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

ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 159 posts

Re: ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis

#91

Post by carbocation »

blackoil wrote: post #68
carbocation wrote: post #58

As an academic researcher, I find analysis of GPT-4 itself — as it pertains to other fields — to be essentially meaningless. There are no guarantees that the version of the model that was used will be available in the future (the API endpoints seem to have a ~12 month future-looking guarantee at most). Don't get me wrong: 1. GPT-4 is incredibly interesting 2. Studying GPT-4 is interesting for people working in that f…

It shows current state and progress. No strong reason to believe future models will preform worse.

Yes, and that's interesting both popularly and to people doing research in developing better models.

But for people who are nominally using this to conduct scientific inquiries in other domains, the specific performance characteristics are what actually matter. When I am writing about the results of my semantic segmentation model, the characteristics of that specific model are more important than the notion that future models will be at least as good.

Hence my critique being pretty narrow (the academic use of GPT-4 for downstream science).

Re: ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis

#92

Post by xbar »

Tostino wrote: post #32
jhbadger wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It's no different from the fake data sets created by hand in scientific misconduct cases for years, just I guess easier. I guess that's not a good thing, but given even making a fake data set by hand is far easier than generating real data, I'm not sure if this will suddenly make more people fake data.

The fake data that's been caught so far in just about every one of the cases that I've read about has been ridiculously poorly constructed fake data. I think the people that are good at faking data simply don't get caught.

The volume of bogus research is already growing non-linearly. It suggests that there is a market for fake datasets, which will lead to better AI training to fix this problem.

Attacks only ever get better, not worse.

Re: ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis

#93

Post by nradov »

chongli wrote: post #50
smitty1e wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Humanity learns" is impossible. The unit of analysis is the individual. Some state may cross between individuals via education, but the individuals still must learn. History shows that knowledge transmission remains a sticky wicket.

Firm disagree! Example: take a tour of the tower of London and learn about all the nasty medieval tortures we used to inflict on people. Now we don't do that anymore. Humans learn things collectively via culture and cultural transmission has been an extremely effective tool of knowledge preservation over the generations.

Who is "we"? Torturing people to death in equally horrific ways is still routine practice among radical Islamists and Mexican drug cartels, among others.

Re: ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis

#94

Post by hunter2_ »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #70
hunter2_ wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you say the same about all systems that are considered "generative"?

Probably. It's easy to mistake entropy for novelty. Computers don't create: they compute. Calling an LLM "Artificial Intelligence" is a bit like mistaking a pseudorandom number generator for true noise.

I think that by that same logic, you could say human artists, writers, etc. don't create either, they just move existing matter (which typically isn't created nor destroyed) from one place to another. You could also say an electric company doesn't generate electricity but merely converts other energy into it -- one of the most popular uses of the word "generator" yet the atoms/energy are already here; we just arrange/convert and call it generation. I must insist that sorting some things a certain way is widely known as generation/creation.

I can see how other words are a bit more precise, though. Synthesize, perhaps?

Re: ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis

#96

Post by shishy »

sigmar wrote: post #16

>“It will make it very easy for any researcher or group of researchers to create fake measurements on non-existent patients, fake answers to questionnaires or to generate a large data set on animal experiments.” Perhaps I'm naive, but I think the people that want to fake data were already doing it without tools like chatgpt. Especially since a ton of biological data is normally distributed, so it's exceedingly easy t…

Being able to do it at scale is an issue because of paper mills.

Re: ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis

#97

Post by nickpsecurity »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #23

It's just emulating a certain cross-section of human scientists.

If Arxiv was used in training, some of those scientists were the ones that taught it to do this. Well, a good chunk of whatever they scraped off the Internet, too.

Re: ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis

#98

Post by chrisweekly »

abnry wrote: post #22
sigmar wrote: post #16

>“It will make it very easy for any researcher or group of researchers to create fake measurements on non-existent patients, fake answers to questionnaires or to generate a large data set on animal experiments.” Perhaps I'm naive, but I think the people that want to fake data were already doing it without tools like chatgpt. Especially since a ton of biological data is normally distributed, so it's exceedingly easy t…

Exactly. How is this news? What would be surprising is if ChatGPT _could_ generate fake data that passed analysis.

I think you meant _couldn't_

Re: ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis

#100

Post by [deleted] »

Nition wrote: post #34

Somewhere in the mind's eye of science fiction is a world where we have near-unlimited productivity and knowledge and we're all free to pursue our self-actualized lives as we see fit. But as productivity increases, and as AI improves, in both cases individual greed holds back lifting up the many. And so we end up asking for caution on automating away someone's job, or caution on rapid AI progress. Does anyone know an…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN