"Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?" • Hacker News Board

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#401

Post by xp84 » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 11:37 PM UTC

PaulRobinson wrote: post #89

xp84 wrote: post #45

The ending is a really powerful point. Most people apparently agree on two things: 1. AI is a great boon for all tasks and specialties we don’t have the skills to do ourselves. Understandable, since (A) we’re ill equipped to see the flaws in its output because it isn’t our area of expertise, and (B) it often can unlock great gains because if we trust it, we then don’t have to pay and wait for humans to do that thing.…

I was saying something like this a few years ago when people were getting first excited about ChatGPT. The gap has narrowed, but not by as much as people think. AI produces output that is very convincing to a non-expert, and (dangerously), it's so good at looking like an expert, they might believe that it is an expert. But the moment you ask someone to use it for something they're an expert in themselves, the holes a…

Insightful comment, but I'm wondering if you would comment on why? You said you don't expect this to change. Do you think there's some limit inherent to any cybernetic 'mind' that simply cannot be overcome by any amount of advancement in the currently-known types of research? Is this specifically about LLMs?

For me, I simply don't know. I know that I have a soul, but I'm still not sure if my brain's output could or could not be perfectly replicated by a simulation, or, to propose a much easier experiment, if a simulation of a brain could be made and trained, if it would be distinguishable in its output from a real brain.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#402

Post by xp84 » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 11:45 PM UTC

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #325

xp84 wrote: post #45

The ending is a really powerful point. Most people apparently agree on two things: 1. AI is a great boon for all tasks and specialties we don’t have the skills to do ourselves. Understandable, since (A) we’re ill equipped to see the flaws in its output because it isn’t our area of expertise, and (B) it often can unlock great gains because if we trust it, we then don’t have to pay and wait for humans to do that thing.…

my skills are at such a high level that it’s almost theoretical that it’ll ever be good enough to replace me for 90% of what I get paid to do. Is it really true for most people that they are using their core advanced skills 90% of the time? I'm curious about how people feel about this. I'm a professor, which is supposed to be an intellectually demanding job. I do research in NLP/AI, and I don't think AI will replace…

> "Most of the time is taken by..."

This reminds me of an exchange I had (this would have been 2018 or so) with a colleague I was visiting when I worked for a large retailer. She had a ton on her plate, and was in charge of running an important department. She lamented privately to me that the company had specifically banned the hiring of anyone as an "assistant." She was spending hours of her highly-paid time doing tasks similar to what you listed here, which didn't require any of her important skills, things like filling out expense reports or scheduling meetings. I could see how we were getting a lot less productivity from her because of this dogmatic idea that was no doubt done more for optics than anything else.

It seems like that company's policy is pretty much pervasive - outside the C-suite, no one has an assistant no matter how well paid they are, but we give them a ton of silly busywork to waste their time on.

To bring this back to the subject at hand, I do hope that "AI" can crack the literal "assistant" duties. If it did, it really could be a net good for society and business, given that it wouldn't even be displacing human assistants, since they just fell out of fashion in 1995 or whatever.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#403

Post by xp84 » Mon, Jun 15, 2026, 11:53 PM UTC

perrygeo wrote: post #221

xp84 wrote: post #45

The ending is a really powerful point. Most people apparently agree on two things: 1. AI is a great boon for all tasks and specialties we don’t have the skills to do ourselves. Understandable, since (A) we’re ill equipped to see the flaws in its output because it isn’t our area of expertise, and (B) it often can unlock great gains because if we trust it, we then don’t have to pay and wait for humans to do that thing.…

At what point does this become an issue for data quality and global epistemology? It seems inevitable that we ask for more AI assistance on topics we don't understand. And therefore have the least context to correct. Result: a flood of poor quality information. In areas we DO understand, we'll either not ask AI at all, or treat its results with a higher degree of skepticism. Result: a lack of high quality information…

Our conventional wisdom is that the LLMs are trained on "the whole Internet" but I hope that isn't true and will be less and less true in the future. I fully agree with you that now when I decide to search Google for something (instead of asking an LLM) I find at least 50% of the sites in the results are just AI-generated generalities of the quality you and GP describe -- useless both to me and to any future model being trained, since they're just repeating things the previous models already knew.

AI ought to be trained on known-to-be-good stuff. Anything that simply trawls the whole net will tend to complete model collapse.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#404

Post by ClimaxGravely » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 1:19 AM UTC

alex0015 wrote: post #324

ClimaxGravely wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm by no means a native level Japanese speaker but I'm frequently surprised at how off Japanese-English subtitles can be.

I was watching the Netflix show The Empress with Chinese subtitles that did a pretty good job translating the German. I switched to English subs for one episode and couldn't stop telling the people I was watching with "That's not what he said! That's completely different!"

Oh weird! I wonder why that is. I wonder if they just put more effort into translating to Chinese? Very curious/interesting.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#405

Post by zhuli » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 2:41 AM UTC

GreenSalem wrote: post #396

zhuli wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, it's me, I wrote the article! I'm a she, BTW. I do admit testing AI. Hell, most of the time, I don't have the choice anymore—I don't use it but several of my clients send AI-translated documents. Do I just send back a CHatGPT version? Hell no. This is why and how I know it's not reliable or good. It's not exactly taboo to use AI, is it? IT doesn't have to be all or nothing. AI is great for my glossaries. AI is sh…

If your translation is as bad as your English, I really have to wonder what value you bring to the table...

Wow, a rude person online. Shocking.

At least I have some reading skills, unlike you who started by stating I was a he.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#406

Post by Chuzam » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 7:33 PM UTC

thi2 wrote: post #257

I recently saw a video showing the french to german translation of a french McDonald's terminal. The translations were hilarious bad, like old school google translate bad. Maybe McDonalds is big enough to not care about their reputation, maybe they are happy about the free clout from people making fun of them but they certainly chose to cheap out on translations. https://www.tiktok.com/@denneshow/video/75221602055015…

Likely wasnt done with an LLM ;)

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#407

Post by PaulRobinson » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 10:46 AM UTC

xp84 wrote: post #401

PaulRobinson wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was saying something like this a few years ago when people were getting first excited about ChatGPT. The gap has narrowed, but not by as much as people think. AI produces output that is very convincing to a non-expert, and (dangerously), it's so good at looking like an expert, they might believe that it is an expert. But the moment you ask someone to use it for something they're an expert in themselves, the holes a…

Insightful comment, but I'm wondering if you would comment on why ? You said you don't expect this to change. Do you think there's some limit inherent to any cybernetic 'mind' that simply cannot be overcome by any amount of advancement in the currently-known types of research? Is this specifically about LLMs? For me, I simply don't know. I know that I have a soul, but I'm still not sure if my brain's output could or…

Apologies for the late reply, 10 days on.

I think the human mind is more complicated than regurgitation. I think repeating things we've seen is key to learning and reasoning, but there's a ton of other stuff we don't full understand that LLMs are not even attempting to solve for.

To get to being able to simulate it, I am reminded of the Borges story On Exactitude in Science [0], where we end up just building, well, an actual brain. Can we do that within 3 orders of magnitude as efficiently as the sum of human evolution in our lifetimes? I doubt it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#408

Post by aaroninsf » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 6:32 PM UTC

Planktonne wrote: post #104

aaroninsf wrote: post #38

True, and relevant (I live with a professional editor)... yet I immediately think of Ximm's Law: Every critique of AI assumes to some degree that contemporary implementations will not, or cannot, be improved upon. Lemma: any statement about AI which uses the word "never" to preclude some feature from future realization is false. Lemma: contemporary implementations have already improved; they're just unevenly distribu…

No one assumes that AI systems won't be improved upon. What people don't assume is that progress will be infinite in every domain cheaply forever.

People don't make this assumption, if you ask (or reflect);

arguments however regularly are implicitly predicated on exactly this premise.

(Infinite improvement, no; enough improvement that practically speaking the difference between effectively free and free is meaningless—that may well be the ultimate bitter lesson.)