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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

#241

Post by darkwraithcov »

I’m envisioning a bifurcation of reality where some people live in an entirely fact based world (or as close an approximation to fact based as a human can objectively reach, aka the observable, knowable universe) and some live in a complete fabrication, a fantasy version carefully crafted by AIs. Now add Augmented Reality to the mix, and it’s a dystopian nightmare.

And I don’t think the US political left will be immune to it as much as they may think. While I agree that older Americans on the right are highly susceptible to misinformation, and media literacy is dismal among that demographic, younger people are also prone to it. Just look at all the unhinged utter nonsense that is wildly popular on TikTok.

The ability of ML models to authoritatively spout bullshit will make gish gallops worse than they are now. It will also make echo chambers even worse, as digital alternate realities will further divide people. I mean, who wants to engage with those who completely rejects that the sky is objectively blue, or that 2 + 2 = 4? Well now they’ll have articulate, authoritative responses with works cited explaining why the sky is red, actually.

Who needs Big Brother when people choose the method of their own subjugation eagerly and with dessert?

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#242

Post by joenot443 »

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…

If you can think of a single individual who can demonstrate knowledge on the fly with the same accuracy and breadth as ChatGPT, I think most of us would agree in calling them “incredibly smart.”

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#243

Post by naniwaduni »

autokad wrote: post #217
rayval wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was surprised to find ChatGPT does a better job of translating than Google translate, at least for one difficult task I needed to get done. I have been a Google Translate user for more than a decade. I use it a dozen or more times a day for multiple languages. It is a very useful tool. I recently had to translate a passage that included this phrase: 六六大顺 Google Translate gave me: Liuliu Dashun (basically no transla…

> It turns out that the number 6 is a lucky number in Chinese. It has the meaning of being “auspicious”. isn't that number 8? (not number 6)

Cultures can have multiple lucky numbers!

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#244

Post by unethical_ban »

Does anyone else have issue with having to provide a phone number to access it?

I signed up, verified email, and then was told I needed to verify with phone. This means, to me, (lest I read their TOS) that they are associating any queries I make with my identity.

I can't wait for this tech to go open source and local on devices.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#245

Post by speed_spread »

pdonis wrote: post #78
_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. No. You've fallen for exactly the con the article is describing. ChatGPT knows nothing . It is very good at generating text that seems plausible if you know nothing about the subject matter, but is not reliable as an actual source of information . If you happened t…

There's lots of real knowledge encoded in ChatGPT and it can recombine and regurgitate it in enough ways that I'd be okay saying that it knows stuff. The real problem is that it doesn't know its limits and will make shit up instead of saying "I don't know". How to reliably detect and enforce these limits probably requires a completely different approach to AI.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#246

Post by joe_the_user »

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…

Yeah, I think making a decent, nuanced analysis of ChatGPT and related systems (which the gp starts trying to do) requires one to avoid terms like smart/intelligent/etc. The term intelligence is naturally not fully defined and primarily used by humans to rank each other. So our human intuition about intelligence comes from the ranking we do of people. IE, we have the intuition that "if they can do X, they can easily do Y" about a given person and such an intuition clearly shouldn't carry over to even a very complex machine.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#247

Post by danjoredd »

_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…

My problem is the type of person that proudly proclaims that all jobs can, should, and are going to be outdated by the use of AI. I have talked to people that believe that, and think that AI need to replace humanity for some reason. I don't understand them.

AI is exciting, and it can be an useful tool. There are a lot of use cases for it, and in the end I think it will be a good thing. However, what's worse than the detractors are the people blindly hoping that AI will automate every single thing a human touches. It shouldn't be used in that way. It has to be a tool to assist humans, not take away our professions and reasons to get out of bed in the morning.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#248

Post by mrtranscendence »

Throwaway78389 wrote: post #128
pdonis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is basically like having an incredibly smart engineer/scientists/philosopher/etc that can explain things quite well, but for pretty much every field. No. You've fallen for exactly the con the article is describing. ChatGPT knows nothing . It is very good at generating text that seems plausible if you know nothing about the subject matter, but is not reliable as an actual source of information . If you happened t…

How many hours you spent trying ChatGPT out? I spent at least high tens, maybe even hundreds. You're absolutely wrong. Yes, it hallucinates, yes its wrong about obscure topics - but calling having success with it luck is absolutely wrong. It's very consistently good. Especially about things like programming, physics, math - and now I'm using it as my teaching assistant for my pilot training, it's perfect (and I can v…

> Especially about things like programming, physics, math

I routinely find ChatGPT giving me completely made-up APIs and incorrect explanations when it come to programming. And I haven't found it much better with math. Sorry, I don't buy it. Maybe it's good at training pilots, and if so great, but it's wrong enough for me that it's hard to trust in general.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#249

Post by damiankennedy »

bastardoperator wrote: post #107

I found 10 tweets to backup my anecdotal argument but it gave me enough confidence to rant about chatgpt. If twitter is your source of data, how are you doing anything different from chatgpt? All I'm getting from this piece is that this person has a fundamental misunderstanding of why people are finding chatgpt useful.

I agree. Its like Jay Leno asking kids geography questions and televising 5 wrong answers.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#250

Post by hansvm »

naniwaduni wrote: post #239
hansvm wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're able to validate the results though (so they logically fit together, or with that newfound vocabulary and pseudounderstanding can you search for that information elsewhere), is that really such a bad thing? I've been doing exactly that to quickly ramp up on some new numerical algorithms I previously didn't know existed.

That's a really big if.

Why? It's the same standard you need to apply to anything else.
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