ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving • Hacker News Board

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#261

Post by throwaway5371 » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 5:58 PM UTC

_petronius wrote: post #14

I'm less worried about stuff like ChatGPT killing things off, but more about just making everything noticeably a bit worse. To take an analogy: bad voice recognition software abounds everywhere, not because it is better than what it replaced in terms of UX, but because it works just enough and allows massive cost-savings on hiring people to do customer service jobs. A world where most marketing copy is written by med…

most marketing copy is now written by mediocre humans who are much worse than mediocre ai

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#262

Post by krustyburger » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 5:58 PM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #200

krustyburger wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re being insincere. Let me guess, you’d say a can opener is artificial intelligence compared to a pocket knife? That’s not the way anyone uses the term.

> you’d say a can opener is artificial intelligence compared to a pocket knife? No. In that case the intelligence is applied by the user. A can opener could be a component in a larger AI system. An AI needs to be aware (in the artificial sense) of its surroundings. Edit: I forgot that AI can openers do exist. The can opener I own is of the dumb machine kind and I hadn't fully considered what else might use that term.…

I apologize for suggesting insincerity on your part. It’s just that I think there is such a thing as artificial intelligence and something simply being a more complex machine doesn’t qualify. Your definition is idiosyncratic but I recognize your earnestness.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#263

Post by falcolas » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 5:58 PM UTC

Reader attention?

ChatGPT output is often so absurdly verbose it becomes tiring to try and make sense of the text (when the text makes sense in the first place). The effort we're willing to put into big swaths of text is already low, and I fear ChatGPT will only make it worse.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#264

Post by axiom92 » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 6:01 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #263

Reader attention? ChatGPT output is often so absurdly verbose it becomes tiring to try and make sense of the text (when the text makes sense in the first place). The effort we're willing to put into big swaths of text is already low, and I fear ChatGPT will only make it worse.

You can make the output more/less verbose with the right prompt.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#265

Post by birdstheword5 » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 6:01 PM UTC

lm28469 wrote: post #128

debacle wrote: post #34

I see two big problems with GPT: 1. It presents information really well that is completely false. I don't know exactly how it works under the hood, but sometimes it spits out paragraphs that read like the fever dreams of a flat earther. 2. It will cause our communication skills to further atrophy. Maybe in an innocuous way (no one memorizes epic poems anymore), but with GPT I think it will make people less likely to…

> It will cause our communication skills to further atrophy. Last week the dude next to me in the train asked chatgpt to generate a "good morning message" for his gf and sent it verbatim to her. At the same time he was working on what looked like a work related slide presentation, 90% of it was filled with chatgpt answers

I watched a dude in front of me at work make a whole PowerPoint using chatgpt, then used it to reply to all his emails - then back to copy pasting from chatgpt into some word doc

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#266

Post by hnarn » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 6:03 PM UTC

It’s kind of like that South Park special about the “streaming wars” and the water parks.

A swimming pool can have a certain amount of urine in it without anyone noticing, and that’s the way it’s always been. It’s not a problem as long as the amount is small and you add cleaning agents. The problem is that filling the web with content created by ChatGPT means adding more and more urine to the pool until someone notices.

It will be fine, for a long while, until it suddenly reaches a threshold where it’s noticeable, when all of the highly ranked hits you get for a question are subtly incorrect to the point that you can’t trust any of them, when more and more Wikipedia contributors are discovered to just copy-paste text from an AI, and then it’s no longer fine, but it’s too late because you’re still in the Internet swimming pool and now you’re swimming in piss.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#267

Post by fsflover » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 6:04 PM UTC

onemoresoop wrote: post #84

101008 wrote: post #22

I agree with the article but maybe you are trying to do the wrong thing with ChatGPT. I am not a native English speaker (as many of you already noticed due to my grammar mistakes), so ChatGPT have been very useful to rewrite my texts, fix grammar and maybe "beautify" them a bit. It's has been an invaluable tool in that sense. I feel much more confident now sending emails and writing important messages knowing that th…

How long until all conversations will start looking like they're authored by the same person?

Sounds like a good anonymity tool.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#268

Post by randomdata » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

krustyburger wrote: post #262

randomdata wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you’d say a can opener is artificial intelligence compared to a pocket knife? No. In that case the intelligence is applied by the user. A can opener could be a component in a larger AI system. An AI needs to be aware (in the artificial sense) of its surroundings. Edit: I forgot that AI can openers do exist. The can opener I own is of the dumb machine kind and I hadn't fully considered what else might use that term.…

I apologize for suggesting insincerity on your part. It’s just that I think there is such a thing as artificial intelligence and something simply being a more complex machine doesn’t qualify. Your definition is idiosyncratic but I recognize your earnestness.

> It’s just that I think there is such a thing as artificial intelligence

Perhaps you are actually thinking of what is more commonly known as AGI (artificial general intelligence)? None of these machines of which we have spoken of are AGIs. That I can agree with.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#269

Post by stereolambda » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #106

fhd2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same worry. Another example: Is furniture nowadays more beautiful and durable than it used to be 100 years ago? Is there more variety now? Not in my book. Same goes for a lot of products that are now produced in the cheapest way possible at scale. Looks very much like a race to the bottom dominated by a few big players to me. Consumers don't seem to care that much.

Does it matter? There is a lot of 100 year old furniture out there that nobody wants. They don't fit modern lifestyles. 100 year houses are only livable because someone put a ton of money into retrofitting things like plumbing, electric, and HVAC. Most of that has had major rework done several times as well since it was first added. Even at that, the fundamentals of those houses mean that they cannot be retrofitting…

I would say more tastes than lifestyles. You can use old wardrobes, drawers etc. just fine. It's just that people are used to looking at vaguely modern (often bland and disposable) stuff from the media, and at least think other people would think them weird and nonconforming for using old furniture. Even if you can get it relatively cheap, which is suggested by the "no one wants it" phrase.

I think there is an ethos of buying new and overpriced (and also buying "experiences") to show off that you have money for that and aren't some poor nerd trying to optimize their budget at the expense of consumerism. Often you don't actually have that much money for actual conspicuous consumption, so at least you're trying to imitate the Apple aesthetic. I am getting this vibe from talking to a distinct set of people of my age group, of course not all.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#270

Post by tshadley » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 6:11 PM UTC

"I cannot emphasize this enough: ChatGPT is not generating meaning. It is arranging word patterns."

To reconcile this statement with his admission that ChatGPT reliably turns out passable results, we must assume the average student simply rearranges word patterns as well. So developmentally, this must be a mile marker on the road to competence.

"[Writing] is an embodied process that connects me to my own humanity, by putting me in touch with my mind"

ChatGPT's experiences with its own "mind" are fleeting and lost forever with each reset of prompt and zeroing of prompt history. Prompt compression and embedding architectures, combined with the steady growth of hardware memory capacity, should allow new models that continuously generate and process "thought" prompts. This should allow the primitive emergence of self-narratives and make a leap, I feel, towards the generation of true meaning.