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ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

hedgehogreview.com

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Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#31

Post by dist-epoch »

danlitt wrote: post #6

It 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.

As a non-physicist I found it's explanations to physics questions I've asked amazing, better then watching videos on them, since you can iterate exactly on the point you don't understand.

Same for philosophy questions, "explain this piece of news through the lens of X philosopher's Y concept".

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#32

Post by mnky9800n »

danlitt wrote: post #6

It 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.

This why I like how perplexity forces citations. I use it more like I’m googling then I care about what the LLM writes. The LLM simply acts as a sometimes unreasonable interface to the search engine. So really, I’m more focused on if whatever embeddings the LLM is trained on found some correlations between different documents, etc that were not obvious to a different kind of search engine.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#33

Post by ohxh »

This seems unusually shallow for the hedgehog review. I thought we'd largely moved on from this sort of sentimental, "I can't get good outputs therefore nobody can" style essay -- not to mention the water use argument! They've published far better writing on LLMs too: see "Language Machinery" from fall 23 [1]

[1] https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/artic...

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#34

Post by admissionsguy »

Hoasi wrote: post #26
admissionsguy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong. Have been wondering this ever since 1 week after the initial ChatGPT release. My cynical take is that most people don't do real work (i.e. one that is objectively evaluated against reality), so are not able to see the difference between a gimmick and the real thing. Most people are in the business of making impressions,…

> It's good that we have markets that will eventually sort it out. But then again, it's not as if markets always rewarded real work either.

It's noisy, biased, and slow, but it generally does eventually reward what works better, in most cases.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#35

Post by terhechte »

danlitt wrote: post #6

It 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.

Can you give some examples where it didn't work for you? I'm curious because I derive a lot of value from it and my guess is that we're trying very different things with it.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#36

Post by visarga »

danlitt wrote: post #6

It 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.

I too have sat at pianos and banged the keys but no valuable music came out. It must be because the piano is a bad instrument. /s

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#37

Post by jrflowers »

liamwire wrote: post #19

I read the entire essay. It comes across wholly uninspired. Some thoughts: > But do the apologists even believe it themselves? Latham, the professor of strategy, gives away the game at the end of his reverie. “None of this can happen, though,” he writes, “if professors and administrators continue to have their heads in the sand.” So it’s not inevitable after all? Whoops. This self-assured ‘gotcha’ attitude is pungent…

> Knowing they come in with such strongly held preconceived notions makes me reflexively question their own introspection before putting pen to paper.

>Ultimately, are you writing to convince me, or yourself, of your point?

I like that you point out here that the author clearly has a strong opinion, and then immediately say that the act of expressing that opinion may suggest that they do not hold that opinion at all.

By this logic, are you trying to convince us that you don’t love the way this article is written, or are you trying to convince yourself of that?

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#38

Post by BlindEyeHalo »

For me the usefulness of LLMs is proportional to how shitty google has become. When searching for something you get a bunch of blog spam or other SSO optimised shit results to pages that open dozens of popups asking you to subscribe or make an account. ChatGPT gives you the answer immediately and I must say I find it helpful 90% of the time.

For simple coding questions it is also very good because it takes your current context into account. It is basically a smarter "copy paste from stack overflow".

At least for now LLMs do not replace any meaningful work for me, but they replace google more and more.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#39

Post by mirekrusin »

> After I got her feedback, I finally asked ChatGPT if generative AI could be considered a gimmick in Ngai’s sense. I did not read its answer carefully. Whenever I see the words cascade down my computer screen, I get a sinking feeling. Do I really have to read this?

Does the author know he can include "be concise" in the prompt if that's what he wants?

I do agree with the author this whole thing is challenging. Frankly I wouldn't like to be youngster nowadays – so much information, so many options, so much flood of tip of success that makes you feel like shit, so easy not to learn anything, so much feeling of "pointless" discipline and hard work, such a wide distance to excel at something - just summarizing available avenues is project on its own.

Anyway there is no turning back. What we see now as best of models will get replaced quickly with better ones and that change will only accelerate with time. I'm still positive – I think we'll find a way to be happy in this completely new reality.

I like it at work - time from business idea to PoC did shrink so much, it's easier than ever to win business (not sure for how long but that's today), agentic coding helps a lot with documentation, tests, finding medium-obvious mistakes that sit above linter/typechecker – that part is amazing as well. We'll continue focusing on low effort/high value tasks it currently excels at and keep expanding it.

At the same time we all know where it's going and it makes me uneasy as well.

I don't think I have anything substantial to add – just advice to try to enjoy the ride, take it easy and keep in mind well being of your colleagues. There is a sweet spot to use it – don't overuse it (don't fight with it where it struggles), don't under-use it either (don't say all of it is shit and you won't touch it ever), don't abuse it (do not drop llm output for others to review without knowing what you're pushing).

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#40

Post by cess11 »

danlitt wrote: post #6

It 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.

I don't think you are. I've found some use for cheap and somewhat unreliable machine translation of formal documents, but it doesn't work for idiomatic or rude texts, for example, LLM:s commonly try to avoid 'saying' something offensive about the house of Saud or the White House so I need to push them around to do the thing I want. Sometimes I also 'one-shot' HTML scaffolds because I suck at Tailwind and I only rarely save templates of single file things, they just end up in an unstructured pile.

Some people seem to use them as a database of common programming patterns, but that's something I already have, both hundreds of scaffolds in many programming languages I've made myself and hundreds of FOSS and non-FOSS git repos I've collected out of interest or necessity. Often I also just go look at some public remote repo if I'm reading up on some topic in preparation for an implementation or experiment, mainly because when I ask an LLM the code usually has defects and incoherences and when I look at something that is already in production somewhere it's working and sits in a context I can learn from as well.

But hey, I rarely even use IDE autocomplete for browsing library methods and the like, in part because I've either read the relevant library code or picked a library with good documentation since that tells a lot more about intended use patterns and pitfalls.

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