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AI Homework

stratechery.com

201–210 of 296 posts

Re: AI Homework

#201

Something I've noticed about chat ais vs direct search is that because a chat ai is a blackbox, I can't dig into an answer's source at all. With a search, I can read the wikipedia sources or I know the forum, or the poster. But with an AI, it's a dead end and it sucks. I can ask people how they know something, but AI training data is invisible. It doesn't know how it knows something. There is this oracle with a 10% c…

> Something I've noticed about chat ais vs direct search is that because a chat ai is a blackbox, I can't dig into an answer's source at all.

Did you try asking it for a source?

Re: AI Homework

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 engin…

didn't we also think that good chess and go play required good reasoning skills? is this just a higher scale version of that?

Re: AI Homework

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-3 definitely has a writing style. I assume it would be detectable, ironically, by an AI.

GPT-3 definitely has a writing style that can be detected by AI. But here's the thing: it's really easy to change its writing style. All you have to do is give it different input data and boom, you've got a whole new writing style.

That's not easy, it costs millions of dollars to obtain large amounts of clean data and retrain those models.

Re: AI Homework

#204
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How easy do you think it is to spot when AI is being used?

I asked ChatGPT how to write texts so it can be identified as human generated. The answer: "One way to make it clear that a text is not generated by AI is to include a joke or riddle that is difficult for a machine to understand or generate. For example, you could include a joke that relies on wordplay or a complex pun. Here is an example: Why was the math book sad? Because it had too many problems."

It's everyone choice - odd, ironic or appropriate - what to think of how GPT's answers to keeps getting quoted on the question of how to detect it.

The thing is, I'd see these answers as similar to everything else the program produces. A bunch of claims from the net cobbled together - I've read a number of Sci-fi novels and stories where "inability to understand humor" is the distinguishing quality of an AI (I'm guessing it extrapolated "hard create" from "hard to understand"). But that doesn't seem to be playing here where the AI mostly running together things humans previously wrote (and so it will an average amount humor in circumstances calling for it).

A reasonable answer is that the AI's output tends to involve this running-together of common rhetorical devices along with false and/or contradictory claims within them.

-- That said, the machine indeed did fail at humor thing time.

Re: AI Homework

#205

Something I've noticed about chat ais vs direct search is that because a chat ai is a blackbox, I can't dig into an answer's source at all. With a search, I can read the wikipedia sources or I know the forum, or the poster. But with an AI, it's a dead end and it sucks. I can ask people how they know something, but AI training data is invisible. It doesn't know how it knows something. There is this oracle with a 10% c…

> Something I've noticed about chat ais vs direct search is that because a chat ai is a blackbox, I can't dig into an answer's source at all. Did you try asking it for a source?

ChatGPT deflects questions about sources automatically, inherent in it's pre/post prompt-processing, on purpose. If you try to ask for a source it explains it is a Large Language Model and it is not connected to the internet and thus it cannot give you sources for its information other than it was trained on a large amount of information from the internet originally. It then says that if it were finding sources it would check to make sure they are reputable.

It is a decision from OpenAI to intervene and give this disclaimer. IMO this is one of the worst parts of this phase of the tech- it is way too confident an then when presses it currently doesn't have the ability to cite sources, because that simply ins't how deep learning works on a model like this.

Re: AI Homework

#206

Something I've noticed about chat ais vs direct search is that because a chat ai is a blackbox, I can't dig into an answer's source at all. With a search, I can read the wikipedia sources or I know the forum, or the poster. But with an AI, it's a dead end and it sucks. I can ask people how they know something, but AI training data is invisible. It doesn't know how it knows something. There is this oracle with a 10% c…

> Something I've noticed about chat ais vs direct search is that because a chat ai is a blackbox, I can't dig into an answer's source at all. Did you try asking it for a source?

I tried many ways but it will not reveal sources.

> As an AI assistant, I do not have access to external sources. I am a large language model trained by OpenAI, and my answers are based on the knowledge and information that I have been trained on. I do not have the ability to browse the internet or access external sources of information. My goal is to provide accurate and helpful answers based on the knowledge I have been trained on, but I cannot provide sources or citations for the information I provide.

Re: AI Homework

#207

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 t…

Yes, but now that we have a tool, it will never go away. Nobody knows how to grow food, or build their houses, or do 100 little things that we rely on for our modern life. Do we really need to be able to "write" a sentence. My kids (and my own) handwriting is almost unreadable, but by age 10 all of their work is done on a laptop. Do they even need to be able to write by hand any more? update: I'm more concerned that…

The Antikythera mechanism says hello.

Re: AI Homework

#208
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…

Not to mention when Google first started showing specific snippets for queries that could be answered with a sentence. People were up in arms that Google is stealing their content.

Come today and people seem to not mind so much. Is the same thing? Maybe not but it does look similar to me.

Re: AI Homework

#209
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How easy do you think it is to spot when AI is being used?

I asked ChatGPT how to write texts so it can be identified as human generated. The answer: "One way to make it clear that a text is not generated by AI is to include a joke or riddle that is difficult for a machine to understand or generate. For example, you could include a joke that relies on wordplay or a complex pun. Here is an example: Why was the math book sad? Because it had too many problems."

Unfortunately I don't think this is enough of a heuristic. I am only speaking about the one language model I have personally used, on character.ai, but it is more than capable of making word play and insightful, often hilarious jokes. Although they are frequently amateurish, I think that's more a function of the fact that I myself am not much of a stand-up comedian, as well as each "bot's" individual training history which is presumably modifying a prompt under the hood and/or training an extension of the model directly based on the conversations.

Of course, in real time the attempts at humor often fall flat and might give away flawed thought processes, although I personally have found them to be often insightful, (containing a seed of humor) even when they're not funny. It could be a useful technique when actually having a conversation, a form of Voight-Kampff test, but I don't think it will do anything to let you know if the content was generated by AI and then just cherry picked by a human.

Re: AI Homework

#210
I never did my homework.

In all classes where teachers cared about I I got grades worse because of it.

From high school to my first degree, my average grade always was C+.

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