Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

danmcquillan.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 425 posts

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

#191

Post by LAC-Tech »

bglazer wrote: post #141
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 langua…

If authors want people to read their articles they should learn to write.

Let's put snarkiness to one side - the article was shit. You know it, I know it, and everyone else knows it. Poorly written, with the same dumb thoughts - and I use the term loosely - I can get from any spoiled sophmore at any university in the western world.

The only reason it got any traction was a clickbait title about a hot topic. So I feel perfectly OK about shitting all over it. If you don't, flag me. It's the internet, it really doesn't matter.

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

#192

Post by Gnatworth »

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?

Small and Medium-sized Enterprise

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

#193

Post by dcow »

pvg wrote: post #159
dcow wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to read the article too and found it both visually unpleasant and intellectually unfocused. GP is making the rather comically clever point that ChatGPT is useful to summarize text that might be difficult for humans to parse, even a text claiming that ChatGPT is a useless model only capable of spewing Islamophobic speech and in need of burying. I mean the article ends on some tangent about reactionary solution…

I tried to read the article too and found it both visually unpleasant and intellectually unfocused. That's fine but then you're probably not in a position to have curious conversation about it. Which is also fine! But the solution to that is to find something else that's interesting to you, rather than to gunk up the thread for the people who are interested in discussing the piece.

Despite the qualities I ascribed to it, I actually read the piece. That's why I chuckled at the satire of having ChatGPT summarize it. I thought it sufficiently concise and every so slightly poignant commentary, daresay curious. I haven't disparaged anybody else for their own curious conversation, have I? If you'd like to discuss whether, "The structural injustices and supremacist perspectives layered into AI put it firmly on the path of eugenicist solutions to social problems.", well, be my guest.

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

#194

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#195

Post by hypertele-Xii »

esjeon wrote: post #138
hsuduebc2 wrote: post #95

"ChatGPT isn't really new but simply an iteration of the class war that's been waged since the start of the industrial revolution." I'm scared too but this is literally neo-ludite sperging.

This is not entirely ludite. Massive AI models has to be trained on the massive amount of data from the internet, which is built by the entirety of the humankind. However, the profit from those models is not being systemically redistributed to the society. Those AI companies are standing right on a copyright gray zone, and are abusing people's goodwill to benefit only a select few. The social capital that built the i…

The Internet has already become a misery filled with low quality contents injected with user-tracking ads.

Adding "AI-generated" into the phrase doesn't really change much. If you make the argument of scale matters, then I think that'll also democratize art. Photography didn't put artists out of commission, it brought realism as an art form to the hands of the masses.

There's plenty of creativity left to be had post-AI. Now an entirely new class of people enter the realm of multi-disciplinary art, since they can compensate for personal deficit in side-fields.

The profits from these models go into running them. They don't fit on consumer-grade hardware.

However, I do believe that society should subsidise art, and distribute automated wealth somewhat evenly, so I don't even disagree with you. I'm from such society and it's pretty great.

"The Internet" is just other people's computers. Don't like AI content? Don't visit those sites. Not every site has ads, either. Hosting is the cheapest it's ever been. It's a curation and reputation issue.

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

#196

Post by peteradio »

tambourine_man wrote: post #169
emodendroket wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 [________]?

Sandwiches!

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

#197

Post by waselighis »

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?

> Haven’t you ever had the experience of knowing exactly what you want to say but struggling to find the word for it?

I came here to suggest this exact thing. Humans clearly have some understanding of the meaning behind words and sentences. However, I think it's wrong, an overgeneralization, to suggest that ChatGPT is just statistically predicting the next word. While that may technically be true, I think buried deep within it has ways of modeling/encoding common concepts and ideas, maybe similar to how a human models concepts and ideas in their mind.

Then there's the whole problem of consciousness, but I won't get into that here.

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

#198

Post by furyofantares »

Is there any way to get ChatGPT to decorate its document with a heat map of how probable it thinks each token is? I know it's always choosing the token it thinks is most probable, but would this approach work to have a more cold/blue document or individual token when it's bullshitting and a hotter document when it's more likely to be reporting widely repeated content?

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

#199

Post by strickman »

"pseudo-authoritative"

Psychometrics is the crown jewel of the field of psychology. There is no controversy among the psychometrists themselves that the body of academic work is numerate, correct, and repeatable. The author has chosen moral crusade over the quest for truth.

A good place to start learning about the field - https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/index.html

As far as exploring the dangers of AI and how to avoid them, I recommend Nick Bostrom's "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies"

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

#200

Post by henryteeare »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #189
sfpotter wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> more or less devoid of academic jargon Really? What the heck does this mean: > Contemporary AI, as I argue in my book, is an assemblage for automatising administrative violence and amplifying austerity. ChatGPT is a part of a reality distortion field that obscures the underlying extractivism Administrative violence? Reality distortion field? Extractivism? What is it with the trend to end so many words with “-ism” t…

> And what is it with the trend to end so many words with “-ism” these days?

According to wikipedia[0], "isms" have been derided since the mid-19th century at least.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-ism

Post reply on HN