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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

#421

Post by freejazz »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #409
freejazz wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might coincidentally be how a human brain behaves, but I made this same point upthread. It's misplaced to think that because we aren't sure exactly what happens when a human thinks, that thinking is what chatGPT does. One has nothing to do with the other.

Totally. I think I just feel like that similarity in behavior could encourage us to forgive its flaws as much as we forgive humans their flaws. In aggregate we clearly still produce value and GPT or similar probably does as well. I can’t trust GPT but I can’t trust my uncle or my in-laws or the media either. I know that’s not exactly precise or “correct” but I think that’s where we’re headed with AI, rich experiences…

But there is nothing similar about the behavior. You are jumping to the conclusion based upon an absence of evidence.

>I can’t trust GPT but I can’t trust my uncle or my in-laws or the media either.

So? I don't ask my uncle for legal advice, and he isn't owned by a company and is being offered for his legal advice?

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#422

Post by freejazz »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #393
MagicMoonlight wrote: post #127

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.

You’re just nitpicking. Everybody here knows that it isn’t intelligent. Words can mean more than one thing. And in this case the word “learn” is being used to describe what ChatGPT does to improve its answers over time. It’s perfectly reasonable to say that ChatGPT needs to lean to say “I don’t know”.

No, it's just anthropomorphizing.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#423

Post by jacobmischka »

stale2002 wrote: post #215
jacobmischka wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's a coinflip whether it's giving you correct information or something completely made up? And now you're not digging through the obscure manuals to actually verify? Seems objectively harmful.

Actually, that is extremely beneficial. For example, I now use GPT3 for every single code debugging problem that I have. I input the bug/problamatic code into the service, ask it for an answer, and then I take the code and see if it fixes my problem I was having. It doesn't work half the time, but thats fine. Then I just figure out the bug the normal way. But the other half the time, it immediately solves my problem,…

I sincerely hope you work on some random SaaS and not any software that actually matters, because this is how you get subtle dangerous bugs.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#424

Post by therealdrag0 »

freejazz wrote: post #421
therealdrag0 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally. I think I just feel like that similarity in behavior could encourage us to forgive its flaws as much as we forgive humans their flaws. In aggregate we clearly still produce value and GPT or similar probably does as well. I can’t trust GPT but I can’t trust my uncle or my in-laws or the media either. I know that’s not exactly precise or “correct” but I think that’s where we’re headed with AI, rich experiences…

But there is nothing similar about the behavior. You are jumping to the conclusion based upon an absence of evidence. >I can’t trust GPT but I can’t trust my uncle or my in-laws or the media either. So? I don't ask my uncle for legal advice, and he isn't owned by a company and is being offered for his legal advice?

How is there nothing similar about the behavior? The whole premise of this thread is that there are similarities. If you wanna get off that train now, then peace.

> So? I don't ask my uncle for legal advice, and he isn't owned by a company and is being offered for his legal advice?

So? You think there aren't plenty of human lawyers who offer questionable/flawed legal advice? I'm not saying it's not worthy of criticism for specific use-cases or output quality, but that's not really what this thread is about.

When building an email service we can expect godlike perfection. When building an AI, we cannot expect godlike perfection. What's interesting is the AI approaching behavior akin to living beings, whether that's animal, toddler, mentally disabled, or adult level intelligence/behavior. And it seems like we're headed in that direction at a rapid clip. Remember humans also confabulate: confidently fabricate memories and explanations post-hoc.

Also remember that some great minds have entertained the "Language of Thought hypothesis", long before computers, which takes language as the building blocks of thought, so is it really that surprising that people are drawing parallels between a machine that uses language as it's building blocks of behavior and human behavior?

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#425

Post by randomcarbloke »

qayxc wrote: post #275
Reptur wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, yesterday I just told it to write a Dockerfile for me, with exactly what I wanted. instead of changing anything by hand, I told it what to fix, without telling it how to. Took 20-30 follow-up messages, telling it to add things, remove things, fix things, make things compatible with the versions of software it was running etc. It worked. Running the container now, works great.

> Took 20-30 follow-up messages, telling it to add things, remove things, fix things, make things compatible with the versions of software it was running etc. So in other words you basically spent just as much time and effort as if you did it yourself?

So far this has been my experience developing with it, lightning fast but inaccurate results, then just as much time getting it to work as I would've spent writing it myself.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#426

Post by fnordpiglet »

biql wrote: post #413
fnordpiglet wrote: post #238

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…

For solo dev this is such a game changer. I found it difficult to work on solo projects in the past because there is no one to talk to who understands what I am doing. Now whenever I feel "stuck" I just write my thoughts to ChatGPT and it often helps me get ideas to unstack. Also, in the past I often procrastinated when I needed to code something that is obvious and hence boring. No longer the case, somehow it just f…

I actually also feel a lot less “lonely” in that I’m not alone in my confusion and frustration. I’m not taking chatgpt out to lunch or inviting it over for my daughters birthday but it does fill a void Siri and Alexa don’t on my solo work.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#427

Post by fnordpiglet »

undersuit wrote: post #412
Cardinal7167 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most mind blowing thing to me is how it’s responsive to feedback like this. It’s like pair programming with a junior. It might be faster for me to just type it myself, but it’s doing what I tell it and filling in a fair amount of blanks itself.

But is it responsive? If I gave ChatGPT the same 6502 prompt now that it's done it once would I also have to correct it about the addition as well?

It “remembers” the context of prior prompts so the answer is, in the same chat, “sometimes.” Other it doesn’t seem to bring enough weighting.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#428

Post by fnordpiglet »

ddalex wrote: post #414
huijzer wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know I'm really confused about how some people think it's so worthless. Maybe because either they believe that ChatGPT is worthless, or they have to deal with the fact that their knowledge is becoming worthless (or, at least, worth less).

I can tell you why I dislike ChatGPT, it's because it's not trustworthy. Somebody that is not well versed in the subject cannot distinguish the hallucinations of the machine, and for somebody that is well versed, they are better served by a rubber duck that doesn't lead them astray

Except there’s an entire thread of people saying it’s useful. No one is trusting it implicitly, but I work with a bunch of folks that are pretty good at what they do but aren’t infallible and I do have to verify a lot of what they do and say. I don’t dislike them for it, they’re human. Why when it’s a machine that’s largely accurate but sometimes hallucinates it’s a perceived failure, while these folks I work with keep getting promoted and praised for their sometimes untrustworthy work?

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#429

Post by fnordpiglet »

kilgnad wrote: post #382
busyant wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a lot of people haven't picked up on the fact that in both cases chatGPT actually understands what you are telling it. This is something that I haven't seen mentioned yet. The stunning aspect of ChatGPT is that it seems to understand* the nuances of what I'm asking. Yes, sometimes it spews bullshit, but the bullshit is still trying to address my questions, no matter how odd. * I suspect that "understand" ma…

> I suspect that "understand" may not be the correct word here, There's no other word for what's going on. The inputs and resulting outputs show something indistinguishable from understanding. If we choose to define "understanding" as some deeper internal process well that's a deadend because we don't even know the meaning of the term "understanding" from the context of the human brain. So more or less from the input…

I suspect the sensation of understanding is a biological response to a level of confidence in the evaluation of some neural process. To that extent it’s perception is illusory, and often occurs in the absence of what anyone who knows the subject would term a true understanding.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#430

Post by btown »

james-revisoai wrote: post #370
btown wrote: post #85

Are there any good AI models specifically designed for the "find all discrepancies/inconsistencies between X text and Y text" problem? It strikes me that this could solve quite a few of ChatGPT's shortcomings by providing an automatic fact-checker - let ChatGPT create statistically-probable articles, then extract claims, generate search queries likely to find online reference articles from reputable sources for those…

Sometimes, documents can disagree with themselves; like a document detailing somebodies relationship history. Embedding time and when things change or making facts contingent on this can sort of avoid this, but most people imply things like time or common sense and it becomes tricky. Nonetheless there are hundreds of startups working on citable GPT and other AI approaches right now, and others working on semantic emb…

Are there any standout efforts here in your view?
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