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

How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

shkspr.mobi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 83 posts

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#21

Post by thefreeman »

fourseventy wrote: post #5

The Forer Effect can't make chatGPT generate syntactically correct and functional code snippets that I use every day at work.

Counter point that literally just bit me this morning. ChatGPT completely lied to me about the scaling properties of Kinesis. I was confused about the 1000 write / second but only 5 read / second throughput of a kinesis shard and was asking it a number of questions, including specifically if a batch read would count as only a single read operation. It explicitly told me that each record in the batch counted as an individual read. Most of the other information it gave me was accurate so I took this to be true.

Only the next day when I still couldn't wrap my head around why a real time processing system like be designed like this and did more google searching did I find it explicitly spelled out in the docs that a batch read counts as only a single read operation and can retrieve up to 10,000 records.

It's the first time I've been bit by this and it will definitely make me wary of any information it provides me in the future for technologies I am not intimately familiar with (at which point it's unlikely I'd need to consult it in the first place).

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#22

Post by agentultra »

reesul wrote: post #16

I agree with the other comments that this is a fairly useless article. Perhaps I’m looking too much into this specific example, but I fail to see how the entirety of AI’s success (per this title) is misrepresented due to its inability to provide a horoscope (good example by another comment) that’s specific to some person in question. We see a lot of articles that swing too far towards “AI will change everything!” jus…

> my favorite is generating and explaining code snippets for languages/libraries I’m not familiar with.

For me this is one of the more dangerous uses.

Humans are already pretty bad at detecting errors in code. Bertrand Meyer, an expert with some renown in formal methods, couldn’t find an error in a one-liner of Eiffel code generated by ChatGPT. What hope do programmers with less training have to recognize when ChatGPT has given them an incorrect summary?

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#23

Post by aimor »

Maybe it's something related. When I ask ChatGPT technical questions I get very confident answers that are often completely wrong. But setting aside the confidence aspect, I notice ChatGPT responses can be vague and widely applicable.

In one case I ask a question about X, and ChatGPT responds with an answer: Y because Z. Well Y is wrong, so I tell ChatGPT Y is wrong and I get a new answer: Not Y because Z.

In another case I ask a question about X, and I get an answer that talks endlessly about Z without ever giving the answer Y.

The reasoning all sounds good, it's relevant and useful, but the actual answer might as well be a Mad Lib.

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#24

Post by andai »

aimor wrote: post #23

Maybe it's something related. When I ask ChatGPT technical questions I get very confident answers that are often completely wrong. But setting aside the confidence aspect, I notice ChatGPT responses can be vague and widely applicable. In one case I ask a question about X, and ChatGPT responds with an answer: Y because Z. Well Y is wrong, so I tell ChatGPT Y is wrong and I get a new answer: Not Y because Z. In another…

It's the same issue of early AI art that looks about right until you take a closer look, then see that everything's kinda messed up.

That's my experience with most LLMs, especially LLaMA based ones. GPT-3.5 is better on this front (RLHF?) and GPT-4 is a lot better (massive model? More training?).

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#25

Post by lostmsu »

choeger wrote: post #13
fourseventy wrote: post #5

The Forer Effect can't make chatGPT generate syntactically correct and functional code snippets that I use every day at work.

Let me make this very clear: Generating syntactically correct code in various languages that also looks plausible is no small feat. It is, in fact, extremely impressive and will certainly have an impact on SE. But. Every single test I ran lead to functionally wrong designs from smallish memory errors in C (that hilariously ChatGPT was able to correct ND explain when pointed to) over misplaced/hallucinated methods in…

ChatGPT which version?

Even Copilot, which is a smaller model, generates working code most of the time.

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#26

Post by chongli »

Filligree wrote: post #7
fourseventy wrote: post #5

The Forer Effect can't make chatGPT generate syntactically correct and functional code snippets that I use every day at work.

The goalposts are moving so fast they're red-shifting.

The whole history of AI debates seems to be an exercise in goalpost-moving. Whether it's AI proponents or skeptics, no one can seem to agree on a stable benchmark. Personally, I think it's due to intelligence itself being ill-defined as a concept. How are we supposed to build something when we don't even agree on what it is we're trying to build?

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#27

Post by lostmsu »

scott_w wrote: post #19
Filligree wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goalposts are moving so fast they're red-shifting.

That’s not really an issue when we’re talking about AI. I said in a separate comment on the topic: intelligence is such a complicated thing that we seem to only be able to define it by pointing to things and saying “that’s not it.” If we didn’t move the goalposts, we’d have declared Stockfish to be full AI, despite it only being a chess-playing program, long ago.

Except in a few years you may realize it was "it" all along.

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#28

Post by ITB »

fourseventy wrote: post #5

The Forer Effect can't make chatGPT generate syntactically correct and functional code snippets that I use every day at work.

I think the interpretation is that there is a certain statistical distribution of statements that appear “more broadly true” than they are. I think there is some meat to this, even with code that works as intended. The degree of creativity might be lower than we perceive.

Re: How much of AI's recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

#30

Post by vsareto »

choeger wrote: post #13
fourseventy wrote: post #5

The Forer Effect can't make chatGPT generate syntactically correct and functional code snippets that I use every day at work.

Let me make this very clear: Generating syntactically correct code in various languages that also looks plausible is no small feat. It is, in fact, extremely impressive and will certainly have an impact on SE. But. Every single test I ran lead to functionally wrong designs from smallish memory errors in C (that hilariously ChatGPT was able to correct ND explain when pointed to) over misplaced/hallucinated methods in…

>But it definitely tells me that such a model cannot replace a developer.

Certainly not an average developer (however that's decided in C's culture). Not making any statements on skill of anyone here, but I'd bet it could replace the very low ends of skill as it is (GPT-4 and maybe Bard). I doubt there's too many of those kinds of developers though.

It's not a guaranteed positive for all languages/people, but it's farther along being useful as an enhancement technology than it is as replacement technology. I think it's making progress on both axes, but one is clearly ahead of the other and it's still possible it stops progress until other innovations are made.

Post reply on HN