Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists • Hacker News Board

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#421

Post by kragen » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 9:16 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #310

kragen wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say: > Anyway, I would be really surprised if die-hard thoughtless style prescriptivists thought that the advice "don't use the passive voice" was meant to apply to participles. Presumably you mean phrases including participles, not participles by themselves. But https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 "The passive in English" says: > The relevance of participles is that a passive clause always has its verb…

> But https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 "The passive in English" says: >> The relevance of participles is that a passive clause always has its verb in a participial form. > So, what are you saying they do think it was meant to apply to, if every passive clause always includes a participle? I'm confused. OK, you're confused. In the general case, an English verb has five forms†: "plain form" [go], "preterit…

It sounds like you're using the word "participle" in a way that conflicts with not just Pullum's explanation but also, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participle, which draws no distinction between "participle" and "participial form", specifically claiming that the past participle and present participle are participal forms.

When you say "We can be even more specific than that: the verb is always in -en form," you're also contradicting Pullum when he points out that the present participle is also used to form certain passive clauses. An example of this is also given in the Wikipedia article, "I saw John eating his dinner."

So, while I certainly agree that I'm confused, I think you're mistaken. I'm not sure exactly how, because I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to express, but I'm sure that sufficient study of sources like those will make it clear to you.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#422

Post by kragen » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 9:20 PM UTC

dmoy wrote: post #414

kragen wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you always turn right at every intersection, you will just go around and around the same block. Which way you should turn depends on where you want to go.

Right (ha), but that's kinda how one can approach passive voice too? If you never use passive voice, you will be unable to emphasize the object of the sentence in cases where it might actually be necessary, and end up requiring more words to get the same effect. If you never make left turns, you end up having to go past one block and make three right turns. So even though best practices might be to avoid passive lang…

Well, I do think you should make right turns more often than left turns (in countries that drive on the right), and you should use the active voice more often than the passive voice, say three to ten times more often. But that's very different from the advice to only ever make right turns or to only ever use the passive voice.

Which way you should turn depends on where you are trying to go; which voice you should use depends on what you are trying to say, who your audience is, what you want to emphasize, and so on.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#423

Post by kragen » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 9:22 PM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #315

kragen wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I had those conversations a long time ago, but we can describe some general patterns. We can smuggle in presumptions through the use of attributive adjectives. In the above comment (which you might have noticed I wrote in E-Prime) I mentioned smuggling in "covert presumptions" of "essential attributes". If I had instead written that in assembly language as follows: I smuggled in presumptions of attributes. The…

Sir, I take issue at your implication that my hand grenade is ugly!

    APOLOGIES MY  GRENADE HAND YOUR  TO  PLEASE CONVEY

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#424

Post by neochief » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 9:26 PM UTC

jll29 wrote: post #169

suzzer99 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. IMO this has always been the killer use case for AI—from Google Maps to Grammarly. I discovered Grammarly at the very last phase of writing my book. I accepted maybe 1/3 of its suggestions, which is pretty damn good considering my book had already been edited by me dozens of times AND professionally copy-edited. But if I'd have accepted all of Gram…

> The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results Thanks for your words of wisdom, which touch on a very important other point I want to raise: often, we (i.e., developers, researchers) construct a technology that would be helpful and "net benign" if deployed as a tool for humans to use, instead of deploying it in order to replace humans.…

What book did you write?

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#425

Post by trealira » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 9:27 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #419

trealira wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The passive voice just switches the roles so that the patient is the subject and the agent is the object (e.g. in "The ball was kicked by John," the ball is still the patient despite being the subject). It's just that with English word order, it also switches the places of the things in the sentence. In languages with more flexible word order, you could just switch the two without passive voice. You could just say th…

While that's true, many of those languages with more flexible word order, such as classical Greek and classical Latin, also have the passive voice. Classical Greek even has a third voice called the "middle voice".

You're right. Those languages have morphological passive voice conjugations for their verbs. That, combined with their flexible word order, offers expressivity.

I was just pointing out that English, due to its strict word order, is more reliant on the passive voice to change word order than less inflexibly-ordered languages.

To borrow from a sentence I used in an earlier comment, here's a fragment of Spanish.

"...sólo porque te impresionó un espectáculo de magia barato."

The equivalent English would be "...just because you were impressed by a cheap magic show."

The English sentence has to use the passive voice to put the verb "impress" at the beginning of that phrase, whereas you still use the active voice in Spanish, just with the word order putting the verb first.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#426

Post by kragen » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 10:12 PM UTC

trealira wrote: post #425

kragen wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that's true, many of those languages with more flexible word order, such as classical Greek and classical Latin, also have the passive voice. Classical Greek even has a third voice called the "middle voice".

You're right. Those languages have morphological passive voice conjugations for their verbs. That, combined with their flexible word order, offers expressivity. I was just pointing out that English, due to its strict word order, is more reliant on the passive voice to change word order than less inflexibly-ordered languages. To borrow from a sentence I used in an earlier comment, here's a fragment of Spanish. "...sól…

I agree. The OVS order in that Spanish clause is unremarkable, though SOV is perhaps more common "un espectáculo de magia barato te impresionó". Up to the 19th century I think SVO or VOS would have been acceptable but now sound archaic: "un espectáculo de magia barato impresionóte", "impresionóte un espectáculo de magia barato", and as far as I know OSV and VSO are completely forbidden: "te un espectáculo de magía barato impresionó", "impresionó un espectáculo de magia barato te".

You can play tricks to come close to OSV and VSO for purposes of emphasis: "A vos un espectáculo de magia barato te impresionó", "Te impresionó un espectáculo de magia barato a vos," but the "te" is still obligatory. And you can do something similar in informal or poetic English: "Just because, you, a cheap magic show impressed you." But the passive offers more flexibility. I posted some other English examples yesterday in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493065.

But Spanish's inflectional structure is very much reduced from classical Latin, with a corresponding reduction in word-order flexibility. I think any of the six permutations discussed above would be perfectly valid in classical Latin, although my Latin is very weak indeed, so I wouldn't swear to it.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#427

Post by amradio1989 » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 10:24 PM UTC

The comments are kind of concerning. First, ChatGPT did not discover unmet demand in the market. It tried to predict what a user would want and hallucinated a feature that could meet that demand. Both the demand and the feature were hallucinations. Big problem.

The user is not going to understand this. The user may not even need that feature at all to accomplish whatever it is they're doing. Alternatives may exist. The consequences will be severe if companies don't take this seriously.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#428

Post by Tainnor » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 10:27 PM UTC

normie3000 wrote: post #90

suzzer99 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. IMO this has always been the killer use case for AI—from Google Maps to Grammarly. I discovered Grammarly at the very last phase of writing my book. I accepted maybe 1/3 of its suggestions, which is pretty damn good considering my book had already been edited by me dozens of times AND professionally copy-edited. But if I'd have accepted all of Gram…

What's wrong with passive?

absolutely nothing, except that some pencil-pushers with poor understanding of grammar somehow dislike it even though they often can't even identify it correctly.

Language log has been writing about this for so long it's not even funny: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=54

Although the best place to start is probably here: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#429

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 08, 2025, 10:35 PM UTC

hathawsh wrote: post #185

normie3000 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with passive?

Here is a simple summary of the common voices/moods in technical writing: - Active: The user presses the Enter key. - Passive: The Enter key is to be pressed. - Imperative (aka command): Press the Enter key. The imperative mood is concise and doesn't dance around questions about who's doing what. The reader is expected to do it.

[deleted]

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#430

Post by selcuka » Wed, Jul 09, 2025, 12:02 AM UTC

b3ing wrote: post #379

selcuka wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, there's no reason it has to be this way - the fact people having their jobs replace by technology are completely screwed over is a result of the society we have all created together, it's not a rule of nature. I agree. We need a radical change (some version of universal basic income comes to mind) that would allow people to safely change careers if their profession is no longer relevant.

No way that will ever happen when we have a party that thinks Medicare, Medicaid and social security is unnecessary for the poor or middle class. But you better believe all our representatives have that covered for themselves while pretending to serve us (they only serve those that bribe/lobby them)

> No way that will ever happen when we have a party that thinks Medicare, Medicaid and social security is unnecessary for the poor or middle class.

This is obviously because the current ruling class can't see what is coming. Historically speaking, the motivation for the elite to support social programs or reforms has been the instinct to preserve social stability, not altruism.

The New Deal did not happen because "the party thought that Social Security and unemployment insurance are necessary for the poor or middle class." It happened to prevent civil unrest and the rise of radical ideologies.