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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

#141

Post by bglazer »

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…

From the HN guidelines on comments: “Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously“

I downvoted you because your comment is both snarky and profoundly incurious.

Seriously, either take the time to engage with whats actually written in the post or don’t bother posting lazy swipes. As has been noted by others, the ChatGPT summary isn’t even really correct.

I’ll admit the piece is written in jargony social science language, but it makes real, interesting points about the social changes that are going to accompany introduction of LLM’s into society.

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

#142

Post by dclusin »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #136
efitz wrote: post #102

The BS that ChatGPT generates is especially odious because it requires so much effort to detect if you're not a SME in whatever output it's giving. Plus, the output, when wrong, is subtly wrong- it's usually not obvious BS, it's credible BS. If you are not competent in the particular area you're asking about, you likely don't have the skills to recognize BS. It also is a time saver, doing work that most people find u…

>if you're not a SME Small and Medium-sized Enterprise? What's SME in this instance?

Subject matter expert

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

#143

Post by fenomas »

It's so weird to me when apparently tech-savvy people say ChatGPT "lies", or call it a bullshit generator and so on.

I mean - when you ask StableDiffusion to draw a dog astronaut, everyone gets that the image it returns is made-up, right? Nobody expects the AI to return only "true" images of existing things - it was trained on fictional images as well as photographs, and people understand that it can imagine new things beyond what it's seen. Nobody expects SD to emit an error like "I can't draw a dog astronaut because they don't exist".

So why do people expect ChatGPT to work differently? Even with developers who presumably understand the technical details, I constantly see people acting as if it was an error mode for ChatGPT to say something that isn't factually true about the world. How is that any different from calling SD a liar because it drew a dog astronaut?

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

#144

Post by kmote00 »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #136
efitz wrote: post #102

The BS that ChatGPT generates is especially odious because it requires so much effort to detect if you're not a SME in whatever output it's giving. Plus, the output, when wrong, is subtly wrong- it's usually not obvious BS, it's credible BS. If you are not competent in the particular area you're asking about, you likely don't have the skills to recognize BS. It also is a time saver, doing work that most people find u…

>if you're not a SME Small and Medium-sized Enterprise? What's SME in this instance?

Subject Matter Expert

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

#145

Post by [deleted] »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #136
efitz wrote: post #102

The BS that ChatGPT generates is especially odious because it requires so much effort to detect if you're not a SME in whatever output it's giving. Plus, the output, when wrong, is subtly wrong- it's usually not obvious BS, it's credible BS. If you are not competent in the particular area you're asking about, you likely don't have the skills to recognize BS. It also is a time saver, doing work that most people find u…

>if you're not a SME Small and Medium-sized Enterprise? What's SME in this instance?

[deleted]

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

#146

Post by apinstein »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #136
efitz wrote: post #102

The BS that ChatGPT generates is especially odious because it requires so much effort to detect if you're not a SME in whatever output it's giving. Plus, the output, when wrong, is subtly wrong- it's usually not obvious BS, it's credible BS. If you are not competent in the particular area you're asking about, you likely don't have the skills to recognize BS. It also is a time saver, doing work that most people find u…

>if you're not a SME Small and Medium-sized Enterprise? What's SME in this instance?

Subject Matter Expert

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

#147

Post by [deleted] »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #136
efitz wrote: post #102

The BS that ChatGPT generates is especially odious because it requires so much effort to detect if you're not a SME in whatever output it's giving. Plus, the output, when wrong, is subtly wrong- it's usually not obvious BS, it's credible BS. If you are not competent in the particular area you're asking about, you likely don't have the skills to recognize BS. It also is a time saver, doing work that most people find u…

>if you're not a SME Small and Medium-sized Enterprise? What's SME in this instance?

[deleted]

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

#148

Post by kristianc »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #136
efitz wrote: post #102

The BS that ChatGPT generates is especially odious because it requires so much effort to detect if you're not a SME in whatever output it's giving. Plus, the output, when wrong, is subtly wrong- it's usually not obvious BS, it's credible BS. If you are not competent in the particular area you're asking about, you likely don't have the skills to recognize BS. It also is a time saver, doing work that most people find u…

>if you're not a SME Small and Medium-sized Enterprise? What's SME in this instance?

Subject matter expert

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

#149

Post by makeitdouble »

efitz wrote: post #102

The BS that ChatGPT generates is especially odious because it requires so much effort to detect if you're not a SME in whatever output it's giving. Plus, the output, when wrong, is subtly wrong- it's usually not obvious BS, it's credible BS. If you are not competent in the particular area you're asking about, you likely don't have the skills to recognize BS. It also is a time saver, doing work that most people find u…

I think it comes in a situation that isn't great, but not so bad that it warranted drastic decisions: people are organically generating mountains of BS online everyday, including on blogs, official looking news sites etc.

It's a pain, but as most of that is also generated by humans there's an opt out, saying "good guys" should band together to fight it and it would be fine.

Now that we have ChatGPT and the like, manually dealing with all the BS is just out of the window.

And I'm kinda hoping we try to deal with it in a systematic matter, and find a way to flag and bury the BS down to levels lower than when ChatGPT came to the public.

Basically, I'm hoping the thing that happened for spam happens for bullshit as well, and we get optimized tools to fight to manageable levels (with the arms race adn all, probably)

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

#150

Post by tempestn »

sverona wrote: post #106

I skimmed his book, and I don't know, man. His thesis as I understand it is a viewpoint I have held for a while now --- artificial intelligence does things that humans do, but faster. It's a force multiplier. Hence your views on AI are likely to correspond directly to your views on those groups who hold power. McQuillan approaches this from an intersectional lens and arrives at entirely predictable conclusions. It's…

Or that we'll just keep muddling along imperfectly as we always have, the same but different (and faster), as it's always been.
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