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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

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not intelligence. If I generated and printed every possible 300 page book and handed all of those books to you, you’d get a book about the American Revolution where Taylor Swift led the armies of the revolutionaries. That would not make my system intelligent. I haven’t written anything because I don’t know how to write. I’ve literally just got every possible book and you’ve been given one at random that seems…

Speaking of movie quotes. From Good Will Hunting "Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth"? You got that from Vickers' "Work in Essex County," page 98, right? Yeah, I read that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or do you, is that your thing, you come into a bar, read…

Also from good will hunting:

    So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel.
> It is difficult to describe the exact smell in the Sistine Chapel, but it is likely a combination of various scents, such as incense, stone, and the bodies of the many visitors. The air conditioning system helps to regulate temperature and maintain a comfortable environment, but it also helps to reduce unpleasant odors.

TIL the Sistine Chapel has an air conditioning system

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was actually literally thinking about that as I worked on my solo project. This is like a coworker I can ask questions of and bounce ideas off of. It actually gives some insightful ideas. I was working on a file rotation scheme and it suggested naming the files uuid_ _ with the intent that resolution conflicts won’t need to be walked very often if ever optimizing the common case of file.0, file.1, etc. This isn’t l…

I mean usually the coworker wouldn’t be hallucinating at work

Only the ones I’d be caught hanging out with would

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#374
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…

Seems far more likely to me that ChatGPT knows the meaning of specific idioms rather than knowing the cultural context of that number and using it in the translation.

Just to give additional context, the full passage I was trying to translate was a New Year's greeting as follows:

里祝愿在新的2023年风调雨顺, 四季平安, 五福临门, 六六大顺, 十全十美, 万事如意, 好运连绵, 兔年吉祥

This passage has some nuance and wordplay, due to the stylistic device of starting each of the key phrases with a character that can represent a number: 四 (four), 五 (five), 六 (six), 十 (ten) and 万 (ten thousand). These characters also have meaning as words within each phrase. For example, 十 can convey perfection, in addition to the numerical quantity.

So here is Google's lumbering and broken translation attempt:

"Wishing you good luck in the new year of 2023, safe all year, Five Blessings, Liuliu Dashun, perfect, May all go well with you, good luck Auspicious Year of the Rabbit"

Baidu does a better job (including handling the problematic 六六大顺 phrase:

"I wish the new year 2023 a good year, Four seasons are safe, Five blessings are at the door, Everything goes smoothly, perfect, Everything goes well, Good luck, Auspicious Year of the Rabbit"

Neither of these is as good as the result from ChatGPT:

"I wish you a smooth wind and rain in the new year of 2023, peaceful seasons, five blessings at your doorstep, everything going smoothly, perfection in all things, everything going according to your wishes, continuous good luck, and a lucky Year of the Rabbit"

ChatGPT is not perfect. I think the phrase 四季平安 is better translated as "four seasons of peace" (this one came from the translator from Korean company Naver).

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#375
I think we have to remember that ChatGPT is often a reflection of us, based its training.

If I Google for a particular answer and the answer I come across is wrong, then the person who wrote that was wrong and Google served me a website that was wrong. This is the world we live in, where it is up to me to decide what is right or wrong based on what is put in front of me.

If I use ChatGPT for a particular answer and the answer I come across is wrong, then the training of the GPT needs to be improved. What I can't do with ChatGPT is tell where the answer came from or the amount of confidence GPT has in its answer for me to make a more informed decision around whether there might be caveats.

I have used it and have had to edit almost everything its provided, but it has helped me be sometimes 80% more efficient at what I need to achieve.

In the end, people just need to be more aware of the fact that it is after all not a full proof product and may never be. It will have its shortcomings as it quite clearly displays on its website before you enter a query.

If you use it as gospel and it leads you down the wrong path, then you only have yourself to blame.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can’t learn because it isn’t intelligent. It’s a markov chain. There is no way for it to make any decision at all. The fundamental system design is that it guesses the word that is most likely to be next. That’s it. There’s no concepts behind whatever it outputs, it has no idea what it means.

It's a next-word predictor like a Markov chain, but a Markov chain couldn't do all the things ChatGPT does. ChatGPT has learned lots of syntax-level patterns pretty well.

Is it actually a next-word predictor? I thought the training loss is against a set of words, not just one.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same experience with it, it's very useful, especially when you are unsure about what to even look for. I have a few theories I suspect it's just a bias we have, most people aren't doing or creating anything, they aren't solving problems or learning new things constantly like engineers do, so chatgpt feels useless to them. Or perhaps the problems we want to talk or learn about are just easier for an ai to a…

> I suspect it's just a bias we have, most people aren't doing or creating anything, they aren't solving problems or learning new things constantly like engineers do, so chatgpt feels useless to them. > Or perhaps the problems we want to talk or learn about are just easier for an ai to answer than the things they want out of it I think the ABOVE two lines captures the real CORE of why they are two big groups of ChatG…

Probably more dependent on the quality required than the domain. GPT code to check into simple CRUD app X? Sure. GPT code to augment the Linux kernel? Maybe not.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#378
post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will it improve though? I’m not a GPT hater or denier, but how do you even predict that it hasn’t already hit the wall? They can increase parameter count x100 again, but correctness is not some knob they can just dial up to 10. What if a learning dataset simply has not enough info for a correct answer to have a greater weight than all the “con” noise? What if an answer requires a sort of reasoning inaccessible to LLM…

Isn't that what the thumbs up/down are for? Some kind of annotating that can be used to improve future iterations of training ? They've got millions of people feeding potentially billions of queries, probably tons of feedback - would this not result in an improvement over time?

Assuming that the existing corpus was already coherent with what experts find true (afaik, they used all available books and common knowledge resources), why would any amount of additional corrective statements make a difference for a retrained model? It’s not that our written knowledge was wrong all the time and we tolerated it until mid 2022.

I don’t really understand how it works, how its iterations are different or what the roadmap is. But what I managed to learn (better say feel) about LLMs isn’t very consistent with such linear predictions.

Well, maybe it will use downvotes as anti-prompts? Existing sources must have had votes too, but it was probably only a subset. Maybe the current iteration didn’t rank by vote at all, so the next one will really shine? Guess we’ll see soon.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite limited, in frequently making even basic mistakes, but when it works well, it displays real intelligence. It synthesizes new knowledge, as opposed to just retrieving it. When it works well, It's not just a magic trick.

That’s not intelligence. If I generated and printed every possible 300 page book and handed all of those books to you, you’d get a book about the American Revolution where Taylor Swift led the armies of the revolutionaries. That would not make my system intelligent. I haven’t written anything because I don’t know how to write. I’ve literally just got every possible book and you’ve been given one at random that seems…

This is not a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters randomly creating the works Shakespeapre scenario. The probability of that is so low that we would never encounter cogent and insightful responses.
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