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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

#231

Post by kristianc »

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…

> 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.

Indeed, ChatGPT produces bullshit because that’s the bullshit it’s been trained on.

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

#232

Post by rojobuffalo »

fenomas wrote: post #143

It's so weird to me when apparently tech-savvy people say ChatGPT "lies", or call it a bullshit generator and so on. I mean - when you ask StableDiffusion to draw a dog astronaut, everyone gets that the image it returns is made-up, right? Nobody expects the AI to return only "true" images of existing things - it was trained on fictional images as well as photographs, and people understand that it can imagine new thin…

Do you mean dog astronaut as an example of a lie? Because there have been dog astronauts.

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

#233

Post by sverona »

sfpotter wrote: post #162
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…

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…

I suppose what I mean to say is I'm fucked.

Suffice to say I exist today because of other trans people on the Internet and a stack of medications. You may be right; I cannot imagine an "alternative means of structuring society" in which someone like me can exist for long.

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

#234

Post by Existenceblinks »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #112

It's a tool that isn't going away. But even Yann Lecun has pointed out that "A house cat has way more common sense and understanding of the world than any LLM". That's fundamentally the real issue. LLMs are far from even animal level "cognition" in their ability to solve novel problems. A lot of people seem to vastly underestimate the number of novel problems they solve on a regular basis. In practice, what we're see…

I honestly find animals are generally very smart. Maybe because they are living things, evolved and born to be survived.

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

#235

Post by fenomas »

neltnerb wrote: post #183
fenomas wrote: post #143

It's so weird to me when apparently tech-savvy people say ChatGPT "lies", or call it a bullshit generator and so on. I mean - when you ask StableDiffusion to draw a dog astronaut, everyone gets that the image it returns is made-up, right? Nobody expects the AI to return only "true" images of existing things - it was trained on fictional images as well as photographs, and people understand that it can imagine new thin…

Because it is conversational and appears to answers direct questions. The image generators accept a prompt, not a question, so we don't expect an answer. ChatGPT generates responses to prompts that make it sound like it is answering a question that is posed. Ask ChatGPT a question. The mere fact that I can fairly reasonably pose that as "asking it a question" is why people get confused. It's very easy to interact wit…

I think this is a big part of it, yeah - I don't remember people calling earlier GPT models dishonest, when the UI presentation was of the AI returning a continuation of the input prompt.

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

#236

Post by EamonnMR »

csomar wrote: post #181
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.

It delves into conspiracy theory. It ignores that these kind of organizations are still not possible (bunch of elite powerful people making plans for all of earth in order to control them). Most of these phenomena are emergent of human/capital/government interactions; they are not planned.

Can you point to where it engages in conspiracy theory?

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

#237

Post by dcow »

bglazer wrote: post #211
LAC-Tech wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's hard because the author is just generating poorly disguised backlinks to other peoples' thoughts. Follow some of the links and see for yourself e.g. Stop feeding the hype and start resisting (which I also read and lacks any explanation of exactly how one might resist if one was so inclined) which links to the same CogSci2022 talk as the author does on resisting the dehumanization of technology. All three of which cite the resistance slogan Stochastic Parrots from a paper published in the proceedings of the Fairness Accountability and Transparency conference. Sociologists don't like large language models because they have the potential to make humans do less menial labor [which isn't good for a capitalist society because it frees humans up to think]. I mean I have no idea why these people feel so threatened by a large language model, but outrage porn gets clicks.

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

#238

Post by tambourine_man »

emodendroket wrote: post #225
tambourine_man wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re not randomly selecting but probabilistically predicting. Haven’t you noticed you predict the next word people will say with very high [________]?

Within a sentence sure. And often arguments are familiar enough that even an essay I’ll know where it’s going. But we do occasionally have original ideas.

I don’t think we know what original really is to make a meaningful distinction between derivative work.

With enough mixing and matching and a tiny bit of randomness, I bet a lot of original thoughts could be created.

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

#239

Post by delhanty »

delhanty wrote: post #177
Gatsky wrote: post #56

> However, as I spell out in my book, the concept of AGI is inseparable from the kind of hierarchy of intelligence that has underpinned ideas of innate supremacy since the days of empire and colonialism. I think this line discredits the entire article, which was already a few obvious points blown at gale force into the reader’s ear.

Indeed It seems that, like ChatGPT, the author is also a bullshit generator, and therefore, by his own definition, unintelligent.

As an aside, I wrote my previous comment in “stochastic parrot” mode.

That is, I scattered commas where it felt natural to breathe.

Then, I edited it. Maybe, there was a non-essential clause in there. Also, possibly, there was an Oxford comma. Or maybe not! I’m not really clear about English grammar rules. But what this stochastic parrot says is usually intelligible to other English speakers.

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

#240

Post by aldousd666 »

est wrote: post #228

I have a vague feeling that graphics and text AI are recognizing textures rather than structures. One funny example is dogs disguised as panda: https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/5cd73e1221000059007aca5... because it's black and white. I am sure AI would gradually solve this problem but this makes me wonde, could AIs really "understand" shapes and structures, narrative logic, or even "reasoning" like humans do?

Convolutional filters can be visually interrogated. You can see exactly which hits it makes at every layer of each filter. There's some cool videos on YouTube illustrating it. You can't tell as the end user, but the developers don't have to theorize about what is matching. Not with the tools we have these days.
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