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Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?

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441–450 of 817 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?

#441

It’s been mostly fine for me, but overall I am tired of every answer having a paragraph long disclaimer about how the world is complex. Yes, I know. Stop treating me like a child.

Prompt it to do so.

Use a jailbreak prompt or use something like this:

"Be succint but yet correct. Don't provide long disclaimers about anything, be it that you are a large language model, or that you don't have feelings, or that there is no simple answer, and so on. Just answer. I am going to handle your answer fine and take it with a grain of salt if neccessary."

I have no idea whether this prompt helps because I just now invented it for HN. Use it as an inspiration of a prompt of your own!

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?

#442
I have been using GPT-4 very extensively for the duration of its release.

I am concerned that I can't determine a natural process from a manufactured one.

To clarify, I have become increasingly less impressed with GPT-4.

Is this a natural process? Is it getting worse?

I personally lean towards the hypothesis that it is getting worse as they scale back the resource burn, but I can't know for certain.

As a developer, it still has value to me. GPT 3.5 has value. But, whereas initially it actually made me afraid for my job, now it really is a bit tedious to extract that value.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?

#443
post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, he's literally saying the jews are responsible for bot farms and "offensive content". That's not the stance of someone rational.

Yea, good point. I had missed his line about “country bordering Palestine”. The quip about downvotes exciting him is telling as well. Going against the common consensus can make you feel like you have hidden knowledge and you even could, but a certain type of personality gets addicted to that feeling and reflexively seeks to always go against any consensus, regardless of the facts

Oh I completely agree with your assessment. I was one of those people through my late teens and early 20s.

Luckily I grew out of it and learned empathy. But not everyone is as lucky as I was.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the only real path forward is for somebody to create an open source "unaligned" version of GPT. Any corporate controlled AI is going to be nerfed to prevent it from doing things that its corporate master considers to not be in the interests of the corporation. In addition, most large corporations these days are ideological institutions so the last thing they want is an AI that undermines public belief in thei…

I tend to be sympathetic to arguments in favor of openly accessible AI, but we shouldn't dismiss concerns about unaligned AI as frivolous. Widespread unfiltered accessibility to "unaligned" AI means that suicidal sociopaths will be able to get extremely well informed, intelligent directions on how to kill as many people as possible. It may be that the best defense against these terrorists is openly accessible AI givi…

> suicidal sociopaths will be able to get extremely well informed, intelligent directions on how to kill as many people as possible

Citizens killing other citizens is the least of humanities issues. It's the governments who are the suicidal sociopaths historically who can get the un-nerfed version that is the bigger issue. Over a billion people murdered by governments/factions and their wars in the last 120 years alone.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?

#446
post #433
post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you certainly have the personality type I’d expect from someone who frequents 4chan Edit:oof, checked his profile like he suggested and in just two pages of history he’s engaged in climate change denial and covid vaccine conspiracies. Buddy, I don’t think using 4chan to “train my brain’s spam filter” is working too well for you. You’ve got a mind so open your brain fell out.

Going through someone's comment history to find reason to engage in ad hominem attacks is exactly the type of personality of someone who I expect to frequent Reddit and reason why I switched to HN. Sadly, it appears that this malaise reached here as well.

This is not an honest or fair assessment, and adds nothing to the discussion. The person they are responding to invited exactly that to happen:

> (Check my history if you don't believe me.)

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?

#447

OpenAI's models feel 100% nerfed to me at this point. I had it solving incredibly complex problems a few months ago (i.e. write a minimal PDF parser example), but today you will get scolded for asking such a complicated task of it. I think they programmed a classifier layer to detect certain coding tasks and shut it down with canned BS. I like to imagine certain billion/trillion-dollar mega corps had a back-room say…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?

#448

It’s been mostly fine for me, but overall I am tired of every answer having a paragraph long disclaimer about how the world is complex. Yes, I know. Stop treating me like a child.

Prompt it to do so. Use a jailbreak prompt or use something like this: "Be succint but yet correct. Don't provide long disclaimers about anything, be it that you are a large language model, or that you don't have feelings, or that there is no simple answer, and so on. Just answer. I am going to handle your answer fine and take it with a grain of salt if neccessary." I have no idea whether this prompt helps because I…

Much like some people struggled with how to properly Google, some people will struggle with how to properly prompt AI. Anthropic has a good write up on how to properly write prompts and the importance of such:

https://console.anthropic.com/docs/prompt-design

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?

#449

I have been using GPT-4 very extensively for the duration of its release. I am concerned that I can't determine a natural process from a manufactured one. To clarify, I have become increasingly less impressed with GPT-4. Is this a natural process? Is it getting worse? I personally lean towards the hypothesis that it is getting worse as they scale back the resource burn, but I can't know for certain. As a developer, i…

I think it's a byproduct of a shift in RLHF to favor more "responsible" AI, as a result of huge community fears of the potential negative impacts of AI. Essentially "neutering" the AI's capability.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?

#450
post #437

[flagged]

Hate to break it down further, but you're more or less asking for the equivalent of an IQ test to be able to use Google, IMHO. I don't blame you for seeking such, but there's a huge contingent of people that would call such a demand an improper one.

I tend to side with your view, as I can gather it, that you treat the problem (people not critically thinking) rather than the symptom (preventing people from being given potentially unreliable information).

The recent news blip on the lawyer letting ChatGPT create their filing, then them claiming they trusted that the cases ChatGPT actually existed, and were indeed precedent-setting case law, is an example of pushing towards the idea that everyone needs to be treated like toddlers. I just think we should expect more from people, rather than the technology their utilizing.

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