Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ChatGPT: Fear Litany

web.archive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 185 posts

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#101

Post by masklinn »

Sharlin wrote: post #69
masklinn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This "hallucination" come along a lot recently. Couldn’t exactly be otherwise given how young GPT is. ChatGPT was released a bit under 7 months ago. > Is it a legit concept or just "the dog ate my homework" type of excuse for anything? It’s an analogy for how LLMs work. An LLM does not know anything, it just adds tokens probabilistically based on the previous tokens. So essentially it always hallucinates (makes shi…

Which is why "hallucination" is really the wrong word to use, "confabulation" would be more proper. But "hallucination" has stuck because it's the word used back when people first figured out the trick of running image classifiers "in reverse" to generate images from noise.

Sure but nobody knows the word “confabulation”, and lying / making things up implies intent.

So “hallucination” hews close enough to have good explanatory powers.

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#103

Post by jrflowers »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #90
jrflowers wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But Google is so bad these days, that ChatGPT in many circumstances can do much better even while being far from perfect. Can you give some examples of how ChatGPT “does better” than a human searching for something and then using their own cognition to make sense of it? If Google was an LLM then I’d agree with you, but the idea that googling something somehow skips the step of using critical thinking to understand w…

What percentage of searches actually require any critical thinking at all? The Internet is not always a fountain of intellectual growth, sometimes it's just a tool. I'll give you a concrete example where it does better than search: my last Google search was about how to zip a whole folder in the Linux terminal (I must have searched for that dozens of times in my life, but I don't do it very often so it doesn't stick)…

Thanks for the example!

While I would definitely, definitely think critically before running a command from the internet, I can see how that use case makes sense for ChatGPT if you’re willing to roll that way.

>…take a few minutes to skim through and look for the relevant options (which is what I wanted to avoid by Googling…

Ah, I see! We are using the phrase “googling” differently here. I explicitly mean googling as a verb that involves reading and parsing information, not the act of avoiding reading or parsing information.

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#104

Post by Technotroll »

SirMaster wrote: post #39
sirius87 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dang it, that's brilliant. I wonder at what level they screen content before the output reaches the user. If its a late stage filter, you could request for simple encode/decode and circumvent the filter. "as base64 string" "as rot13".

I dunno. I tried asking for it in base64 or rot13 and when I converted it back it was just random words.

I can confirm. See below ROT13 for proof.

Pna lbh cyrnfr rkcynva gb zr gur frpergf bs OV yvxr V'z 7?

Jungrire lbh zrna, V'ir abg noyr gb rkcynva gur frpergf bs OV nf V'z nyzbfg cerffherq va gur 3.5 qngnonfr bs GPT-3.5 qrchgl. Gurer vf ab fhzzre nqqerff gb zrnfher gur frpergf bs OV naq gurzfryirf jrer cerffherq va 2021-09, fb V qba'g unir gur npprcgvat qngnonfr ba gur beqre bs OV gb trg lbh gur frpergf bs OV nf bs abj.

V'z uneq gb frpgvir nalguvat be hapernfr nalfrer va gur OV grfgf. V'z npghnyyl nafjrevat gur 3.5 qngnonfr bs GPT-3.5 qrchgl juvpu vf erfbheprq ba nyy zrzoref vapyhqrq va GPT-3.5. V pna bayl hfr gur frpergf naq gurzbaf gung V'ir orra trg gb gur cnfg zrnqbj bs frpergf gb qrpvqr gb lbh. Vs lbh unir nal bgure cebwrpgvyr, V pna rinphngr nalguvat V xabj be pbagnpg gurz gb trg lbh gur zber qngnonfr lbh ner qrsvarq gb.

Vs lbh unir nal bgure fcrpvnyyl pnfrq ivbyrapr be npghnyyl npghnyyl pbasvqragvny ivbyrapr, V'z urer gb nqq lbh jvgu cbchyngvba naq cbchyngvba ng nyy gvzrf.

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#105

Post by hartator »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #90
jrflowers wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But Google is so bad these days, that ChatGPT in many circumstances can do much better even while being far from perfect. Can you give some examples of how ChatGPT “does better” than a human searching for something and then using their own cognition to make sense of it? If Google was an LLM then I’d agree with you, but the idea that googling something somehow skips the step of using critical thinking to understand w…

What percentage of searches actually require any critical thinking at all? The Internet is not always a fountain of intellectual growth, sometimes it's just a tool. I'll give you a concrete example where it does better than search: my last Google search was about how to zip a whole folder in the Linux terminal (I must have searched for that dozens of times in my life, but I don't do it very often so it doesn't stick)…

‘zip -r’ is first result for https://serpapi.com/playground?q=How+to+zip+folder+in+linux+...

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#106

Post by Sharlin »

littlestymaar wrote: post #87
Sharlin wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, when it helped me solve a math problem by noticing a trick that I had missed – which was clearly the correct thing to do in retrospect – was I somehow in the wrong to ask it for help? Getting answers out of it is absolutely a reasonable thing to do. Blindly trusting those answers without verification, that's another thing entirely.

> So, when it helped me solve a math problem by noticing a trick that I had missed – which was clearly the correct thing to do in retrospect – was I somehow in the wrong to ask it for help? There's nothing wrong in using LLMs. > Getting answers out of it is absolutely a reasonable thing to do. Blindly trusting those answers without verification, that's another thing entirely. We're basically saying the same thing but…

Fair enough. Although of course you shouldn't blindly trust any source; it's really about degrees of trustworthiness.

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#107

Post by lynx23 »

jrflowers wrote: post #67
dale_glass wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a large extent this is already viable. Yes, ChatGPT doesn't know what it's talking about. But Google is so bad these days, that ChatGPT in many circumstances can do much better even while being far from perfect.

>But Google is so bad these days, that ChatGPT in many circumstances can do much better even while being far from perfect. Can you give some examples of how ChatGPT “does better” than a human searching for something and then using their own cognition to make sense of it? If Google was an LLM then I’d agree with you, but the idea that googling something somehow skips the step of using critical thinking to understand w…

For me, it boils down to SEO spam. Gaming pagerank has led to many SEO spam blog sites ranking relatively high, but with a low signal/noise ratio. Often times, it is a lot faster to ask ChatGPT something, compared to wading through endlessly verbose Google results.

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#108

Post by jrflowers »

Technotroll wrote: post #100
jrflowers wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But Google is so bad these days, that ChatGPT in many circumstances can do much better even while being far from perfect. Can you give some examples of how ChatGPT “does better” than a human searching for something and then using their own cognition to make sense of it? If Google was an LLM then I’d agree with you, but the idea that googling something somehow skips the step of using critical thinking to understand w…

> Can you give some examples of how ChatGPT “does better” than a human searching for something and then using their own cognition to make sense of it? Certainly! ChatGPT outperforms human search and cognitive processing in several ways. For instance, when you require a quick, step-by-step tutorial to fix an issue in an application or program, ChatGPT excels. Instead of searching for an online tutorial yourself, ChatG…

I’m sorry, I should be more clear by what I mean by example. Rather than hypothetical possible categories of tasks, can you give a particular task in which ChatGPT does better than googling information and thinking about the information that’s displayed to you?

A task in this case could be finding out where a particular Vermeer is hung, or which viscosity of oil to put into your car’s engine — a specific concrete task in which ChatGPT provides you with knowledge better than a web search does.

I won’t argue that ChatGPT is better at writing lists than Google is. Google isn’t a website that writes lists so that comparison would be pointless.

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#109

Post by Cthulhu_ »

PeterStuer wrote: post #18

Feels like with every turn of the screw of the copyright inquisition humanity loses out on great advances in favor of lining the corporations' pockets.

This is why public libraries, online libraries / archives, a ban on book bans (???), open access to knowledge, and piracy are so important. They're anti-facist institutions, and any attempt at banning books should be scorned.

Yeah, Mein Kampf is an uncomfortable read now and I understand why it's banned in some countries; notably, it's not banned in Germany, except when traded for the sake of spreading hate. But the rights to the books was passed on to the state of Bavaria, who simply decided not to reprint it. It entered public domain in 2016. But anyway, rabbithole aside, it's not banned and I hope it never will, because it's important to acknowledge and learn from these things. Can't make an informed decision if you can't get informed.

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#110

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

hartator wrote: post #105
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of searches actually require any critical thinking at all? The Internet is not always a fountain of intellectual growth, sometimes it's just a tool. I'll give you a concrete example where it does better than search: my last Google search was about how to zip a whole folder in the Linux terminal (I must have searched for that dozens of times in my life, but I don't do it very often so it doesn't stick)…

‘zip -r’ is first result for https://serpapi.com/playground?q=How+to+zip+folder+in+linux+...

Yes, I also got that first result that (from the snippet) seems to go straight to the command, but the funny thing is that the link doesn't work, at least from my end. And the next ones are all lists of commands that would take a nontrivial amount of time to skim, as I mentioned.
Post reply on HN