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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

#281

Post by nradov »

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…

The funny thing is how many HN users have no real expertise in anything beyond software, and yet consider themselves SMEs on aviation, politics, climate, energy, medicine, warfare, and every other common topic here. The Dunning–Kruger effect is everywhere.

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

#282

Post by nailer »

pvg wrote: post #207
dcow wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite the qualities I ascribed to it, I actually read the piece. That's why I chuckled at the satire of having ChatGPT summarize it. I thought it sufficiently concise and every so slightly poignant commentary, daresay curious . I haven't disparaged anybody else for their own curious conversation, have I? If you'd like to discuss whether, "The structural injustices and supremacist perspectives layered into AI put it…

I didn't say you've disparaged anyone, you're defending the paste of generated content into the thread as if it's a good thing because, I dunno, you found it amusing or it tickled your sneerbone. But pasting generated content into the thread is not a good thing by HN's standards of good things for the reasons I described and the reasons you described are fine reasons but they are bad HN reasons.

Summarising the article was useful for me, as user of HN since it was Startup News. It certainly doesn’t violate the HN Guidelines.

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

#283

Post by worik »

whydoyoucare wrote: post #210
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 is a credible BS generator (something that I made up reading your post). :-)

"credible BS generators, we are everywhere"

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

#284

Post by didgetmaster »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #136
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…

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

In this kind of forum, it doesn't bother me when terms (like SME) are not defined by the person using it in a comment (even when it might be relatively new and matches several possible definitions). I didn't immediately recognize it, so I Googled it and found what I was looking for (before noticing the other replies which defined it for me).

What does bother me, is when someone writes a long paper and fails to identify what it means when it is first used. I will read along sometimes for several paragraphs hoping to get a definition (or at least a good clue) before finally having to break off to go Google the term on another tab.

Common terms like CPU or SSD have been around long enough to be used as is, but newer ones like AGI, LLM, or RHLF need to be written out in long form (which the article did beautifully). Sometimes they also need a basic definition to go along with that.

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

#285

Post by chii »

bawolff wrote: post #55
thomasfromcdnjs wrote: post #41

If it generates what YOU think is BS or discriminatory, don't use it. /thread

While i find the downplaying of chatgpt to be a bit much, lets not go too far in the other direction. ChatGPT is not suitable in applications where accuracy is more important than plausability, is i think the neutral way of putting the limitation. So it can't write your PhD thesis for you and hasn't literally replaced himans in every field of endeavour. Big whoop. If that's the bar, it is a pretty high bar.

> So it can't write your PhD thesis for you

it can help you write that PhD thesis. It can summarize all current research that might be considered relevant to your current thesis, vastly improving your productivity!

Using chatGPT requires expertise, i think, rather than the other way around! If you have expertise in your field, you can easily check correctness (or at least plausibility) of the output, and fix up the bits it gets wrong. This will make any work you need to undertake faster.

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

#286

Post by tambourine_man »

lukev wrote: post #269
tambourine_man wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please provide evidence that intelligent speech isn’t simply predicting the next word, as it’s obviously not self-evident to me.

I'm not sure it counts as "evidence" because I can't show it to you, but based on personal introspection, whenever I write something it starts with a barely-linguistic thought I want to communicate that gradually gets expanded into as much prose as is necessary to get across the concept whilst establishing context and defending from the most probable detractors. I literally never just start writing and then just keep…

It’s not evidence, sure, but what you describe, the “feel of it” is most of what we have to work with at the moment, unfortunately.

But it clearly is not self-evident that intelligence is or isn’t prediction.

Nothing is self-evident in a field we know so very little about. That’s my main objection, we should be humble and curious, not dogmatic.

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

#287

Post by nailer »

esjeon wrote: post #92
LAC-Tech wrote: post #69

I found the article really difficult to read, so I summarised it with ChatGPT Large language models like the GPT family are statistical models that learn the structure of language by predicting missing words in sentences. These models are seen as "bullshit generators" as they have no idea what they are talking about and are designed to produce baseless assertions with confidence. The addition of reinforcement learnin…

This is not even a correct summary of the content of the post. I'm genuinely entertained by the sheer amount of shamelessness demonstrated here. Seriously, though, technology at wrong hands endorses bad behaviors.

Why is it incorrect? You haven’t provided any supporting arguments.

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

#288

Post by nailer »

pvg wrote: post #133
LAC-Tech wrote: post #69

I found the article really difficult to read, so I summarised it with ChatGPT Large language models like the GPT family are statistical models that learn the structure of language by predicting missing words in sentences. These models are seen as "bullshit generators" as they have no idea what they are talking about and are designed to produce baseless assertions with confidence. The addition of reinforcement learnin…

It runs against the purpose of HN, though. Take a look at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34662167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34240213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34178237

The parent isn’t a bot account. The summarisation was added by a human and adds to the discussion.

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

#289

Post by icelancer »

nradov wrote: post #281
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…

The funny thing is how many HN users have no real expertise in anything beyond software, and yet consider themselves SMEs on aviation, politics, climate, energy, medicine, warfare, and every other common topic here. The Dunning–Kruger effect is everywhere.

Yeah, as if ChatGPT BSes more than your average internet commenter who fools a huge percentage of people he reaches. People really aren't considering the base rate.

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

#290

Post by tambourine_man »

phaedrus wrote: post #272
tambourine_man wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please provide evidence that intelligent speech isn’t simply predicting the next word, as it’s obviously not self-evident to me.

I've always hated the idea promoted by some AI researchers that "intelligence is just prediction." Specifically in the context of your challenge, since a brain must decide the next word before uttering it, is it not vacuously true that any conceivable method of producing speech is "predicting" it? You're asking for evidence that it isn't; I'm asking for evidence that question has any meaning.

Sure, any production in that case can be classified as prediction. What I’m saying is that such distinction, if at all possible, is far from self-evident.
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