Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists • Hacker News Board

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#161

Post by coliveira » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 7:27 PM UTC

plemer wrote: post #97

normie3000 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with passive?

Passive voice often adds length, impedes flow, and subtracts the useful info of who is doing something. Examples: * Active - concise, complete info: The manager approved the proposal. * Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager. * Passive - missing info: The proposal was approved. [by who?] Most experienced writers will use active unless they have a specific reason not to, e.g., to emphasize…

Many times this is exactly what we want: to emphasize the action instead of who is doing it. It turns out that technical writing is one of the main areas where we want this! So I have always hated this kind of blanket elimination of passive voice.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#162

Post by PlunderBunny » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 7:30 PM UTC

arscan wrote: post #120

normie3000 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with passive?

There was a time when Microsoft Word would treat the passive voice in your writing with the same level of severity as spelling errors or major grammatical mistakes. Drove me absolutely nuts in high school.

Eventually, a feature was added (see what I did there?) that allowed the type of document to be specified, and setting that to ‘scientific paper’ allowed passive voice to be written without being flagged as an error.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#163

Post by kragen » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 7:31 PM UTC

scubbo wrote: post #160

bryanlarsen wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Refusing 2/3rds of grammarly's suggestions flattens everything to the same style/voice?

No - that was implicitly in response to the sentence: > The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results.

I suspect that the disastrous results being envisioned are somewhat more severe than not being able to tell who wrote which memo. I understood the author to be suggesting things more like bankruptcy, global warfare, and extermination camps. But it's admittedly ambiguous.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#164

Post by graeme » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 7:32 PM UTC

carlosjobim wrote: post #136

dontlikeyoueith wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they're not customers it doesn't matter at all what they think That kind of thinking is how you never get new customers and eventually fail as a business.

It is the kind of thinking that almost all businesses have. You have to focus on the actual products and services which you provide and do a good job at it, not chase after any and every person with an opinion. Down voters here on HN seem to live in a egocentric fantasy world, where every human being in the outside world live to serve them. But the reality is that business owners and leaders spend their whole day thi…

If people repeatedly have a misunderstanding about or expectation of your business you need to address it though. An llm hallucination is based on widespread norms in training data and it is at least worth asking "would this be a good idea?"

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#165

Post by PlunderBunny » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 7:33 PM UTC

bityard wrote: post #105

normie3000 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with passive?

In addition to the points already made, passive voice is painfully boring to read. And it's literally everywhere in technical documentation, unfortunately.

It has its place. We were told to use passive voice when writing scientific document (lab reports, papers etc).

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#166

Post by skygazer » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 7:35 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #30

I've found this to be one of the most useful ways to use (at least) GPT-4 for programming. Instead of telling it how an API works, I make it guess, maybe starting with some example code to which a feature needs to be added. Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. Then I change the API so that its code works. Conversely, I sometimes present it with some existing code and ask it what it does…

You’re fuzzing the API, unusually, before it’s written.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#167

Post by guluarte » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 7:35 PM UTC

The problem with LLMs is that in 99% of cases, they work fine, but in 1% of cases, they can be a huge liability, like sending people to wrong domains or, worse, phishing domains.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#168

Post by jcranmer » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 7:37 PM UTC

normie3000 wrote: post #90

suzzer99 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. IMO this has always been the killer use case for AI—from Google Maps to Grammarly. I discovered Grammarly at the very last phase of writing my book. I accepted maybe 1/3 of its suggestions, which is pretty damn good considering my book had already been edited by me dozens of times AND professionally copy-edited. But if I'd have accepted all of Gram…

What's wrong with passive?

There's nothing wrong with the passive voice.

The problem is that many people have only a poor ability to recognize the passive voice in the first place. This results in the examples being clunky, wordy messes that are bad because they're, well, clunky and wordy, and not because they're passive--indeed, you've often got only a fifty-fifty chance of the example passive voice actually being passive in the first place.

I'll point out that the commenter you're replying to used the passive voice, as did the one they responded to, and I suspect that such uses went unnoticed. Hell, I just rewrote the previous sentence to use the passive voice, and I wonder how many people think recognized that in the first place let alone think it worse for being so written.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#169

Post by jll29 » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 7:37 PM UTC

suzzer99 wrote: post #53

kragen wrote: post #30

I've found this to be one of the most useful ways to use (at least) GPT-4 for programming. Instead of telling it how an API works, I make it guess, maybe starting with some example code to which a feature needs to be added. Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. Then I change the API so that its code works. Conversely, I sometimes present it with some existing code and ask it what it does…

> Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. IMO this has always been the killer use case for AI—from Google Maps to Grammarly. I discovered Grammarly at the very last phase of writing my book. I accepted maybe 1/3 of its suggestions, which is pretty damn good considering my book had already been edited by me dozens of times AND professionally copy-edited. But if I'd have accepted all of Gram…

> The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results

Thanks for your words of wisdom, which touch on a very important other point I want to raise: often, we (i.e., developers, researchers) construct a technology that would be helpful and "net benign" if deployed as a tool for humans to use, instead of deploying it in order to replace humans. But then along comes a greedy business manager who reckons recklessly that using said technology not as a tool, but in full automation mode, results will be 5% worse, but save 15% of staff costs; and they decide that that is a fantastic trade-off for the company - yet employees may lose and customers may lose.

The big problem is that developers/researchers lose control of what they develop, usually once the project is completed if they ever had control in the first place. What can we do? Perhaps write open source licenses that are less liberal?

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#170

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 07, 2025, 7:40 PM UTC

jll29 wrote: post #169

suzzer99 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. IMO this has always been the killer use case for AI—from Google Maps to Grammarly. I discovered Grammarly at the very last phase of writing my book. I accepted maybe 1/3 of its suggestions, which is pretty damn good considering my book had already been edited by me dozens of times AND professionally copy-edited. But if I'd have accepted all of Gram…

> The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results Thanks for your words of wisdom, which touch on a very important other point I want to raise: often, we (i.e., developers, researchers) construct a technology that would be helpful and "net benign" if deployed as a tool for humans to use, instead of deploying it in order to replace humans.…

[deleted]