Earlier quoted context omitted.
That and I bet the generic boilerplate code that co-pilot produces is on average much better than the boiler plate code that the average dev might use. So it removes the lower level work.
It is. There are a lot of problems with copilot, but one magical thing is the way it rewards best practices like thinking through what a function is supposed to do before starting to write it. If you write a good comment describing name, inputs, outputs, logic, and exceptions, the "generate code from comment" capability is kind of amazing. I'm a terrible, hacky programmer, and it has wholly converted me to documentat…
Certified 100% AI-free organic content
231–240 of 275 posts
Re: Certified 100% AI-free organic content
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
My guess is that ChatGPT is going to solve the SEO spam problem by changing the way we search for things. Instead of searching for webpages that have information about a topic, we're going to ask an AI. It'll tell you what the pros and cons of wedding insurance are, and because eventually it'll have access to your calendar, it'll tailor that answers to the specifics of the fact that you're having a destination weddin…
> Instead of searching for webpages that have information about a topic, we're going to ask an AI. I think this is probably true for some people, the same sort of person who sees something on Facebook and assumes that it's true. [1] But there are quite a lot of people for whom "according to whom?" is the next question after being told something factual. For them, I think search's job is to find relevant sources and g…
Perfect example I found a while back: If you know Chinese or Japanese, ask ChatGPT for the stroke order of a certain character and watch how confidently it tells you how to draw a nonsensical scribble.
Even when you ask it for the stroke order of 一, it will tell you to draw a vertical line!
Re: Certified 100% AI-free organic content
#233The best part is the “gluten free” anti AI crowd will be left in the dust. They may think they’re being classy snobs but being against AI is going to be tantamount to saying you eat crayons and don’t read well.
Re: Certified 100% AI-free organic content
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kinda? AI is often limited in ways we aren't, but it also trivially consumes more than we can in a lifetime. "Just text" in the case of GPT-3, but also it is trained on a token count exceeding the number of times an average synapse in a human brain will fire in a lifetime. It can still get biases from the training set; while I'm not sure if "group think" is quite the right phrase, it does seem to "want" everyone to g…
Consuming and producing vast amounts of information is what makes the problem potentially worse than human groupthink. It enables the situation where AI is mostly consuming information produced by AI. That's the feedback loop I'm calling "groupthink." It could end up diverging from reality in the same way that chaotic functions diverge widely due to tiny differences in the initial conditions. The same problem exists…
While I think I get your point, I'd call that failure mode "believing it's own BS", and (perhaps I'm just being cynical here) I think humans collectively also have this failure mode.
That said, there's an old saying: "To err is human, to really foul up requires a computer" — it is quite possible for a machine, with merely the same category of flaws we have and no others, to be really bad for the world just because it's really fast and doesn't sleep.
Re: Certified 100% AI-free organic content
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Devs can use their noggins to check whether copilot’s output is decent or not. It’s not a given that people will use it automatically.
I think many developers of today agree. Todays programmers can see copilot output and probably think “well that’s not optimal”. Fast forward five years, new CS grads are using Copilot 3.0, and are used to specific auto-completes that copilot gives for certain tasks, as they may have never needed to go beyond some of the more basic suggestions. It “feels” like an older programmer seeing a younger web dev and going “yo…
The airline industry has talked about this, of course, and adoption of robotic surgery has opened up a whole new training problem, because its escape hatches when it goes wrong or can't complete a procedure is often "complete the surgery manually". Which is fine on Day 1 of robotic surgery, but what about day 2 when surgeons typically don't have hundreds of similar procedures under their belts? And where the only time they're called on to exercise the skill is in difficult edge cases?
We have basically turned driving a standard transmission into a weird old person quirk or niche enthusiant skill in the United States. If an automatic transmission required a similar manual fallback or check, how well would that work? Well, it would work fine if basically everyone already had a lot of practice driving a manual--but now? It wouldn't work well at all. Of course, automatic transmission don't fail like that, and are a lot better at switching gears than AI assistants are at generating code. I worry about the semi-automated approach to self-driving, where the driver may not actually have currency with their driving skill, and where--in the instance that it's necessary--a driver has to react to more complicated situations (they don't have practice with the simple ones, and they have to react not to a hazard but to their car's failure to react to a hazard).
Re: Certified 100% AI-free organic content
#236> Published content will be later used to train subsequent models, and being able to distinguish AI from human input may be very valuable going forward I find this to be a particularly interesting problem in this whole debacle. Could we end up having AI quality trend downwards due to AI ingesting its own old outputs and reinforcing bad habits? I think it's a particular risk for text generation. I've already run into…
As someone in SEO, I've been pretty disgusted by the desire for site owners to want to use AI-generated content. There are various opinions on this, of course, but I got into SEO out of interest in the "organic web" vs. everything being driven by ads. Love the idea of having AI-Free declarations of content as it could / should help to differentiate organic content from generated content. It would be very interesting…
Re: Certified 100% AI-free organic content
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But if they depend on it and feel the real-world impact of a confidently wrong answer, they're going to treat it as a human that's untrustworthy. A blowhard, a liar, a fool. Maybe that's good. There are glib liars on the net, and not all of them are ChatGPT. If people learn to be skeptical of fine-sounding content on the net, maybe they'll apply it to humans, too.
Yes, but how would you practically do that? The most basic technique for estimating trust in an answer today is to check the sources, see who said it, why, who is agreeing with them, etc. It some AI just spits out an answer without any references, you cannot do that. You either have to blindly trust the answer, which will be dangerous, or you'll have to blindly distrust the answer, at which point the AI will be usele…
Step 2: Sources? Check them. Do they exist at all? Do they say what the thing in question says they say?
Step 3: Check for other (non-cited) sources that confirm what the cited sources say. Check for other sources that dispute it.
Re: Certified 100% AI-free organic content
#238> Published content will be later used to train subsequent models, and being able to distinguish AI from human input may be very valuable going forward I find this to be a particularly interesting problem in this whole debacle. Could we end up having AI quality trend downwards due to AI ingesting its own old outputs and reinforcing bad habits? I think it's a particular risk for text generation. I've already run into…
> Published content will be later used to train subsequent models, and being able to distinguish AI from human input may be very valuable going forward Every discussion on AI take the example of ChatGPT and its inherent flaws but AI-generated content doesn't have to be dull and low quality. One question that bother me is does it really matter? If AI-generated content is on par with Human-made or even better does it m…
Will be a great question when we can't tell the difference.
Re: Certified 100% AI-free organic content
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So now you need something like ChatGPT to cut through the noise? I once employed a journalist to write about the pros and cons of wedding insurance. Just to give you a clue how long ago this was, it was a unique article at the time. Many years years later, every article you will read about wedding insurance (there will be many thousands) is around 90% similar in style and content to the one I paid for. I dare say y…
My guess is that ChatGPT is going to solve the SEO spam problem by changing the way we search for things. Instead of searching for webpages that have information about a topic, we're going to ask an AI. It'll tell you what the pros and cons of wedding insurance are, and because eventually it'll have access to your calendar, it'll tailor that answers to the specifics of the fact that you're having a destination weddin…
What about creating new, relevant, interesting content that no-one will ever see because search no-longer exists? Will site owners continue to do it knowing AI will crawl it, and never send traffic? Probably....not?
How do LLMs of the future get better if website owners are no longer incentivized to create content?
Re: Certified 100% AI-free organic content
#240> One of my favorite products is “100% Fat-Free Pickled Cucumbers Fit (Gluten Free), “ which I once saw at the grocery store. On my first fligh to the US, in the 90's, a rather obese lady in the row in front of me asked the flight attendant: "Excuse me. Do you have fat-free water?" The flight attendant hesitated a split second, her face not moving an inch. Then she smiled and replied: "We certainly have fat-free wate…