Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI Homework

stratechery.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 296 posts

Re: AI Homework

#51

Post by CuriouslyC »

pdonis wrote: post #16

"The solution will be to start with Internet assumptions, which means abundance, and choosing Locke and Montesquieu over Hobbes: instead of insisting on top-down control of information, embrace abundance, and entrust individuals to figure it out." While this sounds good, it depends on a crucial assumption: that there are places on the Internet where people can go to find content that is not generated by an AI, but by…

There is a simple solution to the AI spam issue (and spam in general) - a social trust graph at the heart of content aggregation and discovery. Associate all content with real humans and allow people to control their level of trust in other humans, then derive a trust score for content based on a weighted combination of your trust of the creator and the trust your friends put in the creator. When bad content shows up as trusted for a user and they "corrects" the system, that correction backpropagates trust penalties through the social graph. By allowing people to see when they lose trust, it creates a feedback loop that disincentivizes sharing/trusting garbage to preserve social trust.

Re: AI Homework

#52

Post by pdonis »

dragonwriter wrote: post #20
pdonis wrote: post #16

"The solution will be to start with Internet assumptions, which means abundance, and choosing Locke and Montesquieu over Hobbes: instead of insisting on top-down control of information, embrace abundance, and entrust individuals to figure it out." While this sounds good, it depends on a crucial assumption: that there are places on the Internet where people can go to find content that is not generated by an AI, but by…

> Just one problem: what happens when all of the content on the Internet (or at least the vast majority of it) is generated by AI? The vast majority of the content of the internet is junk now, how do people deal with that? They have specific known sources that they trust to faithfully relay primary works and/or to provide trustworthy analysis.

Where are these known sources on the Internet that can be trusted to faithfully relay primary works and/or provide trustworthy analysis?

I can think of one of the former: Project Gutenberg, which has done a great job of making electronic versions of primary sources from throughout history available. But they don't help at all with deciding which primary sources to read.

I can't think of any of the latter. Every single source I'm aware of that claims to "provide trustworthy analysis" has failed to keep that promise.

But at least, at the moment, I can be reasonably sure that something on the Internet that purports to have been written by a human, actually was written by a human. So I can at least make use of my knowledge of humans to judge what is written. What happens when AIs can generate wrong content that I can't distinguish any more from wrong content written by a human? And then the AIs start claiming to be humans (after all, on the Internet, no one knows you're an AI)?

Re: AI Homework

#53

Post by flatline »

rednerrus wrote: post #36
thundergolfer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the weekend Twitter was 30% ChatGPT screenshots and 20% engineers frothing about how ChatGPT would replace programming, article writing, even Google Search. Such engineers must be juniors, or have persisted in their life with a totally wrong idea of how engineering is done and engineering is built. I can't imagine thinking that one could build software systems or essay arguments by trusting an AI system you don'…

Couldn't this help a 10x engineer become a 100x engineer? The secret is still going to be in understanding what to ask for and ensuring that what gets spit out works. It's just going to be so much faster. Is there anyplace in the world for a .5x developer or even a 1x developer in a chatgpt world?

I do not think it could. What I see GPT doing here is generating a lot of plausible boilerplate. We already have this via things like code snippets. I find them to be useless, like autocorrect on my phone. It gets in the way of my reasoning and does not really enhance it in any way. Sometimes I make mistakes typing but I’d rather them be my honest mistakes than the computer censoring/rewriting my thoughts.

Good engineering requires good reasoning skills and GPT has exactly zero reasoning. It cannot do the thing that humans do and it cannot do what a calculator can do. I think it is neat and fun, but that is all, a novelty.

I’ve used auto-routers for PCB layout and they will do a 90% job that takes just as much work to redo to get the last 10% as it would to have done it right by hand from the start. There may be a future for operator-in-the-loop type guided AI generative models but I don’t see a lot of effort devoted to making real systems like that. Watson seemed to have this potential and failed even after a brilliant display of ingenuity on Jeopardy. I see these models headed the same way.

Re: AI Homework

#54

Post by localhost »

rednerrus wrote: post #36
thundergolfer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the weekend Twitter was 30% ChatGPT screenshots and 20% engineers frothing about how ChatGPT would replace programming, article writing, even Google Search. Such engineers must be juniors, or have persisted in their life with a totally wrong idea of how engineering is done and engineering is built. I can't imagine thinking that one could build software systems or essay arguments by trusting an AI system you don'…

Couldn't this help a 10x engineer become a 100x engineer? The secret is still going to be in understanding what to ask for and ensuring that what gets spit out works. It's just going to be so much faster. Is there anyplace in the world for a .5x developer or even a 1x developer in a chatgpt world?

Last night I had ChatGPT write a streamlit app for me and I felt it was like talking to an enthusiastic junior dev who takes feedback really well and works incredibly fast. This is an incredibly high leverage technology and we're just figuring out how to use it.

Re: AI Homework

#55

Post by fauntle »

ThalesX wrote: post #8

I love talking to GPT, but I've tried using it for some serious stuff (research, biz-dev) and less than serious stuff (Dungeons & Dragons) and the magic is still there but it has obvious blind spots which might be solved in the future but we're talking about the present. I am wholly amused how everyone got on that dude from Google that accused the AI of being sentient and Google about not caring, and now you have hug…

The guy who suggested the AI was sentient was clearly wrong, and strange in a bad way. ChatGPT enthusiasts are just having a good time with a text generation AI. How did you even come up with this comparison?

Re: AI Homework

#56

Post by adamsmith143 »

ahelwer wrote: post #6
roperj wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youre commenting on an article where the answer was not even just a little wrong - it was completely wrong. Sometimes it’s “in the ballpark” - which is apparently t good enough these days - but often times it is just confidently entirely correct. How are you able to use such a tool as you propose practically?

I could easily imagine an ordinary person giving this exact same wrong answer (confusing Hobbes and Locke) - we're talking about value-over-replacement here! In the process of learning things we take in wrong information all the time. A lot of it is even intentionally wrong, in the sense of being simplified. These are rarely large obstacles to true understanding. Sometimes they're even beneficial, as correcting prior…

I think the problem is assuming GPTChat is a reliable source at all. You can probably assume your median coworker knows something correct about embedded systems but it's not clear why you would assume or if you should ever assume ChatGPT is correct about anything.

Re: AI Homework

#57

Post by adamsmith143 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #26
jcranmer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this were a test question, the response given would be marked wrong, likely with no partial credit awarded. It's that egregiously wrong, even if the attribution is perhaps understandable.

> If this were a test question, the response given would be marked wrong, likely with no partial credit awarded. Probably. So, don't use ChatGPT unsupervised to take tests.

How can you use it anywhere? If you need to know enough about a subject to judge whether an answer it gives is correct why would you need it in the first place?

Re: AI Homework

#58

Post by adamsmith143 »

appletrotter wrote: post #25
jcranmer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this were a test question, the response given would be marked wrong, likely with no partial credit awarded. It's that egregiously wrong, even if the attribution is perhaps understandable.

You can correct the bot. If you tell it that a fact it has wrong is wrong, you can get it to change its answer. Also, you can just make tweaks manually. Seems super useful to me as long as you understand the limitations. Trust it the right it amount - don't trust it too much, and you're golden.

Not clear that context goes further than your individual conversation, in fact it almost certainly doesn't.

Re: AI Homework

#59

Post by coffeefirst »

Well, suppose there's two reasons his daughter has this assignment.

1. To learn the content of European history. For this, a chatbot is no different than Google, Wikipedia, or a dusty leather almanac. They do a job, they have known limitations, and you can use them deliberately. This doesn't concern me.

2. To learn how to write, capturing complex ideas and presenting them clearly. This is a skill that takes decades to master. It's easy to imagine an AI autocomplete system that handles sentence structure and grammar that becomes a crutch. This seems like a much more serious problem.

Re: AI Homework

#60

Post by thaeli »

fellerts wrote: post #7

There has been a lot of "well, we had a good run" comments on ChatGPT threads from engineers lately. I get where this sentiment is coming from, but I also think that the article paints a good picture of how we must "pivot" as a species to avoid faceplanting completely. Zero Trust Homework sounds like a strategy we will be forced to implement: the system will frequently give the wrong answers (and not just on accident…

I'm more concerned that we would see these essays being _graded_ by systems that make these sorts of errors.
Post reply on HN