We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by kristianc » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 2:46 AM UTC

fenomas wrote: post #143

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 thin…

I do tire of these appeal to hypocrisy/inconsistency type arguments that rely on collapsing important distinctions.

It’s generally accepted that artwork can delve into the fantastical and absurd. That’s part of the point of it being art.

ChatGPT isn’t for the most part trying to be performance artwork - it is striving to be ‘right’ and to give the correct answer to your question.

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

#162

Post by sfpotter » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 2:46 AM UTC

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…

His article is perfectly reasonable, straightforward, and logical. It’s also more or less devoid of academic jargon. He makes clear points that are easy to relate to. Can’t speak to his book.

Why do you think admitting that technological solutionism isn’t going to save us means we’re fucked? Are you that cynical/have that little faith in humanity? There are clearly alternative modes of structuring society that we can try out if there’s the will to do so. If you don’t think so that’s your problem and is basically down to a failure in your imagination.

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

#163

Post by osigurdson » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 2:46 AM UTC

It is often useful to try to understand what game is really being played. This is very obvious to me, many people have a fear of AI (justified and unjustified) while knowing little about it. Many people want to hear how horrific AI is going to be and why we have to fight against it.

Ergo..>> my book

This seems to be squarely targeted at the ragey punkrock bangarang subset of this group.

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

#164

Post by claytongulick » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 2:46 AM UTC

fenomas wrote: post #143

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 thin…

One generates art.

The other speaks authoritatively about falsifiable facts and is frequently wrong.

Art is subjective.

Facts are, in theory, not.

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

#165

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 2:47 AM UTC

fenomas wrote: post #143

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 thin…

[deleted]

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

#166

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 2:47 AM UTC

osigurdson wrote: post #163

It is often useful to try to understand what game is really being played. This is very obvious to me, many people have a fear of AI (justified and unjustified) while knowing little about it. Many people want to hear how horrific AI is going to be and why we have to fight against it. Ergo..>> my book This seems to be squarely targeted at the ragey punkrock bangarang subset of this group.

[deleted]

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

#167

Post by cmrdporcupine » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 2:48 AM UTC

fenomas wrote: post #143

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 thin…

Your analogy would only hold if we were asking ChatGPT to write poetry, or descriptive fiction.

But its method of presentation is one where it on the whole composes paragraphs composed of proposed facts and logic.

There's really no ambiguity here. Its sentences are in general (not all sentences, but most) composed of propositions. The propositions can be tested for truth or falsehood. If the proposition is false, we can generally call it a "lie". Or at least -- not a fact.

We expect it to work differently because conversational language works different than images and art.

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

#168

Post by ldoughty » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 2:48 AM UTC

fenomas wrote: post #143

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 thin…

When stable diffusion is told to make a dog, it's fairly obvious when you get one of the AI generated monstrosities.. and people discard those easily.

If you ask ChatGPT if Ebola is transmitted by mosquitos, and it says it's not only transmitted by mosquitos, it's airborne and highly contagious... do you know if this is accurate? Most people don't ask Stable diffusion to make an images of things we don't understand, while we ask ChatGPT questions we do not know the answers to.

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

#169

Post by tambourine_man » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 2:49 AM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #151

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…

That would seem to be the “stochastic parrot” view denounced. But it seems hard to believe. Haven’t you ever had the experience of knowing exactly what you want to say but struggling to find the word for it? How could that be if we’re just randomly selecting words like a souped-up Markov chain?

We’re not randomly selecting but probabilistically predicting. Haven’t you noticed you predict the next word people will say with very high [________]?

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

#170

Post by arbuge » Tue, Feb 07, 2023, 2:49 AM UTC

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…

Indeed, one might conclude that predicting what to do in the next moment (analogous to what to write next in the case of ChatGPT, which can only write) is all we do as humans. At every moment of the day, we are taking all our past experiences and the present as inputs, and predicting what we should do next based on that.