I think the problem with chatGPT is it has no self awareness of when it’s bullshitting. At least half the time I’ll admit I’m full of shit.
We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
301–310 of 425 posts
Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
#302> 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…
But that's just a shiny new layer of paint on the decades-old "well, the computer says..." (and the computer was programmed by those in power).
Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
#303"pseudo-authoritative" Psychometrics is the crown jewel of the field of psychology. There is no controversy among the psychometrists themselves that the body of academic work is numerate, correct, and repeatable. The author has chosen moral crusade over the quest for truth. A good place to start learning about the field - https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/index.html As far as exploring the dangers of AI…
Incidentally, didn't Bostrom just get in trouble for racist emails about psychometrics?
I read the book when it was published and haven't kept up with his doings since; but I'm curious now and will look it up. Watching his talks made me think he's an autist to a mild degree, and social taboos seem to wield less behavioral authority over those types; e.g. - Eric S. Raymond
I bet Bostrom's royalty checks have seen a handsome rebound lately.
Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
#304The 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…
You're not too far off from the arguments people made about the internet not too long ago. It's too easy to access information that could easily be incorrect...even maliciously so! You're better off sticking to published books and journals from respectable organizations that vet their authors and review their publications! Then again, who's in control of those printing presses? How can you trust the publishers to not…
The problem is people weren't wrong about the internet. In fact, they couldn't grasp the magnitude of the problem it would create, and the complete transformation it would have on media, politics, and culture.
Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
#305I think the article is making two points 1 The LLM OpenAI approach is nothing special. Just statistics overhyped and sold to suckers 2 AI is a serious threat to working people everywhere, and must be resisted I am very impressed by ChatGPT. So what if it all boils down to statistical models, perhaps if we had a proper model we could prove any cognition boils down to statistical models One of the comman uses of power…
Good points. Makes me think that picking on chatgpt as a target for ai resistance seems silly since its the most public but almost certainly not the most powerful llm.
I'm imagining some cabal of elite string-pulling shadow masters shrugging their shoulders as we all resist open ai tools while they integrate private ai tools into stock manipulation, subliminal propaganda and advanced smart tv surveillance.
At the very least we should probably be using chatgpt to prepare ourselves for the oncoming tidal wave of manipulative bs thats totally definitely coming.
Or we could see this as an amazing tool for saving time on writing boring react components and regex that we've all earned through countless generations of menial medium article and email labor.
Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
#306The 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'll risk the downvotes, but I'm genuinely curious why people feel that they need to note that they've made trivial edits, like deleting a duplicated word or fixing a typo. Is there a sense that the historical record of these meanderings should be perfectly memorialized?
Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
#307I’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…
I'm very much just predicting the next word when I talk. I don't know the grammar of the sentence and everything I will say when I start the sentence. I just start talking and try to hit the right notes and, if its a topic I've covered before, have some vague plan for the whole thing. Maybe other people's experiences are different, but when it comes to my natural language only and not my ability for reasoning or abstract thought - I am absolutely not doing anything significantly more complicated than chatGPT is doing.
Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
>both visually unpleasant Glad I wasn't the only one who noticed that. It's like the author picked a font/CSS combo to simulate a book with horrible typesetting.
Does it look like a blurred screenshot of text to anyone else?
Love the book, and LaTeX, but it does give me these vibes https://www.google.com/books/edition/Walk_Through_Combinator....
Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
I read way more into it. I actually think the author is attempting a postmodern deconstruction of the concept of AI in the first place. In typical internally inconsistent sloppy rhetoric, this anti-fascist (his words not mine) dismissal both argues that LLMs are not real AI because presumably they can't think and also that we should be afraid of them because as AI they encode modernity into their output and modernity…
Interesting. I think a more coherent form of the argument is this: LLM's aren't capable of reasoning or self-updating. Capitalists are exploiting powerless labor to encode their preferences and goals into LLM's. Because the LLM can't really think and isn't human they can control it. So, we're going to be forced to deal with robots that perfectly embody the worst aspects of the modern economy and society.
Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear this a lot but I don't find it convincing. If I know enough to know if the answer is good or bad, why would I be asking a chat bot? We could say this problem is somewhat analogous to sorting good StackOverflow answers from bad ones. But I feel that there are things like writing and presentation style (not to mention the votes and comments) that could tip me off to a bad answer that are absent when every answer…
I'd suggest just trying it yourself for a bit to see if you can find any use for the tool. If not, that isn't a problem either - I suspect it is completely useless in some domains.
I amused myself by trying to think of funny things for it to write but it was a bit hit-and-miss and now they want me to pay to fiddle with it more.