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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

#401

Post by emodendroket »

hpen wrote: post #399
skissane wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I think for all of blogging we have concluded that the words in your blog post were in fact written by you.

If "we" concluded that it was a little naive since ghostwriting predates the blog.

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

#402

Post by hpen »

emodendroket wrote: post #401
hpen wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I think for all of blogging we have concluded that the words in your blog post were in fact written by you. If "we" concluded that it was a little naive since ghostwriting predates the blog.

I have to give you that. That is a good point. I definitely am or was naive enough to think personal blogs were personally written.

Man, now I’m questioning how ethical ghostwriting is. Not sure that was your intention but that is thought provoking.

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

#403

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,…

I think the bigger picture to me is something like are you being disingenuous rather than are you technically plagiarizing. Thought experiment: if I tell people I’m great at multiplication and I don’t tell them I have an earpiece / mic with someone using a calculator on the other end. If I convince these people I have a great mind and they respect my math skills, have I not fooled them? As for the copilot argument, I’m not convinced it shouldn’t be required to cite.

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

#404

Post by Scottwilliams »

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

#405

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

tambourine_man wrote: post #393
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

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

Of course :)

>> 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.

I think that's unlikely. For Universal Turing Machine expressivity, a system needs to have something to function as an infinite Turing tape, and where's that in an LLM? ChatGPT famously has a limited input buffer and it doesn't even have a memory, as such (it forgets everything you tell it, hence why a user's input and its own answers have to be fed back to it continuously during a conversation or it loses the thread).

Besides, OpenAI themselves, while they have made some curious claims in the past (about GPT-3 calculating arithmetic) seem to have backtracked recently and nowadays if you ask ChatGPT to calculate the result of a computation it replies with a sort-of-canned reply that says it's not a computer and can't compute. Sorry I don't have a good example, I've seen a few examples of this with Python programs and bash scripts.

Anyway you could easily test whether ChatGPT (or any LLM) is computing: ask it to perform an expensive computation. For example, ask it to compute the Ackermann function for inputs 10,20, which should take it a few hundred years if it's actually performing a computation. Or ask it to generate the first 1 million digits of pi. It will probably come up with a nonsense answer or with one of it's "canned" answers, so it should be obvious it's not computing the result of the computation you asked it to.

Btw, I think one could argue that a Transformer architecture is Turing-complete, in the sense that it could be, in principle, trained to simulate a UTM; I seem to remember there are similar results for Recurrent Neural Networks (which are, however, a different architecture). But a Transformer trained to generate text is trained to generate text, not to simulate a UTM.

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

#406

Post by danaris »

tambourine_man wrote: post #394
danaris wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I work for a psychology and neuroscience department, and have done for over a decade now.

Does that give me genuine academic credentials? Pff, no.

Does it mean I have a reasonable high-level grounding in modern understanding of how the brain works? Yes, it does.

Again: You have made an extraordinary claim. You need to provide extraordinary evidence to support it, not just toss accusations of ad-hominem attacks at anyone who points out how thin your argument is.

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

#407

Post by fche »

kristianc wrote: post #231
makeitdouble wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it comes in a situation that isn't great, but not so bad that it warranted drastic decisions: people are organically generating mountains of BS online everyday, including on blogs, official looking news sites etc. It's a pain, but as most of that is also generated by humans there's an opt out, saying "good guys" should band together to fight it and it would be fine. Now that we have ChatGPT and the like, manu…

> I think it comes in a situation that isn't great, but not so bad that it warranted drastic decisions: people are organically generating mountains of BS online everyday, including on blogs, official looking news sites etc. Indeed, ChatGPT produces bullshit because that’s the bullshit it’s been trained on.

chatgpt also produces bullshit because openai has explicitly and deliberately lobotomized it against politically incorrect output

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

#408

Post by Planktonne »

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…

When I don't know how a stage magician's trick works, I don't immediately default to assuming that they must have occult powers.

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

#409

Post by sfpotter »

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…

It’s okay to not be familiar with terms. No one knows everything. At the same time, maybe try modulating your response to be a little less reactive and childish. Just because you haven’t heard these terms before, doesn’t mean they aren’t easy to pick up and understand. We in programming like to define new terminology for new concepts we encounter to aid our exposition. The same is true for people in the social sciences. This article is targeted at people in the social sciences, and for an article written for that audience it is straightforward and well-written. So much so that I would say it should pose no trouble for someone unfamiliar with the terminology often used in that domain.

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

#410

Post by tambourine_man »

danaris wrote: post #406
tambourine_man wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I work for a psychology and neuroscience department, and have done for over a decade now. Does that give me genuine academic credentials? Pff, no. Does it mean I have a reasonable high-level grounding in modern understanding of how the brain works? Yes, it does. Again: You have made an extraordinary claim. You need to provide extraordinary evidence to support it, not just toss accusations of ad-hominem attacks at any…

I have claimed nothing, only cast doubt on the baseless certainties that have been floating around this subject.

To summarize what I'm trying to convey:

- (Variations of the original claim) ChatGPT works nothing like the brain, it's just a prediction machine

- (Me all over this thread) Do we know how the brain works? Do we know what properties may emerge from a blackbox LLM?

If you think questioning awareness is extraordinary (or new) I advise you to read Descartes, the Boltzmann brain thought experiment and epistemology in general.

PS: you replied with credentials rather than arguments, which is still on the logical fallacy ground.

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