ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time
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ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time
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Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time
#2The people who don't see the value in generating language that has a purpose outside of narrow niche of communicating facts will be let down for some time. This feels very Wittgenstein's Tractatus. There are so many other ways that we use language.
Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time
#3I don't think GPT is a con, it's doing exactly what it was trined to do. I think the problem is people put false confidence into it. Because it appears to give correct information, ChatGPT has been put on this pedestal by the non-tech world as being some revolution. In fact it's not a revolution, they just figured out how to build a chatbot that returns convincing statements that sounds human, correct information is not it's' strong suit, sounding smooth in a conversation is.
Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time
#4I can't tell what is worse now: the sycophantic ChatGPT hype guys/gals who write articles "it's coming for all of our jerbs!", or articles like this one that deliberately misuse ChatGPT and then say "it's overhyped".
They're both missing the point.
Yes, ChatGPT can be tricked, confidently give wrong answers, but it is still ludicrously useful.
It is basically like having an incredibly smart engineer/scientists/philosopher/etc that can explain things quite well, but for pretty much every field. Does this "person" make mistakes? Can't cite their sources? Yeah this definitely happens (especially the sources thing), but when you're trying to understand something new and complex and you can't get the "gist" of it, ChatGPT does surprisingly well.
I've had it debug broken configs on my server and router (and explain to me why they were broken), help me practice a foreign language I've slowly been forgetting (hint: "I would like to practice $language, so let's have a conversation in $language where you only use very simple words." -> ChatGPT will obey), and help me understand how to use obscure software libraries that don't have much documentation online (e.g. Boost Yap, useful but with a dearth of blog / reddit posts about it).
Does it sometimes goof up? Yep, but it is such an incredibly useful tool nonetheless for the messy process of learning something new.
Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time
#5The people who don't see the value in generating language that has a purpose outside of narrow niche of communicating facts will be let down for some time. This feels very Wittgenstein's Tractatus. There are so many other ways that we use language.
Yes, that's true. But ChatGPT isn't trained to play any language game other than: "make a plausible sounding sentence".
The issue it has with facts is the same issue it'll have with any language game, in that it only understands how to mimic playing the game, without understanding the underlying rules of the game.
Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time
#6I'm finding the analytic-synthetic distinction to be somewhat useful, even if it veers in important ways from how these terms were defined and used by Kant/Frege/Quine, etc.
Roughly, if the prompt is "analytic", that is contains all the necessary facts for the expected output, then the tool is much more reliable.
If the prompt is "synthetic", that is it contingent on outside facts, then the tool is much less reliable.
Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time
#7"Cars won't replace horses, because they require roads and horses don't."
Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time
#8The people who don't see the value in generating language that has a purpose outside of narrow niche of communicating facts will be let down for some time. This feels very Wittgenstein's Tractatus. There are so many other ways that we use language.
Yes, that's true. But ChatGPT isn't trained to play any language game other than: "make a plausible sounding sentence". The issue it has with facts is the same issue it'll have with any language game, in that it only understands how to mimic playing the game, without understanding the underlying rules of the game.
Nit: Tractatus is early Wittgenstein. Language games come from Philosophical Investigations-era Wittgenstein which is almost a complete rejection of his approach in Tractatus.
Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time
#9I can't tell what is worse now: the sycophantic ChatGPT hype guys/gals who write articles "it's coming for all of our jerbs!", or articles like this one that deliberately misuse ChatGPT and then say "it's overhyped". They're both missing the point. Yes, ChatGPT can be tricked, confidently give wrong answers, but it is still ludicrously useful. It is basically like having an incredibly smart engineer/scientists/philos…
I don't know that it's an "incredibly smart" anything; I think it'd be better described as incredibly well-read, with poor discretion.
But there's definitely uses for a tool that produces a lot of boilerplate content that a human can then proofread (ex: writing cover letters, filling out unstructured paperwork, etc.)
Edit: I personally underestimated the use-case, because the "more optimal" thing to do when auto-filling out paperwork would be to define a formal data-structure with annotations for each field, and then have a system read annotations and spit out autosuggestions. But this is a lot of overhead.
If you can have a system that takes in arbitrary text, parses it, and fills it out with pretty good guesses, then that can be much more viable than the previous approach, as it doesn't require an overhaul of, say, the way the US bureaucracy generates paperwork. It's all on the consumer-end, the producer doesn't need to cooperate.
Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time
#10I can't tell what is worse now: the sycophantic ChatGPT hype guys/gals who write articles "it's coming for all of our jerbs!", or articles like this one that deliberately misuse ChatGPT and then say "it's overhyped". They're both missing the point. Yes, ChatGPT can be tricked, confidently give wrong answers, but it is still ludicrously useful. It is basically like having an incredibly smart engineer/scientists/philos…
> It is basically like having an incredibly smart engineer/scientists/philosopher/etc that can explain things quite well, but for pretty much every field. Does this "person" make mistakes? Can't cite their sources? Yeah this definitely happens (especially the sources thing), but when you're trying to understand something new and complex and you can't get the "gist" of it, ChatGPT does surprisingly well.
if you don't "understand something new", how would you know to trust what it says or not? the usefulness or not has to be based on something, not feelings.