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ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

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Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#51

Post by khazhoux »

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.

Others aren't kidding themselves. You haven't found the use yet.

I was up extremely late last night writing a project-status email. I could tell my paragraphs were not tight. I told Cursor: rewrite this 15% smaller. I didn't use the output verbatim, but it gave me several perfect rewrite ideas and the result was a crisp email.

I have it summarize my sloppy notes after interviewing someone, into full sentences. I double-check it for completeness and correctness, of course. But it saves me an hour of sweating the language.

I used it to get a better explanation to a polynomial problem with my child.

I use it to generate Google Spreadsheet formulas that I would never want to spend time figuring out on my own ("give me a formula that extracts the leading number from each cell, and treats blank cells as zero").

Part of the magic is finding a new use case that shaves another hour here and there.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#52

Post by blixt »

I think it's in human nature to force any topic to be all "good" or "bad". I agree with most criticisms this author has about the performance of AI -- it _is_ very bad at writing essays, and dare I say most things (including code), based on a single prompt. But to say it is a gimmick and compare it with technologies that died or are dying seems to me like a visceral response, perhaps after experiencing the overflow of AI-generated homework (a use of AI that ultimately just wastes everyone's time).

I think most people in here know at least a few ways they can use AI that is genuinely useful to them. I suppose if you're _very_ positive about AI, then it's good to have a polarized negative article to make us remember all the ways AI is being overpromised. I'm definitely very excited about finding new ways to apply AI, and that explorative phase can come off as trying to sell snake oil. We have to be realistic and acknowledge this is a technology that can produce content faster than we can consume it. Content that takes effort to distinguish useful vs. not.

All that said I disagree with the idea that the only way "to help students break out of their prisons, at least for an hour, so they can see and enhance the beauty of their own minds" is via teaching and not via technologies such as AI. The education system certainly failed me and I found a lot of joy in technology instead. For me it was the start of the internet, but I can only imagine for many today it will be the start of AI.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#53

Post by pishpash »

mnky9800n wrote: post #32
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.

You're over-representing the usefulness here. On topics where traditional search reaches a dead end, you will find the AI citations to be the same ones you might have found, except that upon checking, they were clearly misread or misrepresented. Dangerous and a waste of time.

It's much more helpful on popular topics where summarization itself is already high quality and sufficient.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#54

Post by liamwire »

jrflowers wrote: post #37
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.…

Is that what I did, though? I disagree.

Rather, what I hoped to articulate was a sense that being able to viscerally feel that an author holds a very obvious position from the outset of an article, and then not seeing them make even the faintest attempt to proactively argue their point against the most obvious—the easiest—criticisms, comes across lazy.

I expect arguing in good faith, and this wasn’t that.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#55

Post by jrflowers »

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.

> It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.

It is the former.

When LLMs blew up a few years ago I was pretty excited about the novelty of the software, and that excitement was driven by what they might do rather than what they did do.

Now, years and many iterations later, the most vocal proponents of this stuff still pitch what it might do with a volume loud enough to drown out almost any discussion of what it does. What little discussion of what it does for individuals usually boils down to some variation of “it gives me answers to the questions for which I do not care about the answers”, but, —how ridiculous, wasteful, and contrary to the basic ideas of knowledge and reasoning that statement is aside— even that is usually given with a wink and a nod to suggest that maybe one day it will give answers to questions that matter.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#56

Post by exe34 »

terhechte wrote: post #35
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.

From my experience so far, most "AI skeptics" seem to be trying to catch the LLM in an error of reasoning or asking it to turn a vague description into a polished product in one shot. To make the latter worse, they often try to add context after the first wrong answer, which tends to make the LLM continue to be wrong - stop thinking about the pink elephant. No, I said don't think about the pink elephant! Why do you keep mentioning the pink elephant? I said I don't want a pink elephant in the text!

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#57

Post by khazhoux »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #17
notepad0x90 wrote: post #4

Is 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…

> This is a baby 4 year old leap in technology, why are people expecting it to be mature? Because its fans act as though it is, and this article is a response to that overly-enthusiastic outlook on what the tool can do.

I don't think people are "acting" like its mature. It's extremely useful to many (myself included). And it's nonsensical for people to claim it's not useful simply because they haven't found the use.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#58

Post by AndrewDucker »

wiseowise wrote: post #42

AI is gimmick, smartphones are gimmick, computers are gimmick, automation is gimmick, books are gimmick, only %MY_ENLIGHTMENT% is not. Seriously, I understand saying something lime this about crypto or whatever meme of the day, but even current LLMs are literal magic. Instead of reading 10 pages of empty water and wasting my time, ChatGPT can summarize this as > Malesic argues that AI hype—especially in education—is…

Turns out that AI is not good at summarising things:

https://futurism.com/ai-chatbots-summarizing-research

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#60

Post by mort96 »

blixt wrote: post #52

I think it's in human nature to force any topic to be all "good" or "bad". I agree with most criticisms this author has about the performance of AI -- it _is_ very bad at writing essays, and dare I say most things (including code), based on a single prompt. But to say it is a gimmick and compare it with technologies that died or are dying seems to me like a visceral response, perhaps after experiencing the overflow o…

> I think most people in here know at least a few ways they can use AI that is genuinely useful to them

The only thing that really comes to mind is making something in a domain where I have almost no prior expertise.

But then ChatGPT is so frequently wrong, and so frequently repeatedly wrong when it tries to "correct" problems when pointed out, that even then I always have to go and read relevant documentation and re-write the thing regardless. Maybe there's some slight usefulness here in giving me a starting point, but it's marginal.

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