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ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

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Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#81

Post by johnb231 »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #58
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

As usual the paper is dead on arrival. They tested with obsolete models and non-reasoning models.

Try again with any SOTA reasoning model (GPT-o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Grok 3).

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#82

Post by keiferski »

nsteel wrote: post #79
keiferski wrote: post #27

These “AI is a gimmick that does nothing” articles mostly just communicate to me that most people lack imagination. I have gotten so much value out of AI (specifically ChatGPT and Midjourney) that it’s hard to imagine that a few years ago this was not even remotely possible. The difference, it seems, is that I’ve been looking at these tools and thinking how I can use them in creative ways to accomplish a goal - and n…

> These “AI is a gimmick that does nothing” articles I don't think that's an accurate summary of this article. Are you basing that just on the title, or do you fundamentally disagree with the author here? > We call something a gimmick, the literary scholar Sianne Ngai points out, when it seems to be simultaneously working too hard and not hard enough. It appears both to save labor and to inflate it, like a fanciful R…

Not sure how that definition of a gimmick applies to what I wrote. Labeling AI tools as gimmicks would imply that they both save labor and inflate it and therefore offer no real fundamental improvements or value.

In my own experience, that is absolute nonsense, and I have gotten immense amounts of value from it. Most of the critical arguments (like the link) are almost always from people that use them as basic chatbots without any sort of deeper understanding or exploration of the tools.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#83

Post by jiggawatts »

pishpash wrote: post #78
jiggawatts wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I noticed a long time ago is that going from 90% correct to 95% correct is not a 5% difference, it’s a 2x difference. As you approach 100%, the last few 0.01% error rates going away make a qualitative difference. “Computer” used to be a job, and human error rates are on the order of 1-2% no matter what level of training or experience they had. Work had to be done in triplicate and cross-checked if it matter…

You are having low expectations here. People used to enter machine code on switches and punched paper tape, so yes they made sure it worked the first time. Later, people had code reviews by marking up printouts of code, and software got sent out in boxes that couldn't be changed until the next year. Programmers who "iterate" buggy shit for 10 rounds until they get it right are a post-Google push-update phenomenon.

Been there, done that. I made mistakes and had to try again or correct the input (when that was an option).

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#84

Post by jrflowers »

liamwire wrote: post #76
jrflowers wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good faith argument has at no point in history required supporting an opposite proposition. “Taking a position and arguing it” is literally what an argument is. That is what the endeavor entails. Anything else is just aesthetics and personal preference

So, to recap, your gripe, with my gripe, is that I hold the author to aesthetic standards that differ from your own—and that that’s… wrong? Do I have that right? I ask genuinely. I want to understand your position better here.

I think it’s silly to confuse aesthetic preference with the difference between good and bad faith argumentation. Like if you insist that someone painstakingly take the time and effort to convince you that they don’t have an opinion on a topic while trying to convey their opinion about a topic, that’s so absurd that it itself borders on a bad faith request.

Also my original gripe was very clear. “Are you trying to convince yourself?” indicates that the author didn’t believe what they wrote. And your reasoning here for mentioning that is that they wrote it. It is a no-win scenario in which another person literally couldn’t hold an opinion that doesn’t conform to your aesthetic. That is insane!

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#85

Post by diogolsq »

jrflowers wrote: post #68
liamwire wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good faith argument has at no point in history required supporting an opposite proposition. “Taking a position and arguing it” is literally what an argument is. That is what the endeavor entails. Anything else is just aesthetics and personal preference

Agree, that is not required. It is an Essay after all.

That said, I disagree with the idea that it’s merely about aesthetics.(Hegel’s dialectic, for example, isn’t just a stylistic choice — its structure actively shapes meaning and allows for a better synthesis.)

I don't think the author wants to engage and have meaningful conversations, his position is clear.

A meaningful conversation - at least how i see it -, involves acknowledging both the pros and cons of any position. Even if you believe the pros outweigh the cons — which is a subjective judgment — you should still be able to clearly enumerate the cons. That’s is an analytical approach.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#86

Post by alkonaut »

I always found myself to be very good at Googling/Searching. Or asking: like emailing an expert or colleague. I'm good at condensing what I'm trying to ask and good at knowing what they could be misunderstanding, or what follow up questions they might have, to save some back- and forth. The corresponding thing on google is predicting what I might see, and adding negative search terms for them.

BUT, and this is I think why some of us feel ChatGPT is poor: asking in this way that guides a human or a search engine, makes ChatGPT produce worse answers(!).

If you say "What can be wrong with X? I'm pretty sure it's not Y or Z which I ruled out, could it be Q or perhaps W"? Then ChatGPT and other language models quickly reinforce your belief instead of challenging them. It would rather give you an incorrect reason why you are right, than provide you an additional problem, or challenge your assumptions. If LLMs could get over the bullshit problem, it would be so much better. Having a confidence and being able to express it is invaluable. But somehow I doubt it's possible - if it was, then they would be doing it already as it's a killer feature. So I fear that it's somehow not achievable with LLMs? In which case the title is correct.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#87

Post by snickerer »

wilg wrote: post #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 need…

I love to use ChatGPT for creative cooking.

In my camping car, somewhere in the desert, I sometimes have limited resources. Like a can of beans, some fresh potatoes, an apple, Italian spices, and so on.

I like to ask ChatGPT: Listen, I have this stuff, I want to create some food with strong umami taste, do you have an idea?

It is very good at that, the results were often amazing.

This is its core feature: 'feel' loose connections between concepts. Italian pasta with maple syrup? Yes, but only if you add some Arabic spices...

"AI" is, due to the nature of artificial neuronal networks, not intelligent. It does not learn intelligence, it does learn feelings. Not emotions, but feelings in the sense of unconscious learning ('I get a feeling how to ride the bicycle off-road ').

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#88

Post by wiseowise »

mort96 wrote: post #61
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…

Where did they say smartphones and computers are gimmicks?

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/when-...

https://www.today.com/money/are-smartphones-making-us-lazy-t...

Etc., etc.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#89

Post by wazoox »

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.

Perplexity often quotes references that simply don't exist. Recent examples provided by perplexity :

Google Cloud. (2024). "Broadcast Transformation with Google Cloud." https://cloud.google.com/solutions/media-entertainment/broad...

Microsoft Azure. (2024). "Azure for Media and Entertainment." https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/media-entertainm...

IBC365. (2023). "The Future of Broadcast Engineering: Skills and Training." https://www.ibc.org/tech-advances/the-future-of-broadcast-en...

Broadcast Bridge. (2023). "Cloud Skills for Broadcast Engineers." https://www.thebroadcastbridge.com/content/entry/18744/cloud...

SVG Europe. (2023). "OTT and Cloud: The New Normal for Broadcast." https://www.svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/ott-and-cloud-the-n...

None of these exist, neither at the provided URLs or elsewhere.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#90

Post by wiseowise »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #58
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

It was good enough with summarizing this empty rant.
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