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Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

holovaty.com

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Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#201
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

I think the issue here would be that we don't really know just how widespread, nor the impact of the issue.

Ok, sure, maybe this feature was worth having?

But if some people start sending bad requests your way because they can't or only program poorly, it doesn't make sense to potentially degrade the service for your successful paying customers...

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

29% overhead (two of seven words) adds up.

great, someone can do math, but it is not awkward nor wordy.

It's wordy to a high school teacher. Like using "nor" incorrectly it will cause some people's brows to furrow. Always best to be aware of the rules you choose to break.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#204
post #160

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.

Criticisms are almost always read by the reader as criticisms of the OP's actions. If you're agreeing with somebody as you appear to be here, you should probably make that more explicit.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#205
post #190
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had entire conversations in E-Prime. I found it an interestingly brain-twisting exercise, but still managed to smuggle in all kinds of covert presumptions of equivalence and essential (or analytic) attributes, even though E-Prime's designers intended it to force you to question such things.

Would you mind identifying a few of the "smuggled presumptions"?

Well, I had those conversations a long time ago, but we can describe some general patterns.

We can smuggle in presumptions through the use of attributive adjectives. In the above comment (which you might have noticed I wrote in E-Prime) I mentioned smuggling in "covert presumptions" of "essential attributes". If I had instead written that in assembly language as follows:

    I smuggled in presumptions of attributes.
    The presumptions were covert.
    The attributes were essential.
it would clearly violate E-Prime. And that forces you to ask: does he intend "covert" to represent an essential attribute of those presumptions, or merely a temporary or circumstantial state relative to a particular temporal context? Did he intend "essential" to limit the subjects of discourse to only certain attributes (the essential ones rather than the accidental ones), and within what scope do those attributes have this purported essentiality? Universally, in every possible world, or only within the confines of a particular discourse?

In these particular cases, though, I smuggled in no such presumptions! Both adjectives merely delimit the topic of discourse, to clarify that it does not pertain to overt presumptions or to presumptions of accidental attributes. (As I understand it, Korzybski objects to the "is of predication" not because no predicates exist objectively, but because he doubts the essentiality of any predicates.)

But you can use precisely the same structure to much more nefarious rhetorical ends. Consider, "Chávez kicked the squalid capitalists out of the country." Well, he kicked out all the capitalists! We've smuggled in a covert presumption of essentiality, implying that capitalism entails squalidity. And E-Prime's prohibition on the copula did not protect us at all. If anything, we lose much rhetorical force if we have to explicitly assert their squalidity, using an explicit statement that invites contradiction:

    The capitalists are squalid.
We find another weak point at alternative linking verbs. It clearly violates E-Prime to say, "Your mother's face is uglier than a hand grenade," and rightly so, because it projects the speaker's subjective perceptions out onto the world. Korzybski (or Bourland) would prefer that we say, for example, "Your mother's face looks uglier to me than a hand grenade," or possibly, "I see your mother's face as uglier than a hand grenade," thus relativizing the attribute to a single speaker's perception. (He advocated clarity of thought, not civility.)

But we can cheat in a variety of ways that still smuggle in that judgment of essentiality!

    Your mother's face turned uglier than a hand grenade.
We can argue this one. Maybe tomorrow, or after her plastic surgery, it will turn pretty again, rather than having ugliness as an essential attribute.

    Your mother's face became uglier than a hand grenade.
This goes a little bit further down the line; "became" presupposes a sort of transformation of essence rather than a mere change of state. And English has a variety of verbs that we can use like that. For example, "find", as in "Alsup found Dahmer guilty." Although in that case "find" asserts a state (presumably Dahmer became guilty at some specific time in the past), we can also use it for essential attributes:

    I find your mother's face uglier than a hand grenade.
Or lie, more or less, about the agent or speaker:

    Your mother's face finds itself uglier than a hand grenade.
And of course we can retreat to attributive adjectives again:

    Your mother has a face uglier than a hand grenade.
    Your mother comes with an uglier face than a hand grenade.
Or we can simply omit the prepositional phrase from the statement of subjective perception, thus completely erasing the real agent:

    Your mother's face looks uglier [...] than a hand grenade.
Korzybski didn't care about the passive voice much, though; E-Prime makes it more difficult but, mostly, not intentionally. As an exception, erasing the agent through the passive voice can misrepresent the speaker's subjective perception as objective:

    Your mother's face is found uglier than a hand grenade.
But that still works if we use any of the alternative, E-Prime-permitted passive-voice auxiliary verbs:

    Your mother's face gets found uglier than a hand grenade.
As Bourland said, I have "transform[ed] [my] opinions magically into god-like pronouncements on the nature of things".

As another example, notice all the times I've used "as" here. Many of these times smuggle in a covert assertion of essential attributes or even of identity!

But I found it very interesting to notice these things when E-Prime forced me to rethink how I would say them with the copula. It seems like just the kind of mental exercise to heighten my attention to implicit assumptions of identity and essentiality that Korzybski intended.

I wrote the above in E-Prime, by the way. Just for fun.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#206
post #169

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.…

You're trying to put out a forest fire with an eyedropper.

Stock your underground bunkers with enough food and water for the rest of your life and work hard to persuade the AI that you're not a threat. If possible, upload your consciousness to a starwisp and accelerate it out of the Solar System as close to lightspeed as you can possibly get it.

Those measures might work. (Or they might be impossible, or insufficient.) Changing your license won't.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#207
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the missing info is obvious, irrelevant, or intentionally not disclosed, so "The proposal was approved" can be better. Informally we often say, "They approved the proposal," in such cases, or "You approve the proposal" when we're talking about a future or otherwise temporally indefinite possibility, but that's not acceptable in formal registers. Unfortunately, the resulting correlation between the passive v…

Yep, just like tritones in music, there is a place for passive voice in writing. But also like tritones, the best general advice is that they should be avoided.

That doesn't make sense. It's like saying that the best general advice about which way to turn when you're driving is to turn right. From your comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493308, and from the fact that you used the passive voice in your comment ("they should be avoided") apparently without noticing, it appears that the reason you have this opinion is that you don't know what the passive voice is in the first place.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You could improve this comment by rewriting it in the active voice, like this: “I am painfully bored by reading passive voice”.

"Is painfully boring" is not the passive voice. I suggest reading https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#209
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this is a "bare passive" like the beginning of "The day's work [being] done, they made their way back to the farmhouse," one of the bare-passive examples at your link. An analogous construction would be, "The points already [being] made, I ceased harassing the ignorant". But in "In addition to the points already made" this case "the point already made" is not a clause; it's a noun phrase, the object of t…

"In addition to the points that have already been made"

I agree that that has the same meaning, but I think it may have a different grammatical structure, with an entire subordinate clause that was missing from the original. Since the voice of a verb is a grammatical rather than semantic question, this seems relevant; "in addition to the points people have already made" is also (probably) semantically equivalent but unquestionably uses the active voice.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#210
post #141

Chatbot advertising has to be one of the most powerful forms of marketing yet. People are basically all the way through the sales pipeline when they land on your page.

makes me wonder how this will be commercialized in the future.. and i don't like it
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