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

Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

holovaty.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 451 posts

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#301

Post by epidemian »

carlosjobim wrote: post #136
dontlikeyoueith wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they're not customers it doesn't matter at all what they think That kind of thinking is how you never get new customers and eventually fail as a business.

It is the kind of thinking that almost all businesses have. You have to focus on the actual products and services which you provide and do a good job at it, not chase after any and every person with an opinion. Down voters here on HN seem to live in a egocentric fantasy world, where every human being in the outside world live to serve them. But the reality is that business owners and leaders spend their whole day thi…

> You have to focus on the actual products and services which you provide and do a good job at it, not chase after any and every person with an opinion.

But, this story (and the GP comment) is not talking about "any person with an opinion". It's talking about actual ChatGPT users. People who've used ChatGPT as a service, and got false information from it. Even if they were free-tier users (do we even know that?), i think it makes sense for them to have some expectations about the service working somewhat correctly.

And in the concrete case of these LLM chat services, many people do get the impression that the responses they give must be correct, because of how deceptively sure and authoritative they sound, even when inventing pure BS.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#302

Post by selcuka »

csinode wrote: post #271
jll29 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results Thanks for your words of wisdom, which touch on a very important other point I want to raise: often, we (i.e., developers, researchers) construct a technology that would be helpful and "net benign" if deployed as a tool for humans to use, instead of deploying it in order to replace humans.…

The problem here is societal, not technological. An end state where people do less work than they do today but society is more productive is desirable, and we shouldn't be trying to force companies/governments/etc to employ people to do an unnecessary job. The problem is that people who are laid off often experience significant life disruption. And people who work in a field that is largely or entirely replaced by te…

> However, there's no reason it has to be this way - the fact people having their jobs replace by technology are completely screwed over is a result of the society we have all created together, it's not a rule of nature.

I agree. We need a radical change (some version of universal basic income comes to mind) that would allow people to safely change careers if their profession is no longer relevant.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#303

Post by pvg »

kragen wrote: post #143
soganess wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a big difference between the above 'request' and, say, me politely asking the time of a complete stranger I walk by on the street. Requests containing elements of hostility, shame, or injury frequently serve dual purposes: (1) the ostensible aim of eliciting an action and (2) the underlying objective of inflicting some from of harm (here shame) as a means compelling compliance through emotional leverage. Eve…

These are good points, but I think they represent a somewhat narrow view of the issue. What's happening here is that we're discussing among ourselves what kinds of actions would be good or bad with respect to AI, just as we would with any other social issue, such as urban development, immigration, or marital infidelity. You could certainly argue that saying "please don't replace wetlands with shopping malls" or "plea…

Hectoring someone to 'stop doing this' is not 'starting a conversation', it's just hectoring.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#304

Post by rcthompson »

kragen wrote: post #30

I've found this to be one of the most useful ways to use (at least) GPT-4 for programming. Instead of telling it how an API works, I make it guess, maybe starting with some example code to which a feature needs to be added. Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. Then I change the API so that its code works. Conversely, I sometimes present it with some existing code and ask it what it does…

In a similar vein, some of my colleagues have been feeding their scientific paper methods sections to LLMs and asking them to implement the method in code, using the LLM's degree of success/failure as a vague indicator of the clarity of the method description.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#305

Post by djtango »

kragen wrote: post #30

I've found this to be one of the most useful ways to use (at least) GPT-4 for programming. Instead of telling it how an API works, I make it guess, maybe starting with some example code to which a feature needs to be added. Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. Then I change the API so that its code works. Conversely, I sometimes present it with some existing code and ask it what it does…

In essence, a LLM is a crystallisation of a large corpus human opinion and you are using that to focus group your API as it is representative of a reasonable third party perspective?

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#306

Post by chii »

jll29 wrote: post #169
suzzer99 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. IMO this has always been the killer use case for AI—from Google Maps to Grammarly. I discovered Grammarly at the very last phase of writing my book. I accepted maybe 1/3 of its suggestions, which is pretty damn good considering my book had already been edited by me dozens of times AND professionally copy-edited. But if I'd have accepted all of Gram…

> The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results Thanks for your words of wisdom, which touch on a very important other point I want to raise: often, we (i.e., developers, researchers) construct a technology that would be helpful and "net benign" if deployed as a tool for humans to use, instead of deploying it in order to replace humans.…

> The big problem is that developers/researchers lose control

if these developers/researchers are being paid by someone else, why should that same someone else be giving up the control that they paid for?

If these developers/researchers are paying the research themselves (e.g., a startup of their own founding), then why would they ever lose control, unless they sell it?

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#307

Post by tptacek »

ctxc wrote: post #91
simonw wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think my writing is AI-generated you need to recalibrate your AI writing detection skills, they're way off.

Hijacking, but Hey hey you're the TIL guy! I was designing my blog and I looked at what was suggested as the best blogs, yours was on it. The TIL is such a great idea, takes the pressure off of "is it really good enough to post as a blog" Glad to see you here :D

He's always here! He's here all the time! He's one of the good features of HN. :)

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#308

Post by normie3000 »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #182
coliveira wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many times this is exactly what we want: to emphasize the action instead of who is doing it. It turns out that technical writing is one of the main areas where we want this! So I have always hated this kind of blanket elimination of passive voice.

The subject can also be the feature itself. active/passive: - The Manage User menu item changes a user's status from active to inactive. - A user's status is changed from active to inactive using the Manage User menu item.

Object-orientated vs subject-orientated?

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#309

Post by thaumasiotes »

kragen wrote: post #255
thaumasiotes wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It would mean that somewhere in your sentence there's a clause headed by a passive verb. A finite verb is one that heads a clause.

This terminology is where we get the name of the "infinitive" form from, by the way.

As a rule of thumb, the nonfinite forms of a verb are its infinitives and participles. jcranmer used a passive participle, but all of his clauses are active. Unnoticed doesn't have a clause around it.

(He might have thought that go unnoticed is a passive form, perhaps of the verb notice (?), in which case that would just be an error.)

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#310

Post by thaumasiotes »

kragen wrote: post #259
thaumasiotes wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

OK, you're confused.

In the general case, an English verb has five forms†: "plain form" [go], "preterite form" [went], "present third-person singular form" [goes], "-ing form" [going], and "-en form" [gone].

The last two of those are participial forms.

It is true that a passive clause always has its verb in a participial form. We can be even more specific than that: the verb is always in -en form. This is true without exception because passive markers occur last in the sequence of auxiliary verbs that might modify a primary verb, and therefore always directly control the form of the primary verb.

It is not true that a passive clause always includes a participle, except in the sense of the name we give to the form of the verb. -ing and -en are "participial forms" because the verb takes one of those forms when it is a participle. But it can also take them for other reasons.

> 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

Sure. If you wanted to put the present passive third-person plural form of make in that sentence, that form† would be are made. The sentence would have all the same words in the same order.

But that would make no semantic sense. For a point to be "already made", as opposed to having "already" been "made", you need to interpret made as an adjective, describing the state in which the point currently exists. The temporal structure of "each graduate student is given a laptop" differs from that of "in addition to the points that are already made" in a way that allows the present noncontinuous form of the verb. I don't think that works for "the points that are already made"; if I try to interpret that as a passive verb in the present tense, I get a strong sense that the sentence is malformed.

† You might notice that these two uses of the word form conflict with each other. The fact that form is used in both of these ways is why I'm annoyed at your comment conflating "participle" with "participial form". "Participle" is appropriate when you're talking about inflecting a verb according to how you want to use it in a sentence; it is a concern with the language's grammar. "Participial form" is appropriate when you're talking about the actual tokens that can appear in a sentence, with no regard to what they might mean or how they might be used; it is a concern with what you might think of as the language's "anatomy".

Post reply on HN