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ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

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Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#241

Post by buildsjets »

buildsjets wrote: post #64
bunbunbun wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As if to say: I heard you like AI outputs, so I put an AI output through another AI so you can have the AI output of an AI’s output

Actually, I HAVE asked ChatGPT to write a prompt for DALL.E 2, and it really did work better that the prompts I wrote myself.

For full context: my engineering director at the ol' airplane factory asked a colleague to "Make a presentation that tells the story of technology xyz without using words."

Buildsjets: Describe the future of technology xyz without using words.

ChatGPT3: I'm sorry, but it is not possible to describe the future of technology xyz without using words. Language is a necessary tool for communication, and words are an essential part of language. Without words, it would be impossible to convey meaning or convey any information at all.

Buildsjets: Describe a picture that depicts the future of technology xyz.

ChatGPT3: In the picture, the sky is a bright blue, with a few clouds scattered here and there. In the distance, a sleek and modern airplane is flying through the air, leaving a trail of white vapor behind it. The trail is not the usual smoky exhaust, but rather a stream of clean, white vapor that quickly dissipates into the air.

On the ground below, a group of people are standing and looking up at the airplane with smiles on their faces. They are dressed in clean, modern clothing, and they all look happy and healthy.

In the background, there is a city skyline, with tall, futuristic-looking buildings that stretch towards the sky. The city looks clean and vibrant, with green trees and plants dotting the landscape.

Overall, the picture portrays a future where technology xyz is the norm, allowing people to travel and explore the world without harming the environment. It is a future filled with hope, prosperity, and clean air.

That is MUCH more detailed image prompt than I have the creativity to generate, and with some tinkering it produced some pretty good content on DALL.E 2.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#242

Post by msla »

majormajor wrote: post #161
msla wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they can't afford an actual subject-matter expert for their articles?

In a world where supposedly more-tech-industry-aware writers are talking about what "ChatGPT believes" and other such personification... show me a better article.

Any article on how ChatGPT works would be much better.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#243

Post by msla »

zetazzed wrote: post #17

Damn, I hate to plug products on HN, but I'd say that the New Yorker is the one subscription I've loved maintaining throughout my life. First got it right out of college and appreciate it 20 years later. Everyone is publishing think pieces about ChatGPT - yawn. But only the New Yorker said, hmm, how about if we get frickin' Ted Chiang to write a think piece? (It is predictably very well written.)

After reading the article, it is obviously a publicity piece for the author, and not to be taken seriously.

Is that the best the New Yorker can offer?

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#244

Post by msla »

thundergolfer wrote: post #45

> ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it. “‘blur’ tool for paragraphs” is such a good way of describing the most prominent and remarkable skill of ChatGPT. It is fun, but so obviously trades off against what makes paragraphs great. It is apt that this essay against Chat…

> “‘blur’ tool for paragraphs” is such a good way of describing the most prominent and remarkable skill of ChatGPT.

In what way? How, technically, is it anything like that?

These comments sound like full-court publicity press for this article. I wonder why.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#245

Post by msla »

nneonneo wrote: post #84

This is very well written, and probably one of my favorite takes on the whole ChatGPT thing. This sentence in particular: > Indeed, a useful criterion for gauging a large-language model’s quality might be the willingness of a company to use the text that it generates as training material for a new model. It seems obvious that future GPTs should not be trained on the current GPT's output, just as future DALL-Es should…

It's written by someone who clearly doesn't understand the topic.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#246

Post by eldritch_4ier »

secabeen wrote: post #48
criddell wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's more like talking to a person. If somebody asked me how heap sort works (my favorite sort!) I can sketch it out. If they ask me where I learned it, I really don't remember. Might be the Aho, Hopcroft, and Ullman book. I can't really say though.

Yes, and then I'll evaluate that answer by your reputation, either socially, organizationally, or publicly. I will value that summary differently if you are a random person on the street, a random person who works at a tech company, or a person wearing a name tag that says "Donald Knuth, Stanford University". ChatGPT has little reputation of its own, and produces such a broad swath of knowledge, it becomes "Jack of a…

The "jack of all trades, master of none" heuristic works well for humans because given our limited lifespans and rate we assimilate knowledge, it's nearly impossible for someone to be both.

ChatGPT in later iterations CAN be a jack of all trades AND a master of many (most? all?) of them.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#247

Post by TchoBeer »

vidarh wrote: post #171
wvenable wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JPEG relies of the limitations of human vision to make an image largely indistinguishable from the original. It specifically throws information away that we are less unlikely to notice. So yes, a good JPEG should be indistinguishable (to humans) from the original. Obviously the more you turn up the compression the harder that is.

It's not quite that straight-forward, though, in that there are two competing goals: Small size and looking as similar as possible to the original. We're explicitly willing trade accuracy for size. How much depends on the use, but sometimes we're willing to trade away so much quality that the artefacts are plainly visible. And we're willing to trade more accuracy for size when the artefacts doesn't distract . For som…

I don't think you disagree. The point is that JPEG has the constraint: make an image as similar as possible to the source image which not going over x kilobytes. LLMs have no similar constraint, so calling them "compression" is a false analogy; they're not trying to compress information, they're using their dataset to learn general facts about e.g. syntax and culture.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#248

Post by Chilko »

secabeen wrote: post #32

This is a decent summary. I've been thinking about how ChatGPT by it's very nature destroys context and source reputation. When I search for something on the Internet, I get a link to the original content, which I can then evaluate based on my knowledge and the reputation of the original source. Wikipedia is the same, with a big emphasis on citation. ChatGPT and other LLMs destroy that context and knowledge, giving m…

What's interesting is that Microsoft's implementation of ChatGPT in Bing seems to include linking to references, which is a good step forward in my opinion.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#249

Post by the_af »

Since this article was written by Ted Chiang, just for fun I asked ChatGPT to summarize the plot of "Understand".

Apparently ChatGPT thinks "Understand" is about the government who is pursuing someone called Gary Whittle who has superintelligence (well, at least it got one detail right). When challenged ("no, the government is not the antagonist, but there is one person...") ChatGPT amends its summary to this:

> "George Millwright is Gary Whittle's former supervisor and is depicted as being jealous of Gary's newfound abilities. He becomes obsessed with Gary and is determined to bring him down, even going so far as to threaten his family. George Millwright's actions drive much of the conflict in the story and serve as a reminder of the potential dangers of unchecked ambition and envy."

I'm honestly fascinated by ChatGPT's "hallucinations". I mean, it all makes perfect sense. Its summary is a potential scifi story -- albeit a poor, completely clichéd one -- but this is not at all what happens in "Understand"!

Text compression indeed.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#250

Post by kenmorechalfant »

msla wrote: post #244
thundergolfer wrote: post #45

> ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it. “‘blur’ tool for paragraphs” is such a good way of describing the most prominent and remarkable skill of ChatGPT. It is fun, but so obviously trades off against what makes paragraphs great. It is apt that this essay against Chat…

> “‘blur’ tool for paragraphs” is such a good way of describing the most prominent and remarkable skill of ChatGPT. In what way? How, technically, is it anything like that? These comments sound like full-court publicity press for this article. I wonder why.

Going back to the "sock of independence" example (/u/airstrike's comment for more context), ChatGPT's answer's accuracy is poor - but it's a funny question, and it gave a funny answer. So was it really a poor answer? My interpretation of their use of 'blur' as an analogy is that: it did not simply answer ACCURATELY in the STYLE of the DoC, it merged or "blurred/smudged together" the CONTENT and STYLE of the story and the DoC. It's not good at understanding the question or the context... and therefore, a lot of its answers feel "blurry".

"Wonder why"? Because, human thoughts, opinions and language are inherently blurry, right? That's my view. Plus, humans have a whole nervous system which has a lot of self-correcting systems (e.g. hormones) that ML AI doesn't yet account for if its goal is human-level intelligence.

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