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We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

danmcquillan.org

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Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

#121

Post by tambourine_man »

I’ve seen this argument over and over again: it’s just predicting the next word, it’s not creating anything new, etc.

How do we know we’re not doing the same or similar in our brains? We can’t even define creativity, intelligence, let alone tell how it works. Predicting the next word is very much part of an intelligent discourse. What if it’s all just a “computational guessing game” all the way down with perhaps a sprinkle of randomness added?

I’m very concerned with the explosion in AI development but I don’t think we should discredit the tool because we think it’s dangerous. Quite the contrary, in fact. We should take it very seriously.

Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

#122

Post by wpietri »

smackeyacky wrote: post #40
wpietri wrote: post #13

It's nice to see a little realism starting to poke through the hype. The rush for automatic bullshit generation for me is very much in the bucket of, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." As with every new technology, we should be looking at LLMs through a lens of maximizing the benefits and minimizing the harms.

There is one thing that ChatGPT has done, which is highlight the amount of bullshit we are exposed to. If ChatGPT does nothing else but replace the bullshit generators, then we know on the whole we are safe to ignore all bullshit (a pretty safe course of action). Over the past few months I've found myself second guessing whether the article I am reading was generated bullshit or "real" bullshit. It's certainly made m…

For sure. And it's worth asking what we were getting out of those articles before.

As an example, there's an Android video game called Splash Wars. It has algorithmically generated levels with no sense of progression. In some sense it's not a good game, in that there's no narrative, no progression, no increasing cleverness. But I have played an embarrassing number of levels of it because for me it's soothing to have something modestly challenging but ultimately familiar. I realized that there are some video games I use to think. With the ADHD lets-go-ride-bikes portion of my brain pacified, I can ruminate on problems that I might otherwise get distracted from.

Similarly, I suspect that bullshit articles fill other unspoken needs for people. That in the morning over cereal, maybe what I want from my newspaper is not actual news so much as news-shaped or news-flavored textual product. Maybe I want comfortable familiarity or confirmation of my biases.

So I hope you're write, that others start asking those same questions. That the coming vast bullshit surplus puts many of us off it for good.

Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

#123

Post by layer8 »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #69

I found the article really difficult to read, so I summarised it with ChatGPT Large language models like the GPT family are statistical models that learn the structure of language by predicting missing words in sentences. These models are seen as "bullshit generators" as they have no idea what they are talking about and are designed to produce baseless assertions with confidence. The addition of reinforcement learnin…

Here is Kagi’s summary:

This article discusses the dangers of ChatGPT, a large language model, and how it is used to generate 'bullshit' and propagate existing power structures. It argues that the model is harmful and that its plausibility makes it even more dangerous. The article also highlights the exploitative labour practices that go into maintaining the model, as well as the underlying supremacist perspectives that are embedded in AI. The author suggests that instead of embracing AI, we should focus on centring activities of care and search for alternatives to algorithmic immiseration.

Both miss that it’s an advertorial for the author’s book.

Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

#124

Post by neoromantique »

esjeon wrote: post #92
LAC-Tech wrote: post #69

I found the article really difficult to read, so I summarised it with ChatGPT Large language models like the GPT family are statistical models that learn the structure of language by predicting missing words in sentences. These models are seen as "bullshit generators" as they have no idea what they are talking about and are designed to produce baseless assertions with confidence. The addition of reinforcement learnin…

This is not even a correct summary of the content of the post. I'm genuinely entertained by the sheer amount of shamelessness demonstrated here. Seriously, though, technology at wrong hands endorses bad behaviors.

ChatGPT is not really meant for summarizing things, Kagi Summarizer for example:

"This article discusses the dangers of ChatGPT, a large language model, and how it is used to generate 'bullshit' and propagate existing power structures. It argues that the model is harmful and that its plausibility makes it even more dangerous. The article also highlights the exploitative labour practices that go into maintaining the model, as well as the underlying supremacist perspectives that are embedded in AI. The author suggests that instead of embracing AI, we should focus on centring activities of care and search for alternatives to algorithmic immiseration."

Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

#125

Post by ihatepython »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #69

I found the article really difficult to read, so I summarised it with ChatGPT Large language models like the GPT family are statistical models that learn the structure of language by predicting missing words in sentences. These models are seen as "bullshit generators" as they have no idea what they are talking about and are designed to produce baseless assertions with confidence. The addition of reinforcement learnin…

My impression is that dumb people (for lack of a better term) find ChatGPT useful, while smart people (again, for lack of a better term) don't.

It's kind of like how a jazz musician doesn't like for example Ed Sheeran, but the average person does.

Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

#126

Post by WalterSear »

wpietri wrote: post #103
WalterSear wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another way to look at it: imagine that a manager looks at ChatGPT and says, "At last, I can fire all the programmers. Fuck those guys." They set out to build an app. How long do you think it will take before they are forced to admit defeat and hire somebody who can read and edit the code? How is this different from "At last, I can fire all [those senior programmers and hire junior ones, and keep a team lead around…

Maybe I'm not getting the point of your question. It's different in that junior programmers are still people, capable of much more than LLMs are. But yes, it's the same shortsighted executive intent.

My point is that the direction and management that you outline is as relevant to GPT as it is to a team of (sufficiently) junior developers.

And, given that people find utility in Github copilot, I'm not convinced that the difference between GPT and a junior developer is qualitative rather than quantitative. Regardless of whether LLMs are demonstrating intelligence or creativity, they are already writing productive code: they aren't a hallucination.

Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

#127

Post by qotgalaxy »

tambourine_man wrote: post #121

I’ve seen this argument over and over again: it’s just predicting the next word, it’s not creating anything new, etc. How do we know we’re not doing the same or similar in our brains? We can’t even define creativity, intelligence, let alone tell how it works. Predicting the next word is very much part of an intelligent discourse. What if it’s all just a “computational guessing game” all the way down with perhaps a sp…

> How do we know we’re not doing the same or similar in our brains?

How do we know that we're not made of magic?

Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

#128

Post by [deleted] »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #69

I found the article really difficult to read, so I summarised it with ChatGPT Large language models like the GPT family are statistical models that learn the structure of language by predicting missing words in sentences. These models are seen as "bullshit generators" as they have no idea what they are talking about and are designed to produce baseless assertions with confidence. The addition of reinforcement learnin…

[deleted]

Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

#129

Post by alfalfasprout »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #117
alfalfasprout wrote: post #112

It's a tool that isn't going away. But even Yann Lecun has pointed out that "A house cat has way more common sense and understanding of the world than any LLM". That's fundamentally the real issue. LLMs are far from even animal level "cognition" in their ability to solve novel problems. A lot of people seem to vastly underestimate the number of novel problems they solve on a regular basis. In practice, what we're see…

It's pseudo-understanding, but pseudo-understanding can still be useful, as we see with, say, image classification.

100%

I'm just noting that we're currently in a period where suddenly a lot of folks without the understanding of its limitations are experiencing something AGI-like for the first time. It feels a lot more competent than it could ever be.

Once the limitations of what LLMs are really "competent" at are well-established we'll likely see a huge surge of use cases based on them.

A lot of folks are too quick to claim the death of the knowledge worker though. Folks working in the ML space understand there's a much longer road ahead than we've even traveled down so far.

Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

#130

Post by 50 »

The intensification of AI only makes me surfacely interested in cybernetic-thought from theorists like Gilles Deleuze, Norbert Wiener and, of course, William Gibson. But even from the outlandish Nick Land: "AI is a meta-scientific control system and an invader, with all the insidiousness of planetary techno-capital flipping over."[1] Whatever that means...

But on the other hand, what a good time to revist the nature writers like Whitman and Emerson.

1. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3284-on-nick-land

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