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Chatbots are not the future

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Re: Chatbots are not the future

#121

Post by JakeAl »

starmftronajoll wrote: post #63
anonylizard wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? For a writer, if you write out a plot, you can get the AI to actually simulate the character's responses and dialogue (even voiced by AI!). There, you've LITERALLY brought a character to life, each character is driven by a different persona simulated by a different AI, the quality of stories that will create, will annihilate what came before. You want to write an adventure, but want to keep it unpredictable.…

Perhaps the resolution to your cognitive dissonance is not to conclude that artists hate art. Instead I’d suggest that often, artists’ love of art doesn’t stem from concepts like “annihilating what came before” or “outcompeting hard.” Perhaps, like the parent comment said, it comes from self-expression — the pleasure, for both creator and audience, of the “mirage created by the writer,” to borrow your poetic term.

"ars gratia artis" is something AI is not capable of.

Re: Chatbots are not the future

#122

Post by hammyhavoc »

erksa wrote: post #120
hammyhavoc wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would be a voiceover artist, a storyteller, a voice actor, a narrator, a performer, even an entertainer. Depends whose book it is and if the book already exists to be read from. Ever heard of radio plays? Audio dramas?

So, if I record myself talking transcribe it into a book and publish it, I would be a performer, narrator or even an entertainer -- but not a writer? Maybe my point was unclear. If I had no arms, but still managed to publish a book, would I not be considered a writer since I do not have arms?

You'd likely be a scriptwriter.

It really depends. If someone has someone else ghostwrite them a book (this is super common), are they still a writer? No.

Are they an author? Maybe.

Are they just a brand slapped on the cover to shift units? Yeah, pretty much.

Re: Chatbots are not the future

#123

Post by theage »

Why even write a book when every insight in them can be shaken out of an LLM? You know, shorter content doesn't have to mean mind-melting right? Strip away the self-marketing poison found in every social media post and lets see.

Books were very simple machines to dress up our thoughts and the community reoriented itself well to the demands of the machine. But progress marches on the graves of obsolete machines as it did quills, book presses, typewriters, telegrams, libraries, word processors. Joe Reader has the same access to mind blowing dynamic text that creatives only wish to see as a finishing tool. He won't settle for the old glass window over static text just to please the artisan book writer.

Re: Chatbots are not the future

#124

Post by [deleted] »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #34
autokad wrote: post #15

> When I go up the mountain to ask the ChatGPT oracle a question, I am met with a blank face. What does this oracle know? I think if your attitude is that its an oracle, then you already have the wrong attitude for using the tool. Chatgpt is a tool, if you dont know how to use the tool, stop complaining that you don't like it. Imagine telling everyone scalpels are horrible tools because they tried to perform surgery…

> Chatgpt is a tool When you use a hammer or a drill, do you expect it to sometimes not hit/screw the nail? If ChatGPT is a tool for knowledge transfer/extraction, it can't hallucinate/lie to you/be wrong/make stuff up. If it's a tool for potentially discovering some knowledge that may be true and needs to almost always be verified by either a compiler or a followup "find me a reference/discussion" Google search to m…

[deleted]

Re: Chatbots are not the future

#125

Post by Dylan16807 »

swexbe wrote: post #111
brokencode wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond the obvious fact that you can accidentally hit your thumb with a hammer or strip the head off a screw with a screwdriver, I’d very much like to hear about any tool for collecting knowledge that is perfect. Web searches will for sure give you wrong answers. Even professors or other experts in a field will be wrong sometimes. Heck, even Einstein got some things wrong. Your goalpost is in the wrong spot. Tools do…

If you hit yourself with a hammer, that’s your fault because you did something wrong. Comparatively, you can pose a completely correct and unambiguous question to ChatGPT and still get a wrong answer. I don’t like this implicit shifting of blame to the user when it’s the tool that is flawed.

It's not the user's fault if they're handed a power tool without training, but it's not the tool's fault either.

Re: Chatbots are not the future

#126

Post by gmerc »

akiselev wrote: post #60
anonylizard wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? For a writer, if you write out a plot, you can get the AI to actually simulate the character's responses and dialogue (even voiced by AI!). There, you've LITERALLY brought a character to life, each character is driven by a different persona simulated by a different AI, the quality of stories that will create, will annihilate what came before. You want to write an adventure, but want to keep it unpredictable.…

> You want to write an adventure, but want to keep it unpredictable. Ask the AI for ideas, there, the adventure is now a true adventure, not a fake mirage created by the writer. There's something really funny about using an algorithm that predicts the next most likely token to generate unpredictable adventures.

It’s like saying it’s hilariously to take molecules of H2O and pretend they could form fluid dynamics. Preposterous /s

Re: Chatbots are not the future

#127

Post by raincole »

itake wrote: post #5

> Good tools make it clear how they should be used. This is such a weird statement from someone in the tech space. Programming languages rarely have an opinion for how they are to be used (for example JS MUST only run the browser or which code style to use). When I chat with customer support, I wish they could meet me where I am instead of me needing to learn their tools. For example, I want to say "cancel my subscri…

It's just ridiculous. The author even stated:

> Compare that to looking at a typical chat interface. The only clue we receive is that we should type characters into the textbox. The interface looks the same as a Google search box, a login form, and a credit card field.

And Google is one of the most used tools. Probably more used than pen and paper today.

Re: Chatbots are not the future

#128

Post by lxgr »

IanCal wrote: post #69
lxgr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if I don't know what I want? A graphical UI can provide much more and much more intuitive guidance than a chat input ever will. And I say that as a big fan of Unix and the shell.

You can ask it. You can explain your problem and ask how it might be able to help. You can discuss and narrow down with some back and forth what it is you want to do. I could tell a chat bot I am finding the horizontal split in my editor is annoying because I have a wide monitor, and have it tell me there's a setting for that and ask if I want the default changed. With a gui I might have to go through the files menu…

> You can discuss and narrow down with some back and forth what it is you want to do.

To be honest, I find systems that support only this kind of interface infuriating.

Imagine arriving in an unknown city: Being able to ask helpful locals for directions is nice, but sometimes I just want to look at a map.

Re: Chatbots are not the future

#129

Post by barking_biscuit »

root_axis wrote: post #45
autokad wrote: post #15

> When I go up the mountain to ask the ChatGPT oracle a question, I am met with a blank face. What does this oracle know? I think if your attitude is that its an oracle, then you already have the wrong attitude for using the tool. Chatgpt is a tool, if you dont know how to use the tool, stop complaining that you don't like it. Imagine telling everyone scalpels are horrible tools because they tried to perform surgery…

ChatGPT including the GPT-4 variant sucks quite terribly at creative writing, especially the kind of writing necessary to create long-form narratives like that in serial television and especially novels. The technology will certainly improve and it will definitely become a staple in the editor's toolbox, but it is so far away from being able to produce long form narratives well that it's not a given it will eventuall…

It's just down to small context window. Once the context window is big enough to fit entire examples in the training data, then it should be trivially solvable to train a model to do it.

There are various finetuned models out there for conversations or story-telling, though they're quite small in terms of parameter count at the moment, but I don't see it as being fundamentally impossible.

Re: Chatbots are not the future

#130

Post by barking_biscuit »

ambicapter wrote: post #58
autokad wrote: post #15

> When I go up the mountain to ask the ChatGPT oracle a question, I am met with a blank face. What does this oracle know? I think if your attitude is that its an oracle, then you already have the wrong attitude for using the tool. Chatgpt is a tool, if you dont know how to use the tool, stop complaining that you don't like it. Imagine telling everyone scalpels are horrible tools because they tried to perform surgery…

Every "impressive chatgpt" story I hear is about someone comparing what chatgpt produced to what a human produced, and saying it's scary close. No one talks about all the times they asked chatgpt to produce something, didn't compare it to what a human could do, and then realized it was catastrophically wrong once implemented.

I suppose all that really matters if the ratio of the two? I have use-cases for which I use GPT-4 and it does as good a job as I would, but faster and so I just leverage it by default now and am faster at certain things. There are also things I try it for and I don't get a useful result, so I learn not to rely on the model for that particular use-case. In that regard, it's a tool and you simply learn what it's useful for and what it's not.
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