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We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

simonwillison.net

411–420 of 485 posts

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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To clear this up, because open Holocaust denial is never OK: Thousands of jews were indeed murdered at Babi Yar, you can find their names online [0]. Paul Blobel [1] was executed at Nuremberg for this. No serious source disputes the killing of jews at Babi Yar, be it the US, Germany (where this matter went to court), Israel, Ukraine, or Russia. 0: https://yvng.yadvashem.org/index.html?language=en&s_id=&s_la... 1: htt…

I couldn't find any connection between the names on the list and the people who lived in Kiev during the war.

Prior to the war, there were 224,000 Jews living in Kiev, and approximately 200,000 were evacuated to the east. Around 40,000 Jews remained, including my grandmother. This is a relatively small number of people that can be verified.

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pre-Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, the Butlerian Jihad came about because people became lazy under AI, lazy of mind, and were eventually enslaved by those who controlled the AI. Oh I love this, basically Wall-E is a better Dune than the latest books? Genius! Anyway, I read Dune many years ago and don't remember this, is this explained in the novels or is it coming from some other sources?

It's not fully fleshed out in the novels, so you have to piece it out from various mentions and their implications. The two most informative descriptions, IMO, are from Dune: "Then came the Butlerian Jihad — two generations of chaos. The god of machine-logic was overthrown among the masses and a new concept was raised: “Man may not be replaced.”" and from God-Emperor: "The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude a…

There's nothing in those quotes about humans being enslaved by AI.

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than getting extincted, I suppose.

Oh man, I am going to be a huge nerd now. Pre-Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, the Butlerian Jihad came about because people became lazy under AI, lazy of mind , and were eventually enslaved by those who controlled the AI. Not much more was said about it. One could have, yes, militant robots, Exterminate! Exterminate! out of it, or you could posit a more Huxley-like dystopia, one of convenience. Control the AI, cont…

As someone who read "Dune" several decades ago and doesn't remember much, this is very interesting and almost makes me want to read it again (though I'm afraid of yet another time sink – I'm now after 2 volumes of "The Stormlight Archive"...).

But _my_ inner geek must nitpick here and mention that the Daleks are not robots, but living creatures in metal cases. Though they do have some kind of computer-augmented memory IIRC.

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#414
post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have to pick either masculine or feminine gender. There's no other option.

Ancestor asked: > I wonder if ChatGPT is non-binary? You answered: > Nope - it speaks as a man would speak in my language. If they have to pick either masculine or feminine language even if they are non-binary, I don't understand how based on the language you can tell they are not non-binary.

I think the ancestor was making a computer joke about ChatGPT being non-binary

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#415
post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot smart people seem to be saying that the existing approaches have room to improve simply by training with more data. There’re also many “smart people” saying that simply having more data doesn’t turn a machine that can’t reason into one that can.

"simply having more data doesn’t turn a machine that can’t reason into one that can" But that's exactly what's been happening. LLM's are a triumph of "big data" used by dumb algorithms to create a reasoning machine.

A reasoning machine that can't reason, makes up fake evidence and doesn't follow simple logic.

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#416
post #21
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no! Sounds like there are two misconceptions there: the idea that ChatGPT can read URLs (it can't - https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/10/chatgpt-internet-acces... ) and the idea that ChatGPT can remember details of conversations past the boundaries of the current chat. This is something I've noticed too: occasionally I'll find someone who is INCREDIBLY resistant to learning that ChatGPT can't read URLs. It seems…

They definitely need to add some guardrails to warn it can’t read URLs like they do when you try to ask anything fun.

What is the point? In a couple of months the plugins will be generally available and then it will be able to.

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not fully fleshed out in the novels, so you have to piece it out from various mentions and their implications. The two most informative descriptions, IMO, are from Dune: "Then came the Butlerian Jihad — two generations of chaos. The god of machine-logic was overthrown among the masses and a new concept was raised: “Man may not be replaced.”" and from God-Emperor: "The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude a…

There's nothing in those quotes about humans being enslaved by AI.

OP's original claim was "enslaved by those who controlled the AI", which is rather different.

But, yes, I don't think that the books imply literal enslavement either way. It could be described as "enslavement of the mind" in a sense of humans themselves adopting the "machine-logic" and falling prey to it.

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ancestor asked: > I wonder if ChatGPT is non-binary? You answered: > Nope - it speaks as a man would speak in my language. If they have to pick either masculine or feminine language even if they are non-binary, I don't understand how based on the language you can tell they are not non-binary.

I think the ancestor was making a computer joke about ChatGPT being non-binary

I suppose it's funny if asking an honest question is a joke.

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#419

I’ve spent way too much time (and money) on the OpenAI API and spoken to enough non-technical people to realize now that ChatGPT has in some ways really mislead people about the technology. That is, while it’s impressive it can answer cold questions at all, the groundbreaking results are reasoning and transforming texts “in context”, which you don’t have control over easily with ChatGPT. It also seems likely this wil…

Prices will come down quite significantly as competition increases. Currently OpenAI can charge any prices

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#420
post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an example of the dangers gpt poses today. Not sure where you got the impression these are family anecdotes

I don’t think the post above makes a good point because there’s no links to evidence. They talk about “declassified archives”, “US spy plane”. Like, what is that? Saying “Russian lies” 10 times in every paragraph doesn’t turn a rant into compelling argument. I mean, I get it, the poster above is Ukrainian and wants to turn every discussion in a certain direction. It’s just there’re many places on the internet they ca…

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