Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

danmcquillan.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 425 posts

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

#251

Post by bglazer »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #226
bglazer wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There was a single thought expressed in the article!?

Here's what I took from it: LLM's encode and are very adept at generating hate and bullshit. To counter that, big wealthy companies pay foreign workers low wages to do the very unpleasant task of reading and tagging the worst outputs from their LLM. This is a bad state of affairs and should be changed.

Yes, they frame this is in weird academic phrases. But, it's really not hard to get the point, even a tiny modicum of intellectual curiosity would get you there.

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

#252

Post by astroalex »

simple-thoughts wrote: post #134
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.

I disliked the article, but this particular quote is a relatively strong one. Colonialism, racism, and aristocratic structures were often justified by the idea that certain classes of people are more intelligent, enlightened, or were selected by dieties. Here the author is arguing that a similar process is happening with AI, where atrocious policies by people in power are justified by claiming the AI (which was train…

I think this is fascinating. The way that you stated this idea is more interesting and subtle than the original author's quote (to me).

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

#253

Post by tambourine_man »

emodendroket wrote: post #241
tambourine_man wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These things are hard to quantify but ChatGPT writing does have a certain anodyne character, in my mind, when I read it. Then again, I can't quantify it, I could be biased by my foreknowledge of the writing's provenance, and even if I'm right, the world is full of situations where bland writing is suitable or even desired.

It absolutely does. It’s wishy-washy nature is harder to disagree with, sounds more credible, etc.

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

#254

Post by saurik »

est wrote: post #221
AussieWog93 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if you're not a SME Small and Medium-sized Enterprise? What's SME in this instance?

This thread is weird. Are the comments made by bots unaware of each other? https://i.imgur.com/t6ilhR7.png

It is a question where people think they can get easy karma if they know the answer, and many people know the answer. That said, I also don't think even most people would know the answer. I further think it is a fair question as they provided the most common expansion and that's what you naively find on Google (so it isn't like the people who ask a question they could have already answered asking Google).

The next problem is that the Hacker News user interface doesn't encourage people to not cause duplicate answers within a short window: you load the full thread and spend 10-15 minutes reading it. At the time you loaded the page there aren't all of these other replies, so you may as well leave the first one.

You then click the reply button and start typing a reply--FWIW, for longer replies this step can matter even more than the previous one--and you are staring at the single now and are given just the empty box for your reply. When you are done you submit, and maybe you then notice it is a duplicate? You might not, based on where the page loads and how much you are paying attention. Even if you do, do you bother to delete it? I would, but I hate the duplication and also know how to delete my comments.

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

#255

Post by slowmovintarget »

richk449 wrote: post #246

* Saying, as the OpenAI CEO does, that we are all 'stochastic parrots' like large language models, statistical generators of learned patterns that express nothing deeper, is a form of nihilism. Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean it isnt true.

No, the fact that sometimes we're not guessing, and not blabbing random word salad, makes it untrue.

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

#256

Post by AussieWog93 »

est wrote: post #221
AussieWog93 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if you're not a SME Small and Medium-sized Enterprise? What's SME in this instance?

This thread is weird. Are the comments made by bots unaware of each other? https://i.imgur.com/t6ilhR7.png

I'd hazard a guess that they're all (helpful, thanks!) people, but just didn't refresh the page before replying.

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

#257

Post by emodendroket »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #117
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…

It's pseudo-understanding, but pseudo-understanding can still be useful, as we see with, say, image classification.

There's no doubt about that, but it is somewhat limited to cases where "close enough" is actually close enough (or it should be... the worst case is when these sorts of technologies are inappropriately deployed in scenarios where the level of certainty they can give is not enough).

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

#258

Post by sfpotter »

osigurdson wrote: post #222
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…

ChatGPT helps a lot but it is necessary to take everything with a grain of salt - so what? It still can save a lot of time. Just Alt-tab ChatGPT/Google. Adjust your mental model from what you think it should be to what it actually is.

The slippery slope here isn’t obvious to you? Or you just don’t care?

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

#259

Post by Barrin92 »

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…

>What if it’s all just a “computational guessing game” all the way down

then we would be categorically unable to meaningfully work on purely analytical problems that have nothing to do with induction, which is how these learning systems work. Human beings can invent mathematical proofs and build machines that do symbolic computation, ChatGPT can't. At best it can try to copy a solution that humans have written down somewhere or mangle it in the process.

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

#260

Post by fenomas »

kristianc wrote: post #214
fenomas wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's what I just said - people are expecting the AI to discern from the prompt whether to answer in fiction mode or fact mode. And my point here is, people who understand the tech should know that only one of those modes actually exists! It's a generative AI; it doesn't have a fact-retrieval-mode any more than StableDiffusion does.
Post reply on HN