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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

#371

Post by jijijijij »

jjk166 wrote: post #368
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…

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.

That’s a bad analogy. It would actually rather be like: I know what a clean house looks like, but I’d still love a machine to describe it to me.

However, I think you are somewhat on the right track as “AI” shows us which types of work can be removed all together. I think, if “AI” can do it, it’s not necessary work to begin with. Eg. instead of “AI” doing formal correspondence for us, we could then just have an interface to exchange raw information directly, as the human element is lost anyway.

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

#372

Post by tambourine_man »

pnt12 wrote: post #355
tambourine_man wrote: post #223

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.

You're asking for the evidence of a non existing factor in a complex process not fully understood... I'd say it's on you to provide it. Why is predicting the next word proof of intelligent speech?

That’s not what I’m asking.

The grandparent said it’s self-evident that humans do not simply predict the next word. I asked for evidence of that self-evidence.

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

#373

Post by toss1 »

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…

YES!

And not only does the BS often need expertise to detect, but the tech cheerleaders are claiming that not only is this high-volume automated BS machine useful, but that it is somehow nearly an actual near-generalized AI.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The generative models make sometimes-useful BS, and are sometimes surprising in the similarity of the output to human output (sure, human bullshitters often look good too, so what?), but there isn't even the slightest ability to understand any concept. The thing can't even get right puzzles that children laugh at. These things have no concept of truth vs fiction or ethics vs evil.

Yet the "tech elite" try to feed us the BS us that it is nearly the singularity. What we have is a very amusing parlor game toy.

What we need, whether for the world's sanity and/or to get close to AGI, is not an automated high-volume BS generator.

What we need is an automated high volume BS detector.

Then, you'll have something worth praising.

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

#374

Post by tambourine_man »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #367
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.

You’re just repeating that computing is not predicting without explaining why.

Also, LLMs are not grep. If the string doesn’t match, it will come up with something it deems plausible, like us. It’s even bad at math in eerily similar ways to us, like off-by-a-decimal-place errors.

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

#375

Post by b3morales »

edanm wrote: post #325
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…

> 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 thing…

This is not the same thing at all. You know whether a tool like VLC works because it has a pretty well-defined scope for "works": it plays the video or audio file you clicked on.

If you're asking ChatGPT to teach you something, you have no such easy verification you can do: you essentially need to learn the same material from another source in order to cross-check it. Obviously this is easy for small factual questions. If I ask ChatGPT the circumference of the Earth, I can quickly figure out whether it's reliable or not on that point. But at the other extreme if I ask it to do a music theory analysis of the Goldberg Variations, it's going to take me about as much work to validate the output as to have just done the analysis myself.

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

#376

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#377

Post by lobsterthief »

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 may be used to generate copy but the risks of putting out brand-damaging copy or a marketing campaign that doesn't make sense are too high.

My girlfriend works for a certain AI marketing (i.e. copywriting) company that services large customers like Dropbox and Humana. They create and test headlines for email, ads, direct mail, whatever.

She’s an excellent and creative writer, so her job is to help validate and train the models by analyzing the copy it generates and setting up tests. Unfortunately, people like her are creating 99% if the marketing copy at the company and everyone (including the CEO) is in denial about it. The copy just isn’t good or violates brand guidelines.

And because the company is in denial, they’re not investing in more people in her role nor replacing people who leave. As they get overworked, more people leave, and they’re losing accounts because the deniers believe the AI is doing all the work.

It’s pretty ridiculous. I guess they want that SaaS-AI multiplier. But really it’s just a marketing agency.

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

#378

Post by bartimus »

Are we feeling threatened by LLM's?

The negativity towards ChatGPT is very unfounded. The bottom line is that ChatGPT is providing value in many ways. It's true it has no concept of a specific question and answer. It's true it doesn't hold the absolute truth. It doesn't even know what it's going to write when generating the first word of an answer. What it has are all the concepts in the training data. Patterns of questions and answers. Linguistical reasoning. Either you use it or you don't.

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

#379

Post by pvg »

nailer wrote: post #288
pvg wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It runs against the purpose of HN, though. Take a look at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34662167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34240213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34178237

The parent isn’t a bot account. The summarisation was added by a human and adds to the discussion.

This is directly addressed by the moderator comments.

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

#380

Post by osigurdson »

b3morales wrote: post #375
edanm wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thing…

This is not the same thing at all. You know whether a tool like VLC works because it has a pretty well-defined scope for "works": it plays the video or audio file you clicked on. If you're asking ChatGPT to teach you something, you have no such easy verification you can do: you essentially need to learn the same material from another source in order to cross-check it. Obviously this is easy for small factual question…

I don’t think learning in many situations is as black and white as you assert
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