computer vision to understand what you can do with objects, not just convert object representation of images into string texts. For example, can I move this object away to get an object under it? Can I place an object on this object without it toppling over? Is this object dirty and moving it will smear th…

I agree with all that (though I don't really necessarily associate any of that with computer vision, perhaps it's my physics bias). Having good state estimation, kinematic, and dynamics models of real world objects is something that is very mature in controlled environments, but not very mature in other environments.

Hm? Do we have robots that can pick eggs without squishing them, for example? I vaguely remember reading something like this years ago and it was impressive.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#407

Post by pdimitar »

nooorofe wrote: post #384
pdimitar wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree but I still question whether modern ML is useful at all. I mean OK, obviously it works quite well for China in order for their social credit score system to work (facial recognition almost everywhere you go) -- which is damned impressive, I'll give it that. But does it work in the benefit of the people at large? I've read a study a loooooong time ago, I think the late 90s, that stated that the amount of time…

Dishwasher saves a lot of time. Not many machines in my kitchen can be classified as "robot" * oven - not intend to save time (except the fan option), easy-medium to clean * instant pot - saves time, easy to clean * rice-cooker - saves time, easy to clean * electric kettle - save time, easy to clean If you ever lived in condition without those, you wouldn't praise "cutting board and the knife". I don't need quotes fr…

I agree on the kitchen appliances front and I am just about to buy a slow cooker and a steamer these days and I am sure it's going to improve things a lot.

But the so-called kitchen robots? They are incredibly useful but they make a mess of themselves that you have to clean thoroughly afterwards. They save effort but they don't save time. That was my overall point. And I am not praising the cutting board and the knife per se, I am saying that if you are in the mood to use them for 10-15 minutes then they are sometimes the better options.

But in general this wasn't the topic, I was merely saying that time is not being saved very much these days, at least not the maximum extent that's IMO possible with today's technology. But I recognize that not everyone agrees.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#408

Post by pdimitar »

lmm wrote: post #382
pdimitar wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree but I still question whether modern ML is useful at all. I mean OK, obviously it works quite well for China in order for their social credit score system to work (facial recognition almost everywhere you go) -- which is damned impressive, I'll give it that. But does it work in the benefit of the people at large? I've read a study a loooooong time ago, I think the late 90s, that stated that the amount of time…

I suspect that might be down to kitchen social dynamics (and/or carefully defined its terms to avoid counting pre-prepared food which is the real timesaver), because e.g. laundry has famously become something that consumes massively less time due to mechanisation. Being able to search through your photo library by person is a real improvement that ordinary people notice and use. (Also I think most technical people ga…

Oh yes, I completely agree with the laundry part. That indeed was the biggest time saver in my household as well.

> Being able to search through your photo library by person is a real improvement that ordinary people notice and use.

Agreed and I want that as well but I will not use Google Photos. And Apple's Photos it waaaaaaaaay too slow into adopting this -- at least it doesn't allow you to specifically say "please can my library now", which would be of tremendous help. So I am left with searching open-source software for this which I haven't yet found -- but I didn't look too hard because I have a ton of other things to do.

Any recommendations btw?

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#409

Post by harpersealtako »

cableshaft wrote: post #289
harpersealtako wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NovelAI is literally built by disgruntled AI Dungeon fans after the censorship scandal who wanted a better, more privacy-focused AI Dungeon for story generation. If you think AI dungeon has some cool features, you ain't seen nothing yet. There's a prompt tuning system called "modules" which basically primes the AI to write in a certain style, like a certain author or genre, etc (there are dozens of default modules, p…

Do you know how much you can paste from an existing story in NovelAI (like number of words) to continue off of? Like I've got some 2500 word stories I never got around to writing an ending (I struggle with endings in general), that maybe I could paste into NovelAI and see where it goes from there. Might help me finally finish the damn things, they've been sitting in a folder for a couple of years now.

I don't think there's any practical limit (I could probably paste in the entire text of the Bible and see what it generates next), but for the most part you want to use it as a writing companion, not an auto-writer. The general strategy is to have it generate some text (a few sentences), and then generally edit or retry it. The fun part is seeing the novel (ha) ideas that the AI comes up with and then working from there. There are some people who actually do try to use the AI to write the whole thing with not editing, with limited success (usually it involves a very meticulous and nebulous combination of tricks and techniques, and a lot of retrying).

As far as the context limit (how many lines back it can actually use), I believe it's 2048 tokens for novelAI, which is about 3 times higher than AI Dungeon uses, but likely not enough for the AI to have all of the story in memory. For important details or characters that aren't repeated except at the start, you may need to do some priming techniques with memory, author's note, or world info.

Though with 2500 words one advantage is that you have a very large amount of text in your writing style for the AI to try to mimic. One disadvantage of NovelAI over AI Dungeon is that AI dungeon seems a lot better at working off a small, limited prompt with very little context, while NovelAI prefer much longer prompts with plenty of descriptive detail. Having a large prompt that is entirely your own words definitely helps.

Re: Chatbots: Still dumb after all these years

#410

Post by cableshaft »

harpersealtako wrote: post #409
cableshaft wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know how much you can paste from an existing story in NovelAI (like number of words) to continue off of? Like I've got some 2500 word stories I never got around to writing an ending (I struggle with endings in general), that maybe I could paste into NovelAI and see where it goes from there. Might help me finally finish the damn things, they've been sitting in a folder for a couple of years now.

I don't think there's any practical limit (I could probably paste in the entire text of the Bible and see what it generates next), but for the most part you want to use it as a writing companion , not an auto-writer. The general strategy is to have it generate some text (a few sentences), and then generally edit or retry it. The fun part is seeing the novel (ha) ideas that the AI comes up with and then working from t…

Okay cool. Yeah I didn't mean generate it all for me, just come up with some responses and maybe a few ideas of where it could go. I did end up experimenting with it last night briefly and it did help me write a few more paragraphs to one of my stories.

One thing I did notice is it doesn't seem to know when to move on to something else, and will just keep trying to do what's been working, so I need to be able to tell it "Stop that conversation, let's talk about this now", although admittedly it's from very limited interaction with it. Still pretty neat.

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