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ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

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Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#71

Post by diydsp »

_nalply wrote: post #30

Too harsh! ChatGPT is lossily compressed knowledge of humanity collected on the Internet. And it can talk! That's extremely new for us poor hoomans and so we get extremely excited. I found out, it gets about one in ten things wrong. When this happens it spews confident bullshit and when I confront it, it cheerily admits that it was wrong, but can continue to produce further bullshit. I understand the comparison to a…

I'm guess I'm learning talking isn't as amazing as I thought... If you spend time around demented, or similarly mentally disabled people, you can pick up on how well they're able to make talking sounds and form sentences. They typically relate their needs/desires/complaints/observations pretty well, even with next to no cognitive ability! Speech appears to be a totally different 'function' from intelligence! hmm wow.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#72

Post by VBprogrammer »

Maybe I missed the memo but why isn't anyone impressed that a computer can generate well formed prose in response to arbitrary questions? It seems like we've completely leaped over that as an achievement and are now arguing over how it's confidently wrong or how there are emergent patterns in what it has to say. No one is claiming it's a general intelligence but it's still amazingly impressive.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#73

Post by idontpost »

bnralt wrote: post #51
karpierz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that it's an "incredibly smart" anything; I think it'd be better described as incredibly well-read, with poor discretion. But there's definitely uses for a tool that produces a lot of boilerplate content that a human can then proofread (ex: writing cover letters, filling out unstructured paperwork, etc.) Edit: I personally underestimated the use-case, because the "more optimal" thing to do when auto-fill…

> I don't know that it's an "incredibly smart" anything; I think it'd be better described as incredibly well-read, with poor discretion. But likely much better read and with much better discretion that most of people writing content these days. Which I think is part of the point that people are missing. ChatGPT’s output might not be as good as the best writing, but most of what people read is mediocre content with qu…

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Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#76

Post by sampo »

jesterman wrote: post #28
sampo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't cite their sources? Has there been research on neural nets who could cite their sources? In common cases, thousands or millions of items in the training set have contributed to the weights in the pathways that activate for a certain input. But maybe for some inputs, only a small number of items in the training set contributed strongly to the weights on the pathways the are decisive to the output? Could you de…

perplexity.ai/ specifically uses web sources to construct natural language. I believe it's going to be in Bing soon?

> perplexity.ai/ specifically uses web sources to construct natural language.

I am going to guess that even though it uses the GPT language model, it works fundamentally differently than ChatGPT.

My guess is, Perplexity AI is a traditional search engine, that first finds a list of links that match your questions. And then it feeds text from those links to the GPT language model to write a summary of the results.

Whereas ChatGPT produces text based only on the trained deep neural net.

Maybe I am guessing wrong how Perplexity AI works. Maybe it works in a different manner.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#77

Post by bamboozled »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #18
karpierz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that it's an "incredibly smart" anything; I think it'd be better described as incredibly well-read, with poor discretion. But there's definitely uses for a tool that produces a lot of boilerplate content that a human can then proofread (ex: writing cover letters, filling out unstructured paperwork, etc.) Edit: I personally underestimated the use-case, because the "more optimal" thing to do when auto-fill…

I dunno, I recently learned about how the Toyota Synergy Drive system works in detail. Despite being the type of person who'd be interested in that kind of thing I thought it was not generally well understood, I've only come across one website which described it in detail. I asked ChatGPT about it and it game me a fairly surface level answer. I then asked it for more details and it went into detail far beyond what th…

Because it’s really trained off datasets you’d have access too via search engine, if you couldn’t find the info yourself, it’s likely just making a lot of the answers up, convincingly

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#78

Post by pdonis »

_huayra_ wrote: post #4

I can't tell what is worse now: the sycophantic ChatGPT hype guys/gals who write articles "it's coming for all of our jerbs!", or articles like this one that deliberately misuse ChatGPT and then say "it's overhyped". They're both missing the point. Yes, ChatGPT can be tricked, confidently give wrong answers, but it is still ludicrously useful. It is basically like having an incredibly smart engineer/scientists/philos…

> It is basically like having an incredibly smart engineer/scientists/philosopher/etc that can explain things quite well, but for pretty much every field.

No. You've fallen for exactly the con the article is describing.

ChatGPT knows nothing. It is very good at generating text that seems plausible if you know nothing about the subject matter, but is not reliable as an actual source of information.

If you happened to get information from it that turned out to be ok, you were lucky. Don't expect your luck to last.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#79

Post by preordained »

sergiotapia wrote: post #15

You can call it a con all you want but I have personally extracted a lot of value from ChatGPT. It _really_ made a difference in launching in a product in record time for me. It also taught me a bunch of things I would have otherwise never discovered. But go on calling it a con because it failed your arbitrary line in the sand question.

I'm not saying your experience isn't valid...but did launching this product have to deal with doing things outside your domain or dealing with technologies you are inexperienced with? I'm just hearing a lot of people making claims that make it sound generically useful, when it seems more plausible that it really shines when you are fumbling around and need help to get a handle on things.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#80

Post by rvz »

_huayra_ wrote: post #4

I can't tell what is worse now: the sycophantic ChatGPT hype guys/gals who write articles "it's coming for all of our jerbs!", or articles like this one that deliberately misuse ChatGPT and then say "it's overhyped". They're both missing the point. Yes, ChatGPT can be tricked, confidently give wrong answers, but it is still ludicrously useful. It is basically like having an incredibly smart engineer/scientists/philos…

Well an AI that can't explain itself transparently makes it untrustworthy for more serious use and applications since ChatGPT it is being celebrated as a great sophist. There is nothing new in this, other than 'train more data on the internet'.

The hype in ChatGPT reminds me of the short-lived hype of Clubhouse; the end result is the same: The bigger players will come in to surpass it, just like they did with GPT-3.

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