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Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

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Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#251

Post by kragen »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #248
kragen wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's boring. It's easy to come up with examples of the passive voice that aren't boring at all. It's everywhere in the best writing up to the 19th century. You just don't notice it when it's used well unless you're looking for it. Consider: > Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. This would not be improved by r…

> Consider: >> Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. > This would not be improved by rewriting it as something like: >> Now the Confederacy has engaged us in a great civil war [...] It's technically possible to parse "we are engaged" as a verb in the passive voice. But it's an error to think that's how you should parse it. T…

You could be right.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#252

Post by [deleted] »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #186

What this immediately makes me realize is how many people are currently trying ot figure out how to intentionally get AI chat bots to send people to their site, like ChatGPT was sending people to this guy's site. SEO for AI. There will be billions in it. I know nothing about this. I imagine people are already working on it, wonder what they've figured out. (Alternatively, in the future can I pay OpenAI to get ChatGPT…

[deleted]

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#253

Post by thaumasiotes »

kragen wrote: post #157
brookst wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats not passive voice. Passive voice is painfully boring to read is active. The preamble can be read like “however”, and is unnecessary; what a former editor of mine called “throat-clearing words”.

Yes, the verb "is" in "Passive voice is painfully boring to read" is in the active voice, not the passive voice. But umanwizard was not saying that "is" was in the passive voice. Rather, they were saying that the past participle "made", in the phrase "the points already made", is a passive-voice use of the verb "make". I don't know enough about English grammar to know whether this is correct, but it's not the asserti…

> But umanwizard was not saying that "is" was in the passive voice. Rather, they were saying that the past participle "made", in the phrase "the points already made", is a passive-voice use of the verb "make".

> I don't know enough about English grammar to know whether this is correct, but it's not the assertion you took issue with.

The most natural interpretation is indeed that the participle made is being used as a full participle and not as a zero-derived adjective. For example, you could give it a really strong verbal sense by saying "the points already made at length [...]" or "the points made so many times [...]".

> So, is "made" in "the points already made" really in passive voice as it would be in "the points that are already made"

Though I wouldn't say the same thing there; if you say "the points that are already made", that pretty much has to be an adjective. If you want it to be a passive verb, go with "the points that have already been made".

Anyway, I would be really surprised if die-hard thoughtless style prescriptivists thought that the advice "don't use the passive voice" was meant to apply to participles. It's a quibble that you don't care about and they don't care about or understand. You're never going to get anywhere with someone by telling them they mean something they know perfectly well they don't mean.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#254

Post by gortok »

I think folks have taken the wrong lesson from this.

It’s not that they added a new feature because there was demand.

They added a new feature because technology hallucinated a feature that didn’t exist.

The savior of tech, generative AI, was telling folks a feature existed that didn’t exist.

That’s what the headline is, and in a sane world the folks that run ChatGPT would be falling over themselves to be sure it didn’t happen again, because next time it might not be so benign as it was this time.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#255

Post by kragen »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #245
jcranmer wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with the passive voice. The problem is that many people have only a poor ability to recognize the passive voice in the first place. This results in the examples being clunky, wordy messes that are bad because they're, well, clunky and wordy, and not because they're passive--indeed, you've often got only a fifty-fifty chance of the example passive voice actually being passive in the first place.…

> Hell, I just rewrote the previous sentence to use the passive voice Well, sort of. You used the passive voice, but you didn't use it on any finite verbs, placing your example well outside the scope of the normal "don't use the passive voice" advice.

What would it mean to use the passive voice on a finite verb?

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#256

Post by b112 »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #241
b112 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of discourse really grinds my gears. The framing of it, the conceptualization. It's not creative at all, any more than taking the sum of text on a topic, and throwing a dart at it. It's a mild, short step beyond a weighted random, and certainly not capable of any real creativity. Myriads of HN enthusiasts often chime in here "Are humans any more creative" and other blather. Well, that's a whataboutism, and…

> Well, that's a whataboutism, and doesn't detract from the fact that creative does not exist in the AI sphere. Pointing out that your working definition excludes reality isn't whataboutism, it's pointing out an isolated demand for rigor. If you cannot clearly articulate how human creativity (the only other type of creativity that exists) is not impugned by the definition you're using as evidence that creativity "doe…

I'll play with your tact in this argument, although I certain do not agree it is accurate.

You're asserting that creativity is a meld of past experience, both personal and the creative output of others. Yet this really doesn't jive, as an LLM does not "experience" anything. I would argue that raw knowledge is not "experience" at all.

We might compare this to the university graduate, head full of books and data jammed therein, and yet that exceptionally well versed graduate needs "experience" in a job for quite some time, before having any use.

The same may be true of learning how to do anything, from driving, to riding a bike, or just being in conversations with others. Being told, on paper (or as part of your baked in, derived "knowledge store") things, means absolutely nothing in terms of actually experiencing them.

Heck, just try to explain sex to someone before they've experienced it. No matter the literature, play, movie or act performed in front of them, experience is entirely different.

And an AI does not experience the universe, nor is it driven by the myriad of human totality, from the mind o'lizard, to the flora/fauna in one's gut. There is no motive driving it, for example it does not strive to mate... something that drives all aspect of mammalian behaviour.

So intertwined with the mating urge is human experience, that it is often said that all creativity derives from it. The sparrow dances, the worm wiggles, and the human scores 4 touchdowns in one game, thank you Al.

Comparatively, an LLM does not reason, nor consider, nor ponder. It is "born" with full access to all of its memory store, has data spewed at it, searches, responds, and then dies. It is not capable of learning in any stream of consciousness. It does not have memory from one birth to the next, unless you feed its own output back at it. It can gain no knowledge, except from "context" assigned at birth.

An LLM, essentially, understands nothing. It is not "considering" a reply. It's all math, top to bottom, all probability, taking all the raw info it has an just spewing what fits next best.

That's not creative.

Any more than Big Ben's gears and cogs are.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#257

Post by dmoy »

kragen wrote: post #207
brookst wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, just like tritones in music, there is a place for passive voice in writing. But also like tritones, the best general advice is that they should be avoided.

That doesn't make sense. It's like saying that the best general advice about which way to turn when you're driving is to turn right. From your comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493308 , and from the fact that you used the passive voice in your comment ("they should be avoided") apparently without noticing, it appears that the reason you have this opinion is that you don't know what the passive voice i…

> the best general advice about which way to turn

At the risk of derailing into insane pedantry land, this part is kinda true, so maybe not the best analogy?

From routing efficiency: https://www.ge.com/news/reports/ups-drivers-dont-turn-left-p...

And also safety: https://www.phly.com/rms/blog/turning-left-at-an-intersectio...

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#258

Post by antonvs »

swalsh wrote: post #138
thih9 wrote: post #137

What made ChatGPT think that this feature is supported? And a follow up question - is that the direction SEO is going to take?

Id guess the answer is gpt4o is an outdated model that's not as anchored in reality as newer models. It's pretty rare for me to see sonnet or even o3 just outright tell me plausible but wrong things.

Hallucinations still occur regularly in all models. It’s certainly not a solved problem. If you’re not seeing them, either the kinds of queries you’re doing don’t tend to elicit hallucinations, or you’re incorrectly accepting them as real.

The example in the OP is a common one: ask a model how to do something with a tool, and if there’s no easy way to perform that operation they’ll commonly make up a plausible answer.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#259

Post by kragen »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #253
kragen wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the verb "is" in "Passive voice is painfully boring to read" is in the active voice, not the passive voice. But umanwizard was not saying that "is" was in the passive voice. Rather, they were saying that the past participle "made", in the phrase "the points already made", is a passive-voice use of the verb "make". I don't know enough about English grammar to know whether this is correct, but it's not the asserti…

> But umanwizard was not saying that "is" was in the passive voice. Rather, they were saying that the past participle "made", in the phrase "the points already made", is a passive-voice use of the verb "make". > I don't know enough about English grammar to know whether this is correct, but it's not the assertion you took issue with. The most natural interpretation is indeed that the participle made is being used as a…

You say:

> Anyway, I would be really surprised if die-hard thoughtless style prescriptivists thought that the advice "don't use the passive voice" was meant to apply to participles.

Presumably you mean phrases including participles, not participles by themselves. But https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 "The passive in English" says:

> The relevance of participles is that a passive clause always has its verb in a participial form.

So, what are you saying they do think it was meant to apply to, if every passive clause always includes a participle? I'm confused.

With respect to:

> Though I wouldn't say the same thing there; if you say "the points that are already made", that pretty much has to be an adjective. If you want it to be a passive verb, go with "the points that have already been made".

the passive-clause examples given in Pullum's blog post I linked above include "Each graduate student is given a laptop," which sounds structurally identical to your example (except that an indirect object is present, showing that it cannot be an adjective) and clarifies:

> The verb was doesn't really add any meaning, but it enables the whole thing to be put into the preterite tense so that the event can be asserted to have occurred in the past. Changing was to is would put the clause into the present tense, and replacing it by will be or is going to be would permit reference to future time; but the passive VP damaged by storms would stay the same in each case. (Notice, the participle damaged does not itself make any past time reference, despite the name "past participle".)

So it sounds like your grammatical analysis is explicitly contradicting Pullum's, which probably means you're wrong, but I'm not sure I understand it.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#260

Post by antonvs »

thih9 wrote: post #137

What made ChatGPT think that this feature is supported? And a follow up question - is that the direction SEO is going to take?

> What made ChatGPT think that this feature is supported?

It was a plausible answer, and the core of what these models do is generate plausible responses to (or continuations of) the prompt they’re given. They’re not databases or oracles.

With errors like this, if you ask a followup question it’ll typically agree that the feature isn’t supported, because the text of that question combined with its training essentially prompts it to reach that conclusion.

Re the follow-up question, it’s almost certainly the direction that advertising in general is going to take.

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