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ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

tedgioia.substack.com

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Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#31

Post by raesene9 »

The way I've come to look at ChatGPT is via a D&D analogy.

It's like a helpful Bard with 1 rank in all the knowledge skills and a good bluff roll.

It'll give you good answers to a lot of basic queries, but if it doesn't know, it'll just make up something and provide that.

Once you know that, I think it can be a lot of use and in many way, I think it'll get a lot better with time.

I've already found it useful in basic programming tasks, specifically where I know how to do something in one language but not another, it can give me the equivalent code easily.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#32

Post by renewiltord »

All these articles really sound like “I used an apple to hammer in a screw and it sucked. This has to be the worst plant-based object ever made”. It’s a common junior engineer approach. “I broke our database by running DROP TABLE cows in the console”. Yeah, dude, that’s possible. Just don’t do that.

The point of tools isn’t to use them like Homer Simpson. But you know what, it doesn’t matter. Stay behind. Everyone else is going on ahead.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#35

Post by andrepd »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #18
karpierz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Well it's essentially a (good) search engine then, isn't it? Somebody somewhere wrote that description, and chatgpt understood your query and fetched it.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#37

Post by _nalply »

ResearchCode wrote: post #26
ajuc wrote: post #7

"Cars won't replace horses, because they require roads and horses don't."

Still waiting on those autonomous cars. Unlike many other software development tools, I've found ChatGPT to be useless so far.

Not even for satisfying your curiousity?

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#40

Post by williamcotton »

karpierz wrote: post #16
williamcotton wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actu…

In many ways LLMs are more in support of the Philosophical Investigations era understanding of language and less in support of the logical positivist understanding of language put forth my Frege...

Like, the Frege approach is like the symbolic AI approach... define the rules, derive the meaning from the rules.

The PI approach is like the LLM approach... derive the rules and meaning from "experiencing" the use of the language.

Eg, we don't need to define what a "game" is. We know when something is a game or not even if we can't come up with an explicit set of rules for defining all instances of what we would otherwise "feel" was a game.

I'm running low on blood sugar...

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