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We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

danmcquillan.org

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

#211

Post by bglazer »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #191
bglazer wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You still haven’t referenced a single thought actually expressed in the article.

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

#212

Post by dcow »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #191
bglazer wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The bias and motive is also obnoxious. The author is very clearly generating backlinks to other pseudo-academics in some postmodern anti "AI" résistance. It's just regurgitation of other peoples' original commentary.

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

#213

Post by osigurdson »

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…

Amazing that we have had enough nukes to nearly wipe out humanity for over 50 years and our primary concern at the moment is a 4000 token limit LLM. Humans have always been terrible at risk assessment I suppose.

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

#214

Post by kristianc »

fenomas wrote: post #209
kristianc wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that premise stands. If I ask ChatGPT to write a poem about Sherlock Holmes fighting a mermaid it will happily do so, and I think most users would agree that it'd be a failure mode if it refused. Isn't it more the case that people are expecting it to sometimes be an artist and other times be a true-fact database, and assuming the AI will know which one they want?

No, because inherent in them asking ChatGPT to write them a poem about Sherlock Holmes is that they’re asking ChatGPT to write something fictional and artistic.

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

#215

Post by tambourine_man »

waselighis wrote: post #197
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?

> 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…

>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

Right, maybe meaning and concepts are just “things that usually go together” with different levels of distance.

We’re comparing our minds, which we know very little of, to LLM, which are blackboxes. It seems like a lot of certainty in face of such vast ignorance.

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

#216

Post by akomtu »

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…

A token generator corresponds to reflexes: a fuzzy hash table of situations and responses. Cats and dogs have that.

Assigning meanings to tokens and establishing relationships between them is where intelligence begins. GPT continues sequence CGGA with T because there is a similar sequence in its dataset, but we interpret T as a tree and see how this meaning relates to A. I believe GPT will solve this problem to some extent in 10 years and will finally earn its real AI badge.

Above it there is abstract mind that only top scientists use to some extent.

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

#217

Post by lolinder »

herpdyderp wrote: post #73
fintechie wrote: post #39

> ChatGPT is, in technical terms, a 'bullshit generator'. This bs generator speeded up my coding by 10-20x. It's like a superpower... not talking about ChatGPT specifically but its stochastic parrot cousin (Copilot).

How does Copilot help you code faster? I've watched some coworkers use it but it appears to be more distraction than help, as they accept CoPilot suggestions and then have to rewrite it all anyway.

It helps me a ton, but I suspect that's because I disabled auto-suggest, so it only gives me a suggestion when I specifically ask. I know by now what kinds of problems it's good at, so I can selectively prompt it when I know I'm working on something that it will able to do faster.

One example is when working on a front end form in Vue or React: if I have a bunch of variables in the component state and create a form tag, Copilot is great at creating all of the inputs with the correct bindings and input component types, so I'll usually prompt it after creating the first one by hand as an example.

Since I'm selectively prompting it instead of just letting it suggest left and right, I also find it helpful to sometimes write out a quick comment explaining what it is that I want in more detail than the function name can provide, then prompt it on the next line after the comment. That often helps to get better results, though I'm still careful to read through everything.

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

#218

Post by root_axis »

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…

I won't speak for what's "all the way down", but on whatever level humans perform reflective reasoning, it's self-evident that we don't simply "predict the next word" in the way a LLM does.

Whether or not a LLM is capable of "creating anything new" is a different argument altogether. "New" is in eye of the beholder and it is often said that nothing is new under the sun, but we already know that unthinking processes within nature are capable of producing beauty far and beyond anything that even the greatest human artist could ever hope to accomplish. That a large LLM is unthinking doesn't preclude it from producing art.

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

#219

Post by hypothesis »

makeitdouble wrote: post #149
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…

I think it comes in a situation that isn't great, but not so bad that it warranted drastic decisions: people are organically generating mountains of BS online everyday, including on blogs, official looking news sites etc. It's a pain, but as most of that is also generated by humans there's an opt out, saying "good guys" should band together to fight it and it would be fine. Now that we have ChatGPT and the like, manu…

> Basically, I'm hoping the thing that happened for spam happens for bullshit as well, and we get optimized tools to fight to manageable levels

Who is going to do that? I’m genuinely asking, because I’m old enough to remember that BigCo was totally fine to “enshitificate” their search for years and still barely anyone got close to them…

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

#220

Post by dools »

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…

Yes the odious part is not about how much labour it will eliminate but about how it will take a “commons” and enclose it much the same as pharmaceutical patents have done for folk remedies or the enclosure of common lands.
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