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

We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

danmcquillan.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 425 posts

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

#361

Post by zhenyakovalyov »

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?

it’s a case of virtue signalling to other community members, same as using abbreviations in a corporate email or double space after a full stop.

i guess, there is nothing wrong with that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#362

Post by hpen »

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”

Eh I don’t think that’s writing. But the very least would be for everyone to list chatgpt as a coauthor.

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

#363

Post by ttpphd »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #176

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.

You certainly are having a reaction to it, but you aren't persuading me that he's full of shit

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

#364

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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…

>> It's a tool that isn't going away.

Like "Resistance is futile"? That sort of thing?

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

#365

Post by frumper »

drpixie wrote: post #326
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)

Sounds like anything you read, aside from maybe it may not look good.

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

#366

Post by ttpphd »

sverona wrote: post #106

I skimmed his book, and I don't know, man. His thesis as I understand it is a viewpoint I have held for a while now --- artificial intelligence does things that humans do, but faster. It's a force multiplier. Hence your views on AI are likely to correspond directly to your views on those groups who hold power. McQuillan approaches this from an intersectional lens and arrives at entirely predictable conclusions. It's…

You skimmed the book, but didn't read it. I don't think you are the person whose review I'll take seriously.

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

#367

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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 do we know we’re not doing the same or similar in our brains?

Because if I ask you to calculate 85 + 73 in your head, you will not start searching for the string that completes "85 + 73 = " with maximum probability, but instead try to add those two numbers using an algorithm you learned at school.

Which means you can compute stuff, just like a computer, and not only guess stuff, just like an LLM.

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

#368

Post by jjk166 »

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…

I know what a clean house looks like, but I'd still love a machine to clean my house. CatGPT's purpose is not to understand complex ideas, it is to do the tedious task of joining disparate such ideas together in an intelligible way. Much faster to have it do 95% of the work and you only need to modify the 5% that's bad, then for you to do 100% yourself.

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

#369

Post by HDThoreaun »

esjeon wrote: post #138
hsuduebc2 wrote: post #95

"ChatGPT isn't really new but simply an iteration of the class war that's been waged since the start of the industrial revolution." I'm scared too but this is literally neo-ludite sperging.

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…

You are describing a situation very similar to what the Luddites went through. When the automated clothes making systems showed up they all lost their jobs and the profit went to the capital owners instead of being redistributed to society. It just turns out that technology creates so much value that even without proper distribution it's still an overwhelmingly good thing.

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

#370

Post by sverona »

ttpphd wrote: post #366
sverona wrote: post #106

I skimmed his book, and I don't know, man. His thesis as I understand it is a viewpoint I have held for a while now --- artificial intelligence does things that humans do, but faster. It's a force multiplier. Hence your views on AI are likely to correspond directly to your views on those groups who hold power. McQuillan approaches this from an intersectional lens and arrives at entirely predictable conclusions. It's…

You skimmed the book, but didn't read it. I don't think you are the person whose review I'll take seriously.

To be clear, I more or less agree with him - it's just that I've heard it all before. Capitalism is bad, kyriarchy is bad, AI is dangerous, organize.

Also, his book is a dang academic monograph. The parts I skimmed over were mostly recapitulations of existing theory (I mean this in the political sense) that I am unfamiliar with.

Post reply on HN