471–480 of 485 posts
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Book 4, Sonia's vision with Leto strongly implies that the problem is the machines. Agreed that the endings done by others were incredibly bad.
It describes humans hiding from "seeker machines", which does indeed imply some kind of AI. But whether that AI is the enemy or merely one of its tools is left unclear.
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>>How is this not “paternalistic”? I see three categories of handling this issue, perhaps call them "Paternalistic", "Responsible", and "Anti-Social". - Paternalistic would be like: "We assess [thing] to be dangerous in a number of ways and so we forbid you to use [thing], except by using our high priesthood representatives as intermediaries". - Responsible would be like: We assess [thing] to be dangerous in a number…
Interesting. Thank you for the detailed response. Paternalistic is indeed not the right term and it’s nice to worry about your fellow humans to this degree. I guess I am anti-social. But I disagree on the premise that this is comparable to a dangerous boobytrap. It’s not completely without danger of course, but that’s a property it shares with kitchen utensils, cars, scissors, religious texts.. Are we going to prefac…
Outstanding idea!!
>>warnings like that are cheap ways to evade liability and do not actually solve the issue which is people being stupid.
Yes, the all-too-common generic disclaimers and warnings to cover asses for liability are usually so broad and vague as to be useless. And generally with ordinary well-tested consumer products, the problem is user stupidity.
However, I think this is different - it is an entirely new level of tech that has never before been seen by anyone, it can be amazingly useful if used with a good skeptical eye, but also truly dangerous if it is trusted too much. And you've seen the level of anthropomorphization that happens here on HN, so there is a real psychological tendency to trust it too much. So, I'd say tell 'em.
Anyway, fun conversation, hope you're having a great weekend!
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If you expect ChatGPT to give you information or direct you to it (like Wikipedia or Google) you will be frequently disappointed. You may also be frequently pleased, but you often won’t be sure which and that’s a problem. ChatGPT is very good at transforming information. You need to show up with stuff and then have it change that stuff for you somehow. You will be disappointed less often.
It has been surprisingly terrible at this for me, lately. I had a pretty simple list, which was a list of monthly expenses in a separate list, like this. Groceries - 200 Phone bill - 70 I just wanted it to add these expenses up. Exactly the type of thing it should be good at. New conversation with no context. It could not do it. I wrestled with it for a long time. It kept "correcting" itself to another wrong answer.…
What’s similar that it would be good at is extracting what you bought and turn it into a list and formula.
[Me] Extract the list of things that I bought and their prices. Write a shell command to figure out how much I spent.
I spent 200 on groceries and paid my 70 phone bill. I was going to buy three pairs of pants that were $40 each. I didn’t like the colors. I bought a t shirt for thirty. And I did end up buying one pair of pants. But it was 5 dollars more than those other ones. And I bought bag of tea for every day next year, they were a quarter each.
[ChatGPT] List of things bought and their prices:
Groceries: $200
Phone bill: $70
T-shirt: $30
One pair of pants: $45
Bag of tea: $0.25
To figure out how much was spent, you can use the following shell command:
echo $((200 + 70 + 30 + 45 + 365*0.25))
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Interesting. Thank you for the detailed response. Paternalistic is indeed not the right term and it’s nice to worry about your fellow humans to this degree. I guess I am anti-social. But I disagree on the premise that this is comparable to a dangerous boobytrap. It’s not completely without danger of course, but that’s a property it shares with kitchen utensils, cars, scissors, religious texts.. Are we going to prefac…
>>Are we going to preface the Bible with this kind of warnings too? I’m all for it, but be consistent. Outstanding idea!! >>warnings like that are cheap ways to evade liability and do not actually solve the issue which is people being stupid. Yes, the all-too-common generic disclaimers and warnings to cover asses for liability are usually so broad and vague as to be useless. And generally with ordinary well-tested co…
Now I think of it, it’s like conversing with an expert salesman or politician. Very tiring as they are skilled in framing the conversation. You have to double check every word.
How cool would it be if a politician would have an overlay on TV saying not to trust what he/she says plus some real-time fact checking. Fun times.
I hope you’re enjoying the weekend too, have a good one!
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
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> You can use that definition, but it is not how the word "lie" is commonly used. The problem is that any word that ascribes agency to the LLM will technically be incorrect. But that removes most possible descriptions of its tone and style which are a relevant part of its response. An analogy would be if ChatGPT started insulting me and calling my question stupid. Would it be wrong to call its response "rude" or "mea…
There are plenty of people who cannot admit they don’t know something and will just spout bullshit. We call them “bullshitters”, not “liars.” It’s important because of motive. A lie is told with intent to conceal a known truth. It’s not just LLM agency that’s in question, it’s human malice. Co-opting the term “lie” is a rhetorical tool used to shift the conversation from “this person/LLM is saying things that aren’t…
> It’s important because of motive. A lie is told with intent to conceal a known truth. It’s not just LLM agency that’s in question, it’s human malice.
That is not a distinction that matters to me with humans or AI. "Bullshitting" is just a specific form of lying. "Lying" doesn't imply malice to me. But a lack of malice is fairly irrelevant: mostly when people say they didn't intend any harm by lying, it's true, but it's just a way to minimize the fact that they lied. Intent is not as important as you seem to think it is: intent has little to do with how much harm is caused by a lie.
Intent is particularly irrelevant with AI, because AI doesn't have intent. Contrary to your statement, LLM agency isn't in question: we know AI does not have agency.
> Co-opting the term “lie” is a rhetorical tool used to shift the conversation from “this person/LLM is saying things that aren’t true” to “this person/LLM is acting maliciously and needs to be punished/sanctioned”
That's a pretty big leap. I'm not saying that AI should be punished or sanctioned. In fact, I'm not even sure what it would mean to "punish" something that can't experience suffering. What I want isn't to punish/sanction AI, what I want is for people to not trust AI.
simonw’s linguistic argument seems to be “i’m right and i’m not gonna listen to you lalalalalala”. throwing a strawman paragraph comparison to a 5 word phrase doesn’t bolster his argument at all. You could just say “ChatGPT gets things wrong” instead of “ChatGPT will lie to you!” without the yelling and anthropomorphizing
I used a strawman paragraph deliberately as a rhetorical device: that's what strawman paragraphs are for.
A “lie” is a deliberate falsehood and not the product of a wrong belief, delusion, etc. Normally ChatGPT “makes stuff up” that is sometimes right and sometimes wrong and you can’t say it “lies” when it is just wrong. If you instruct it to lie and it does, maybe that really is a lie.