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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

#331

Post by tarsinge »

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.

Someone deaf and blind still form thoughts but don’t output them in words. Words follow cognition, it’s sometimes obvious when you have a clear concept in mind but forget the word.

Edit: also when programming, I form mental structures and code them without verbalizing them, same with maths or when drawing or making music. A thought is maybe a prediction, but language seems not to be the abstraction it’s operated on.

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

#332

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

Search engine selects contents for you, but doesn't generate the content, so they have less power to influence what you see. For example, if authorities in a certain country order the requirement that their local ChatGPT must prepend any instance of the word "uk----an" with "nazi gay", it will do that.

It's another stepstone on the way to total centralization and control.

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

#333

Post by alfalfasprout »

WalterSear wrote: post #96
alfalfasprout wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posted elsewhere, but this is what I suspect is happening. Folks that are primarily slapping together a lot of code are benefitting from ChatGPT. It's pretty useless for the other stuff except maybe boilerplate stuff for a design doc.

There's no language or coding environment that doesn't involve some level of boilerplate or repetition.

Of course. But coding is the easiest part of software engineering already.

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

#334

Post by impjohn »

Existenceblinks wrote: post #234
alfalfasprout wrote: post #112

It's a tool that isn't going away. But even Yann Lecun has pointed out that "A house cat has way more common sense and understanding of the world than any LLM". That's fundamentally the real issue. LLMs are far from even animal level "cognition" in their ability to solve novel problems. A lot of people seem to vastly underestimate the number of novel problems they solve on a regular basis. In practice, what we're see…

I honestly find animals are generally very smart. Maybe because they are living things, evolved and born to be survived.

Thank you, I dislike this lazy connection between animals and stupidity. It feels like a verbal tick of some sort thrown around when reaching for an example

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

#335

Post by nagonago »

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?

Just one guess, but in the "good old days" of the Internet, people would sometimes get suspicious and accuse you of trickery if you edited your posts without explanation, so a culture developed of always explaining even the most trivial edits. "Full transparency" taken to its absurd extreme, I suppose.

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

#336

Post by hiq »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #189
sfpotter wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His article is perfectly reasonable, straightforward, and logical. It’s also more or less devoid of academic jargon. He makes clear points that are easy to relate to. Can’t speak to his book. Why do you think admitting that technological solutionism isn’t going to save us means we’re fucked? Are you that cynical/have that little faith in humanity? There are clearly alternative modes of structuring society that we can…

> more or less devoid of academic jargon Really? What the heck does this mean: > Contemporary AI, as I argue in my book, is an assemblage for automatising administrative violence and amplifying austerity. ChatGPT is a part of a reality distortion field that obscures the underlying extractivism Administrative violence? Reality distortion field? Extractivism? What is it with the trend to end so many words with “-ism” t…

> Administrative violence? Reality distortion field? Extractivism?

Note that the first term has good results if you look it up (one being "what is administrative violence"), while the two others even have Wikipedia pages.

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

#338

Post by orwin »

tambourine_man wrote: post #286
lukev wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's pretty much self-evident when you worked with 3-6 that this isn't how it work. The idea come before the vocalization.

Or even when you talk in a foreign language you're semi-competent with.

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

#339

Post by jwestbury »

skissane wrote: post #316
hpen wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it help writers block by writing for you? If so, are you still writing?

What if you take what it writes as a starting point, adding to it, removing bits from it, rewording it, etc? Surely then you are indeed “writing”

No, then you are plagiarising.

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

#340

Post by tasuki »

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…

You are just a bullshit generator - and so am I!
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