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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

#321

Post by osigurdson »

emodendroket wrote: post #310
osigurdson wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember playing around with it first and doing similar things with the openai playground. It is amusing but the novelty of this type of usage wears off quickly.

I mostly use it for programming type work now. Write a little snip of code (personal projects only) or tell me how to use a library. I also use it to teach me things. I find it incredibly useful for this.

ChatGPT is still free for me but it is glitchy at times. I would definitely pay the $20/ month one it is available in my region.

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

#322

Post by osigurdson »

Gigachad wrote: post #317
emodendroket wrote: post #249

Earlier 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…

It’s easier to prove an answer correct using google than it is to find one from scratch. 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.

Exactly. I assume Google or others will combine these together in some way soon. It is a pretty obvious win.

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

#323

Post by jcampbell1 »

mhb wrote: post #306
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…

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?

Full disclosure: I work for Google and am a member of the Illuminati. They aren’t necessary because we keep track.

Sincerely,

ChatGPT

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

#324

Post by sixstringtheory »

chrismcb wrote: post #320
skinnyarms wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But... With books you know who is publishing them. You might know who is in charge of a website. At least with Wikipedia sources are cited. With gpt, nothing.

Just had a dinner conversation where ChatGPT was characterized as automated plagiarism, and then I thought wouldn’t it be cool to get like a set of BibTex entries for all the sources whose content were combined to synthesize an output.

Not sure that’s possible, and even if so, that it would be any kind of reasonable or manageable size whatsoever.

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

#325

Post by edanm »

emodendroket wrote: post #249
osigurdson wrote: post #222

Earlier 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…

> If I know enough to know if the answer is good or bad, why would I be asking a chat bot?

I mean, taken to the extreme, I can probably read through the source of VLC and know that it's correct, given enough years to read it and study video compression standards etc. Does that mean I don't get use out of someone else having written VLC for me?

Knowing something is right and producing it are completely different things. You might be thinking of ChatGPT too narrowly, as a simple question-answer thing, but even now you can ask it to write code that will save you time, and scale it up by a few factors and it's doing the equivalent of writing new libraries for you. (Probably many years before it can write VLC for you, if ever.)

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

#326

Post by drpixie »

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…

So use ChatGPT by all means, but include a tag:

#TL;GPT (text from ChatGPT, looked good, may be complete garbage)

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

#327

Post by AbuAssar »

sixstringtheory wrote: post #324
chrismcb wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But... With books you know who is publishing them. You might know who is in charge of a website. At least with Wikipedia sources are cited. With gpt, nothing.

Just had a dinner conversation where ChatGPT was characterized as automated plagiarism, and then I thought wouldn’t it be cool to get like a set of BibTex entries for all the sources whose content were combined to synthesize an output. Not sure that’s possible, and even if so, that it would be any kind of reasonable or manageable size whatsoever.

perplexity.ai does this

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

#328

Post by deely3 »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #195
esjeon wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not entirely ludite. Massive AI models has to be trained on the massive amount of data from the internet, which is built by the entirety of the humankind. However, the profit from those models is not being systemically redistributed to the society. Those AI companies are standing right on a copyright gray zone, and are abusing people's goodwill to benefit only a select few. The social capital that built the i…

The Internet has already become a misery filled with low quality contents injected with user-tracking ads. Adding "AI-generated" into the phrase doesn't really change much. If you make the argument of scale matters, then I think that'll also democratize art. Photography didn't put artists out of commission, it brought realism as an art form to the hands of the masses. There's plenty of creativity left to be had post-…

> However, I do believe that society should subsidise art, and distribute automated wealth somewhat evenly, so I don't even disagree with you. I'm from such society and it's pretty great.

Are you from future or from non-profit DeviantArt community?

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

#329

Post by peterth3 »

tambourine_man wrote: post #121

I’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…

How well GPTZero can detect ChatGPT generated text by measuring perplexity (how random the words choices are) and burstiness (how diverse the sentence structure is) shows that whatever algorithm our brain uses has stronger creative capabilities than this LLM.

GPT-3.5 isn’t a great writer like AlphaGo is a great go player. Maybe one day AI will generate better scripts and novels than humans, but not this model.

Medium-quality writing is ok for informative content though, but it’s problematic when the model doesn’t know fact from fiction. That’s the important complaint.

Is it dangerous? Maybe.

But is it useful? Not if it’s wrong too often.

You’re right that this tech should be taken seriously, but so should the hallucination problems. These problems can be solved. And maybe they should be solved before anyone trusts it with serious questions.

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

#330

Post by [deleted] »

tambourine_man wrote: post #223
root_axis wrote: post #218

Earlier 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.

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