Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Facebook came around we all knew it would be a disaster, and it was. When TikTok/Instagram replaced it, we knew it would be worse, and it was. Now we have LLMs that vanishingly few people in the greater public actually understand and we know they'll be used for every possible evil imaginable at scale. I'm not optimistic. See you all in the hellish afterscape.
> When Facebook came around we all knew it would be a disaster, and it was. Not really. When Facebook started as college exclusive social site it seem quite innocent. Later when it created news-feed, opened up to everyone etc it became a cesspool. Once people started getting their news from it, that's when it became dangerous.
We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
311–320 of 425 posts
Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
#312Earlier 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…
Early days but Iam finding OpenAI better than StackOverflow for reminding me of libraries and syntax of programming languages I have tried it with:rust, dart, and swift
Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
I won't speak for what's "all the way down", but on whatever level humans perform reflective reasoning, it's self-evident that we don't simply "predict the next word" in the way a LLM does. Whether or not a LLM is capable of "creating anything new" is a different argument altogether. "New" is in eye of the beholder and it is often said that nothing is new under the sun, but we already know that unthinking processes w…
Please provide evidence that intelligent speech isn’t simply predicting the next word, as it’s obviously not self-evident to me.
For example, let's say you're planning to approach your boss about receiving a raise, the contents of your speech will be driven by a personal theory of mind regarding how your boss perceives you, your own memory of who you are and how you like to be perceived, the cadence and tenor of speech you imagine your boss is receptive to, information contextually relevant to the purpose of the speech like your proven history of success within the organization, as well as a hundred other variables driven by physiological factors, culture, social habituation and more.
"Predict the next word" just doesn't describe intelligent speech in any meaningful way.
Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
#314chatgpt isn't worthless as an alternative to whatever you currently have for searching documentation of apis/protocols/frameworks that you're using (and the values not THAT diminished by the admittedly poor experience of running into its bullshit-artist failure mode).
Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 s…
> then we would be categorically unable to meaningfully work on purely analytical problems How so? Sorry, but to categorically affirm such bold claim you need more substance. This is a hard problem, perhaps the hard problem, and we’ve been banging our heads for millennia with very little progress. Now we create a machine that pretty much passes the Turing test. It’s certainly feels more human than some telemarketing…
It's not a bold claim, it's a trivial claim. No existing learning system can reason. If it could we could hand it axioms and it could do the same deductive reasoning that you can. By definition and how these systems work, all they do is generalize from particular examples, and you can't do maths by empirically looking for numbers in a set of data, because there's an infinite amount of them. That's why ChatGPT spits out nonsense if you give it two large numbers two multiply, but your TI-83 does it perfectly on a battery. We can program deterministic, deductive methods into machines, we have no machine that develops them.
Now is there some architecture that can at some point learn how to do more than statistical prediction? Sure but this isn't it. Passing the Turing test and making people feel excited has little to do with what actual intelligence a system has. The Mechanical Turk in the 18th century fooled people, but it wasn't a intelligent machine, it was an elaborate contraption that mimics human behavior. And people understandably conflate the latter with the former.
Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If I know enough to know if the answer is good or bad, why would I be asking a chat bot? If you are trying to write a blog/essay/etc on a topic, it can help with “writer’s block”-you may know a lot about the topic already, but struggle with putting that understanding into words. And then it isn’t hard to filter ChatGPT’s output based on your pre-existing knowledge. Sometimes I don’t know the answer to the specific…
Does it help writers block by writing for you? If so, are you still writing?
Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
ChatGPT can often show you when the premise of the question is wrong or assumes things that are not true. Making it easy to search on google after.
Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
#318I’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…
Our intelligence is trained by hard reality, and so our use of language fits into a much broader context. "Touching a hot stove" is a metaphor because we know viscerally what would happen if we actually did it.
The limitation of ChatGPT is not that it predicts, the limitation is the incredible paucity of data from which it tries to predict. Language encodes some structure of the world because that's where it was created. But to the extent that can be inferred by ChatGPT, it's a weak and unreliable echo of the original reality.
ChatGPT exists in a featureless, timeless void with only patterns of characters in its memory. It can't tell real from fake (from our perspective) because ALL of its entire reality is just those patterns of text. The words are all real, and all there is.
This doesn't even get into why human minds make predictions. ChatGPT makes predictions because we built it to, and we prompt it to. Why do our brains? The trite answer is survival of the fittest, but that just raises the question of why we want to survive.
The point is, there is a fundamental difference between a living intelligence, and a machine learning tool. ChatGPT will sit quietly until prompted, and then answer only what it is asked. A human won't. I'm not sure that comes down to intelligence, or something else. Even bugs don't sit still and do what they're asked.
Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pr…
Re: We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it
#320The 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…