ChatGPT Is a Gimmick
hedgehogreview.com
ChatGPT Is a Gimmick
1–10 of 166 posts
Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick
#2Seems to be a very wordy article that complains that only a proper education teaches you to think?
In any case, even contemporary LLM---as primitive as they will look like in even a few months time---are already pretty useful as assistants when eg writing software programmes. They ain't gimmicks. They are also useful as a more interactive addition to an encyclopedia. Amongst other uses.
The article also conflates AI in general with LLM. It's a common enough mistake to make these days, so I won't ding the author for that.
Summary of the article: contemporary LLMs aren't very useful for highfalutin liberal arts people (yet). (However they can already churn out the kind of essays and corporate writing that people do in practice.)
Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick
#3I personally feel like some of the AI hype is driven by it's ability to create flashy demos which become dead end projects.
It's so easy to spin up an example "write me a sample chat app" or whatever and be amazed how quickly and fully it realizes this idea, but it does kinda beg the question, now what?
I think in the same way that image generation is akin to clipart (wildly useful, but lacking in depth and meaning) the AI code generation projects are akin to webpage templates. They can help get you started, and take you further than you could on your own, but ultimately you have to decide "now what" after you take that first (AI) step.
Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick
#4Is it that ChatGPT is a gimmick or is it that people are using it as such?
A lot of the author's arguments could have been said about the internet in the 90's. This is a baby 4 year old leap in technology, why are people expecting it to be mature?
It is human nature to try and find silver bullets, to take solutions and find problems. The way I would look at the LLM-centered future is to consider LLM agents assistants and suggestion makers, personal consultants even. You don't ask an agent to write an essay for you, you write an essay, and as you write consider its suggestions and corrections. The models should be familiar with your writing style and preferences. Don't blame ChatGPT for human laziness.
There was this fad about every thing being smart* (smart home,smart tooth brush , smart sex toy,etc...). that wasn't smart, it was just connected to a network. This is "smart". and in the future technology might get past "smart" and become "intelligent" (we're not there yet, outside of scifi at least).
At the end of the day, everyone needs to step back and consider this: It's just a tool. period. it's not "AI", not really. there is no intelligence.
The problem is, the world is full of enshittification capitalists and their doomsday bandwagons.
Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick
#5> “Human interaction is not as important to today’s students,” Latham claims
Goodness that's depressing. Is this going to crank individualism up to 11?
I remember hating having to do group projects in school. Most often, 3/5 of the group would contribute jack shit, while the remaining people had to pick up the slack. But even with lazy gits, the interactions were what made it valuable.
Maybe human/-I cooperation is an important skill for people to learn, but it shouldn't come at the cost of losing even more human-human cooperation and interaction.
Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick
#6It is refreshing to see I am not the only person who cannot get LLMs to say anything valuable. I have tried several times, but the cycle "You're right to question this. I actually didn't do anything you asked for. Here is some more garbage!" gets really old really fast.
It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.
Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick
#7Some companies may save money by employing LLMs to do shallow things. Others may not. Also, LLMs are not all AIs. AI is a broad field with many models and applications that were already omnipresent in our lives but less marketable to the general public as revolutionary, such as spam filter. AI is NOT a gimmick per se. Some users are.
P.S.: consider that when there are huge investments in something, people will do anything to see a return, including paying other people to create hype.
Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick
#8Seems to be a very wordy article that complains that only a proper education teaches you to think? In any case, even contemporary LLM---as primitive as they will look like in even a few months time---are already pretty useful as assistants when eg writing software programmes. They ain't gimmicks. They are also useful as a more interactive addition to an encyclopedia. Amongst other uses. The article also conflates AI…
I think you missed the entire point of the article. They're not saying that AI cannot be useful in the way you describe. They're saying that too many people are using it as a shortcut to producing verbiage that mimics the outcomes of learning, missing out the valuable things that come from the process of learning.
Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick
#9I personally feel like some of the AI hype is driven by it's ability to create flashy demos which become dead end projects. It's so easy to spin up an example "write me a sample chat app" or whatever and be amazed how quickly and fully it realizes this idea, but it does kinda beg the question, now what? I think in the same way that image generation is akin to clipart (wildly useful, but lacking in depth and meaning)…
The demos I see all make compromises in order to work that hobble you from hardening them or otherwise lock you to very specific conceptualizations that you simply wouldn't have building from the smallest low level building blocks or even starting at a super high level state machine placeholder. In my experience no matter how hard I try it will be guided by the weights of the total generated output towards something that doesn't understand the value of compartmentalization, and will add tokens that make its probabilities work internally above all.
Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick
#10> But look at what people actually use this wonder for: brain-dead books and videos, scam-filled ads, polished but boring homework essays. Another presenter at the workshop I attended said he used AI to help him decide what to give his kids for breakfast that morning.
The last example is actually the most interesting! The essays are whatever, dumb or lazy kids are gonna cheat on their homework, schools have long needed better ways of teaching kids than regurgitative essays, but in the mean time just use an in-class essay or exam. But people aren't really making the brain-dead books and videos as anything other than a curiosity, despite the fears of various humanities professors.
The interesting part of AI, and I suspect the primary actual use case, is everything else.