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How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

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Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#41

Post by AstralStorm »

autokad wrote: post #32

I remember I was working on a game where you fly a ship and shoot alien ships. I didnt have a lot of experience at the time so I just made the ships move in one direction and eventually take a random turn, but if you got within a distance they moved away from you, but if you got too close they would kamikaze toward you. but I needed to figure out when to shoot, so I just decided that they would randomly shoot when yo…

Good old-fashioned script. That's how RTS tend to run since general AI tend to get lost in the sea of options available.

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#42

Post by anon291 »

I've been looking at using llms to extract as structured information from structured but human written documents (local municipal codes). Unfortunately the models need a lot of handholding to do this without hallucinating or making generic statements.

They produce output that looks correct and that's an accomplishment on its own. Unfortunately the output often has little bearing on the reality presented to it.

Realistically... They need to evolve much more. As an experiment I paid people on fiver to do the exact same thing with the same prompt and they get it right. These are not Americans so the norms of American municipalities are new to them.

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#43

Post by cj »

Timpy wrote: post #39
rcme wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same experience. I think the transformer-based models are impressive, but whenever I try to actually use them for something, e.g. having ChatGPT write something or using GitHub Copilot, the results I get are terrible. I was legitimately afraid for my job when GPT-4 was released. After using it, however, I sleep easy now.

I had the same experience, I was worried and now that I've used the tools I sleep easier. But I still worry that these tools will improve dramatically and quickly. Somebody tell me I don't have to worry, please.

If an analogy helps, I think the current AI craze will lead to some obvious and permanent changes to how the world works in a way that’s very similar to the self-driving Tesla hype over the past 5+ years.

Things like ChatGPT might get 90% of the way there very, very quickly for many use cases (similar to how lane keeping and adaptive cruise control is 90% of “self-driving”) but the remaining 10% of edge cases will require humans for a very long time (similar to how we never quite managed to get “100% self driving” because the vehicles still can’t respond reliably 100% of the time). But we still value it because the 90% works.

Once people understand that 10% limitation and once the 90% value has been gained/normalized/integrated, the hype will die down and we’ll be watching a slow grind to figure out how to “fix” the last 10% which is necessary to live up to what’s being hyped today.

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#45

Post by isaacg »

autokad wrote: post #32

I remember I was working on a game where you fly a ship and shoot alien ships. I didnt have a lot of experience at the time so I just made the ships move in one direction and eventually take a random turn, but if you got within a distance they moved away from you, but if you got too close they would kamikaze toward you. but I needed to figure out when to shoot, so I just decided that they would randomly shoot when yo…

By the way, the word is "beeline", not "b-line". It originally was a reference to bees traveling back to their hive. Sorry to be pedantic.

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#46

Post by marcusverus »

scott_w wrote: post #19
Filligree wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goalposts are moving so fast they're red-shifting.

That’s not really an issue when we’re talking about AI. I said in a separate comment on the topic: intelligence is such a complicated thing that we seem to only be able to define it by pointing to things and saying “that’s not it.” If we didn’t move the goalposts, we’d have declared Stockfish to be full AI, despite it only being a chess-playing program, long ago.

We agreed on a definition of artificial intelligence--the Turing test--for 50 years. The goalpost was clearly established, widely agreed upon, and promptly abandoned when chatbots blew past it.

I'm convinced that when the dust has settled and historians look back to decide on THE point in time at which we achieved AI or even AGI, that time will not be in the future, but in the past.

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#47

Post by flangola7 »

choeger wrote: post #13
fourseventy wrote: post #5

The Forer Effect can't make chatGPT generate syntactically correct and functional code snippets that I use every day at work.

Let me make this very clear: Generating syntactically correct code in various languages that also looks plausible is no small feat. It is, in fact, extremely impressive and will certainly have an impact on SE. But. Every single test I ran lead to functionally wrong designs from smallish memory errors in C (that hilariously ChatGPT was able to correct ND explain when pointed to) over misplaced/hallucinated methods in…

If it can correct itself when promoted to do so, there should just be a loop made that automatically does that. You can't get all of GPT's abilities from a single passthrough. Humans are also not very capable without iterative reflective processing.

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#48

Post by mooxie »

greiskul wrote: post #34
thefreeman wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter point that literally just bit me this morning. ChatGPT completely lied to me about the scaling properties of Kinesis. I was confused about the 1000 write / second but only 5 read / second throughput of a kinesis shard and was asking it a number of questions, including specifically if a batch read would count as only a single read operation. It explicitly told me that each record in the batch counted as an ind…

Yes, please. Do not use LLMs as a substitute for Google search. If you are looking for factual information, just use google, bing, or duckduckgo. You should only use ChatGPT for things that you are able to review it's work. Technology is supposed to make us smarter. Blindly believing an AI that we know can hallucinate makes us dumb with confidence.

> You should only use ChatGPT for things that you are able to review it's work.

This keeps being my argument when people at work daydream about time and cost savings by offloading non-critical business functions to AI. I say, "Great, so it can produce 1000x more work than a person. But then what army of people are we planning to use to check those outputs?"

I'm super-impressed with the current crop of language models for their ability to so accurately simulate correctness, but their inability to understand what they don't know - because, in fact, they don't 'know' any of it in the sense that we do - makes them like very productive but completely untrustworthy employees. A junior dev who monopolizes his mentor's time through inconsistent performance is not a good hire.

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#49

Post by rco8786 »

choeger wrote: post #13
fourseventy wrote: post #5

The Forer Effect can't make chatGPT generate syntactically correct and functional code snippets that I use every day at work.

Let me make this very clear: Generating syntactically correct code in various languages that also looks plausible is no small feat. It is, in fact, extremely impressive and will certainly have an impact on SE. But. Every single test I ran lead to functionally wrong designs from smallish memory errors in C (that hilariously ChatGPT was able to correct ND explain when pointed to) over misplaced/hallucinated methods in…

As a counterpoint, I am absolutely horrible at writing Bash but I used ChatGPT to write a fairly complex (~50 lines, multiple functions) script in Bash that works just dandy. It wasn't perfect, and I made a couple adjustments, but it was 100x faster than what I could have done without it.

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#50

Post by ftxbro »

This isn't it. Look at Figure 4 in https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08774 those test results aren't like reading your horoscope and thinking hmmm that does sound like me and they aren't like philip k dick using chatgpt recreationally and thinking that it's valis talking to him directly
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