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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

#391

Post by skissane »

jwestbury wrote: post #339
skissane wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What counts as “plagiarism” depends on the context. It is (in most cases) unethical to present the work of another human being as your own, but what about an AI? In an educational setting, it would be unethical to turn in an AI’s work as your own. But if a professional programmer uses GitHub Copilot, are they obliged to acknowledge Copilot’s contribution? If I have a personal blog, and ChatGPT helps me write a post, am I obliged to acknowledge ChatGPT’s contribution?

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

#392

Post by tambourine_man »

orwin wrote: post #390
tambourine_man wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but how's that indicative that prediction isn't taking place?

I have the idea before i have thought of the word i would use to express it. Sometimes, i don't even have word to express it, "you know what i mean?". And like i said. Children will often act, then talk. Or seek their words for long period of time, and when you propose a word to help them vocalize, they can accept it or reject it. I have another example. Do you ever have slip of the tongue? You're talking about "yoga…

All of that happens to me as well. I just don’t see how it couldn’t be explained by prediction from probability distribution.

The fact that you can’t find a word could be that you’re stuck in a Markov chain wall or loop:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34688673

The thing is, we just don’t know how any of that work. Our speculation is as good as any.

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

#393

Post by tambourine_man »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #381
tambourine_man wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> You’re just repeating that computing is not predicting without explaining why. Yes, because I assume you're a programmer, or a computer scientist, and you already understand the difference. To clarify, the difference is that a program that computes the most likely next token in a sequence, like a language model (LM) is one kind of program, whereas the set of all program contains infinitely many programs that are n…

No worries, you were right on your assumption, I am a programmer, like you seem to be as well.

> like a language model (LM) is one kind of program, whereas the set of all program contains infinitely many programs that are not LLMs

I don’t know if it’s been formally verified, but it’s pretty safe to bet that ChatGPT is Turing Complete. If so, than your statement is false. ChatGPT can emulate every computable problem.

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

#394

Post by tambourine_man »

danaris wrote: post #385
tambourine_man wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Picture a line—say, the line defined by y=2x + 3. Now, tell me what's contained inside that line. Not "what does it mean" or "what's it made up of"; "what is contained inside it?" The question doesn't make sense. There's no "inside" of a line. It's a one-dimensional mathematical construct. It fundamentally cannot "contain" anything. "What's inside the line?" is a similar question to "Is ChatGPT self-aware?"—or, more…

Haha, yeah. OK internet stranger. Take a deep breath and perhaps consider why questioning the certainties you so dearly hold throws you into an ad hominem fallacy.

Maybe check if the consensus on neuroscience is that the brain is definitely-for-sure-certainly not a predictive machine while you’re at it.

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

#395

Post by hajile »

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…

It’s not a “gray zone”. Derivative works are flatly covered by copyright law and this definitely doesn’t meet any of the fair use criteria either.

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

#396

Post by AussieWog93 »

ttpphd wrote: post #363
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

Perhaps you should read the article, then.

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

#397

Post by x-complexity »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #359
chii wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were not right to break the machines. Sometimes the wheels of progress will roll and grind over the bones of those underneath in order to move forward. You just have to hope you get out of the way in time, and cling on as the whole apparatus moves forward.

This is one of the most inhuman takes I've seen on HN and that's a damn high bar.

> > > (y) As is always pointed out when this comes up, the luddites broke machines as a strategic move to resist the undermining of their class interests and livelihood by workshop owners.

> > > (y) So the comparison is correct, but not in the way you mean, and as the luddites were right to break machines then so we are now.

> > They were not right to break the machines. Sometimes the wheels of progress will roll and grind over the bones of those underneath in order to move forward. You just have to hope you get out of the way in time, and cling on as the whole apparatus moves forward.

> (y) This is one of the most inhuman takes I've seen on HN and that's a damn high bar.

The "inhumanity" that's being opposed here is the overall increase in production & accessibility of what was once a luxury item that we now take for granted as a modern basic good.

The "human" take that's being championed here, giraffe_lady, is the supposed moral "goodness" that these machines should never exist at all, with the downstream idea being that there SHOULD be masses of people that toil their lives away in repetitive work.

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

#398

Post by grogenaut »

WalterSear wrote: post #2

> If it produces plausible articles or computer code it means the inevitable hallucinations are becoming harder to spot. How functional does the code have to be before it's no longer a hallucination? What if we are all not much more than only drawing "on the (admittedly vast) proportion of [our experiences] ingested at training time?

I burned an hour with chat gpt insisting an AddOrUpdate function existed in microsoft entity framework. When I called bullshit it hallucinated that another library contained it. Then it hallucinated versions... Then I gave up...

A week later I noticed that Update in the new version does an Upsert... by reading the f*cking docs... google also didn't know this answer nor did SO.

Thius has been my experience with ChatGPT and code,it hallucinates a lot of stuff.

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

#399

Post by hpen »

skissane wrote: post #391
jwestbury wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, then you are plagiarising.

What counts as “plagiarism” depends on the context. It is (in most cases) unethical to present the work of another human being as your own, but what about an AI? In an educational setting, it would be unethical to turn in an AI’s work as your own. But if a professional programmer uses GitHub Copilot, are they obliged to acknowledge Copilot’s contribution? If I have a personal blog, and ChatGPT helps me write a post,…

Somewhat of an open question really. I think for all of blogging we have concluded that the words in your blog post were in fact written by you. I see two reasons plagiarism is bad: both and injustice to whom wrote the original but also a false indicator to your cognitive and creative ability.

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

#400

Post by wpietri »

CatWChainsaw wrote: post #388
wpietri wrote: post #13

It's nice to see a little realism starting to poke through the hype. The rush for automatic bullshit generation for me is very much in the bucket of, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." As with every new technology, we should be looking at LLMs through a lens of maximizing the benefits and minimizing the harms.

But but but, there's money to be made!

Hah! I am honestly not even sure about that. There's clearly investment money to be raised. But sustained ways to generate value in the world? That's not as clear to me. I wonder if this more in the category of Groupon, which everybody thought was worldchanging for about 20 minutes. Or Shazam, which was an absolutely fucking mindblowing technology at first, and then it quickly became banal. Or perhaps the closest analogy was Qwiki, which was sort of inspired by the Star Trek voice interface where the computer would tell you about things on request. It was a hot startup, something people were watching closely. And then when people actually got to use it, turned out nobody cared.
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