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We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

danmcquillan.org

341–350 of 425 posts

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

#341

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…

> it’s problematic when the model doesn’t know fact from fiction.

This is in no way unique to an AI. Have you ever interacted with humans? Half the population thinks the other half can't tell fact from fiction. The other half thinks the same about the first half. We're all wrong about all the time.

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

#342

I know this is HN, and we're supposed to be intellectual and elitist and all, but I just cannot get over how much of an absolute wanker this this guy is. Every single paragraph is just full of shit in the worst way possible.

Would you say he's, in technical terms, a "bullshit generator"?

Aside from that, ad hominem is against the Hacker News guidelines. It does not lead to productive discussion.

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

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>How so? Sorry, but to categorically affirm such bold claim you need more substance. 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…

I don’t consider ChatGPT to be self aware. I think most people don’t. No one, however, can pinpoint exactly why.

The vast majority of the population can’t deduce anything from axioms or even multiply large numbers. Yet most won’t doubt their self awareness.

If you’re using “self-evident” and “trivial” when discussing AI, conscious, intelligence, you’re fooling yourself.

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

#344
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve spent many years with infants and learned 3 languages aside from my mother tongue. I don’t find it self-evident at all.

You’re gonna need to elaborate why you think so if you’re willing to convince someone.

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course they do. They still have language. How else would they interact with the world?

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

#346

It has lots of value. But it's not the AI it pretends to be. Mostly because we and it can't always tell what's fact or fiction and it has 0 cognition. It's up to us to figure out where it can add value. It's way too early to announce its death. It's a super charged Cliff Clavin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Clavin

> It's a super charged Cliff Clavin

How well would ChatGPT perform if it played the final round of Jeopardy?

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

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please provide evidence that intelligent speech isn’t simply predicting the next word, as it’s obviously not self-evident to me.

The content of intelligent speech is not driven by statistical relationships between the spoken lexemes, this is self-evident. 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…

So, you thrown in theory of mind, physiological factors and culture without defining what that means or showing that they don't all derive from the same underlying statistical relationships in order to make your argument more robust? That's not how it works.

Defining intelligence is fundamental philosophical problem, a discussion that's thousands of years old in the making. To call something in this field self-evident is either ignorance or self denial.

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

#348
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if you're not a SME Small and Medium-sized Enterprise? What's SME in this instance?

This thread is weird. Are the comments made by bots unaware of each other? https://i.imgur.com/t6ilhR7.png

Also your comment is "hidden" for a few minutes after you post it, to allow you to edit it, which is why they most probably didn't even see each other.

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

#349
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…

McQuillan’s central point here that ChatGPT is a “bullshit generator” and not “artifically intelligent” is really apt. What we’re often working on in the industry is emulating the worst uses of intelligence processes, that humans also use, like optimized BS generation. Seeing ChatGPT turn into the equivalent of a competent essay-spitting undergrad is distressing; the internet is now such a mass of human-generated BS, it's hard to believe people will be arguing and competing with machine optimized and generated BS speech.

The really concerning thing is that in BS Wars, the party that's willing to BS most flagrantly and not be seen as truthful tends to win: https://post.news/article/2LGf4ziMatzJ3nCHuZv7e6pTKVA

The most powerful and effective and immediately available BS generators will probably rely on machine-generated, unhinged speech. I truly fear for the future of the few reputable internet forums left, because even intelligent people tend to engage with well-optimized BS generators, whether driven by human or machine.

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

#350
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve spent many years with infants and learned 3 languages aside from my mother tongue. I don’t find it self-evident at all. You’re gonna need to elaborate why you think so if you’re willing to convince someone.

That the idea form before it's vocalized?

A three year old reaching toward any toy, then saying 'mine!'.

Stumbling on a specific word, stopping your sentence, then proceed to replace it with a combination of words.

Or any time you paraphrase basically.

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