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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

#11

Post by williamcotton »

_huayra_ wrote: post #4

I 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…

All of this seems eerily similar to Wittgenstein's use theory of meaning:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_theory_of_meaning

From wikipedia: The Investigations deals largely with the difficulties of language and meaning. Wittgenstein viewed the tools of language as being fundamentally simple and he believed that philosophers had obscured this simplicity by misusing language and by asking meaningless questions. He attempted in the Investigations to make things clear: "Der Fliege den Ausweg aus dem Fliegenglas zeigen"—to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger W. Dijkstra

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#12

Post by dougmwne »

Pretty cool that GTP is hitting such a mainstream moment. Everyone I talk with about it has glazed over for years, but I guess this is finally a demo that breaks through. 100m users if reports are accurate.

Of course regular folks are going to wildly overestimate GTP’s current capabilities. Regular folks wildly overestimate the intelligence of their pets.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#13

Post by [deleted] »

endisneigh wrote: post #10
_huayra_ wrote: post #4

I 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…

[deleted]

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#14

Post by lostoldsession »

Part of me thinks one of the big reasons Google has held back so much is because of ethical concerns and/or just general fear of not having complete knowledge of how AI (incomplete to boot) will impact the world. We know that Google has some extremely powerful AI, but they never let it out of the lab. Just the most heavily neutered and clamped versions to help accentuate their existing products.

Now it seems that Open.AI/Microsoft are ready to jump in, caution to the wind. As you would expect the chance for a competitive advantage will always overwhelm external concerns.

We'll see what Google does. They might say "fuck it" and finally give us a chance to play with whatever their top tier AI is. Or maybe they'll discredit it and try and compete with their current (ad optimized) search product. We'll see, but I am definitely curious to see how Google responds to all this.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#15

Post by sergiotapia »

You can call it a con all you want but I have personally extracted a lot of value from ChatGPT. It _really_ made a difference in launching in a product in record time for me. It also taught me a bunch of things I would have otherwise never discovered.

But go on calling it a con because it failed your arbitrary line in the sand question.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#16

Post by karpierz »

williamcotton wrote: post #8
karpierz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah yeah, my mistake. I'd assumed that the GP was referring to the later work and echoing its core premise (language has no intrinsic meaning; or rather takes on meaning from context and intent).

As an aside to anyone reading, would highly recommend internalizing the Tractatus. It really helps side step a lot of "high minded" debates (ex: is X conscious, is it moral to do Y) by actually making you ground what you actually mean when you say "conscious", "moral", etc.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#17

Post by fnordpiglet »

I had a detailed conversion with chatGPT about how to gracefully handle terminating conditions of a rust program. It summarized cogently to register at_exit()’s for each thread, panic handlers, and register signal handlers. It advised and explain in detail on my query about the thread handling for each of these variants, gave really helpful advice on collecting join handles in a closure on the main thread and waiting for the child threads to exit their at_exit handlers since at_exit can’t guarantee when handlers will execute. It went into detail about cases the process won’t have the ability to clean up. I was able to ask it a lot of clarifying questions and it provided useful responses with clear coherent explanations that were salient and considered the full context of the discussion. I’m certain when I go to actually implement it it’ll have gotten so details wrong. But it provided about as clear explanation of process termination mechanics (for Unix) as I’ve seen articulated, and did so in a way that was directed by my questions not in a 300 page reference manual or random semi relevant questions in stackoverflow answered by partially right contributors.

If this is a con, then consider me a mark.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#18

Post by VBprogrammer »

karpierz wrote: post #9
_huayra_ wrote: post #4

I 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-fill…

I dunno, I recently learned about how the Toyota Synergy Drive system works in detail. Despite being the type of person who'd be interested in that kind of thing I thought it was not generally well understood, I've only come across one website which described it in detail.

I asked ChatGPT about it and it game me a fairly surface level answer. I then asked it for more details and it went into detail far beyond what the average person would be able to tell you. I thought that was quite impressive for a fairly obscure bit of mechanical engineering.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#19

Post by jchw »

endisneigh wrote: post #10
_huayra_ wrote: post #4

I 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…

That goes for pretty much any resource; there's a lot of botched or sub-optimal explanations of complex things out on the internet. But being able to have a conversation with someone who has a decent conceptual grasp on something is better than a perfect encyclopedic article alone, and ChatGPT is able to roughly do that for a lot of subjects.

As for how you know it's accurate, you don't really have to know it's accurate most of the time, because if you're using it to try to learn something new it's probably going to become apparent quickly enough. Nobody is reading something and then going "Welp, now I'm done learning."

As a software example, you can ask it about implementing the Fourier transform. If it says something wrong, you'll find out.

The question then becomes how often it is inaccurate and how badly. But in that regard, as long as you don't treat it as an all-knowing oracle, it's at least as useful as having a friend that knows a lot of stuff you want to learn.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#20

Post by [deleted] »

_huayra_ wrote: post #4

I 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…

[deleted]
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