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ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

biblioracle.substack.com

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Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#71

Post by relaxing »

wruza wrote: post #59
globnomulous wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you're quoting, or stressing, a word I didn't use. I once got into an argument with a date about the existence of God and the soul. She asked whether I really think we're "just" physical stuff. I told her, "no, I'm not saying we're 'just' physical stuff. I'm saying we're physical stuff." That 'just' is simply a statement of how she feels about the idea, not a criticism of what I was claiming. I don't…

“That’s all they do” and “just” are interchangeable. All you do is transferring electric charges across synapses, and all molecules do is bouncing off each other, but this reduction doesn’t explain neither thinking nor flying. In this case you’re saying “That’s all they do”, which means “just” to others. Don’t even try to argue, cause all I do is typing letters and you’ll only get more letters in response ;)

> “That’s all they do” and “just” are interchangeable.

I disagree. Whereas “do” is a verb, “just”, as an adverb, implies an entirety of being, an essence. And a system is not solely its actions.

Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#72

Post by dingnuts »

bulatb wrote: post #8
knowknow wrote: post #6

It’s always baffling how people take a technology that wasn’t even thought as feasible a decade ago and try to dismiss it as trivial and stagnant. It’s pretty clear that LLMs have improved rapidly and have successfully become better writers than the majority of people alive. To try and present this as just random pattern matching seems as just a way to assuage fears of being replaced. It’s also amusing that people mi…

You can't interrogate your qualia. A lot of people think (or really, feel) that makes them magic. It doesn't. But if you feel they're magic, you'll never believe that a "random" mechanical process, which you think you can interrogate, could ever really have that spark.

LMAO really? Who said anything about qualia?

LLMs lack the capacity for invention and metacognition. We're a long way from needing to talk about qualia; these things are NOT conscious and there is no question.

This website is absurd. "I don't think LLMs are all they're cracked up to be" "YOU'RE JUST MAD BECAUSE QUALIA AND YOU WANT TO BE MAGIC"

no the "magic" text generator just writes bad code, my dude

Only the people on r/singularity care about qualia in this context and let us remember this is a mechanism without even a memory

Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#73

Post by throw310822 »

globnomulous wrote: post #42
throw310822 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs are token predictors. That's all they do. You certainly understand that if they can successfully predict the tokens that a great poet, a great scientist or a great philosopher would write, then everything changes- starting from our status of sole, and rare, generators of intelligent thoughts and clever artifacts.

Congratulations, you've successfully solved the Chinese Room problem by paving over and ignoring it.

I don't get what the Chinese Room argument has to do with this (even assuming it makes any sense at all). You said that LLMs are just token predictors, and I fully agree with it. You didn't add any further qualifier, for example a limit to their ability to predict tokens. Is your previous definition not enough then? If you want to add something like "just token predictors that nevertheless will never be able to successfully predict tokens such as..." please go ahead.

Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#74

Post by wruza »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #70
wruza wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m conflicted about your comment. On one hand, I agree, useless reductions are boring. But on the other, we are living in the “overselling all up in your ears” epoch, which is known to sell pffts as badabooms. So it isn’t baffling to me that a new tech gets old quickly, because it’s not really what was advertised. Our decades-old ideas of AI weren’t feasible a decade ago, but neither are these now. Those who believe…

You're right about "living in the “overselling all up in your ears” epoch", but a good first defense against "being sold pffts as badabooms" is to blanket distrust all the marketing copy and whatever the salespeople say, and rely on your own understanding or experience. You may lose out on becoming an early adopter of some good things, but you'll also be spared wasting money on most garbage. With that in mind, I stil…

Idk, I find their output mediocre and sometimes misleading. But that’s not the worst part and is often cheaper than doing things yourself.

The worst part is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43314958 . We may be still blind to this, but new generations may find themselves on the other side of the fence, so to say.

Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#75

Post by simonw »

ludicrousdispla wrote: post #52
simonw wrote: post #3

The original story here was published on December 11th 2022, just 12 days after the launch of ChatGPT (running on GPT-3.5). I feel most of this document (the bit that evaluates examples of ChatGPT output) is more of historic interest than a useful critique of the state of LLMs in 2025.

This document is not a critique on the state of LLMs.

It includes some very prominent examples of 2022 ChatGPT output.

I am not saying that the rest of the document does not include valuable content, just providing a warning that some of it uses 2+ year old examples.

Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#76

Post by TeMPOraL »

wruza wrote: post #74
TeMPOraL wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right about "living in the “overselling all up in your ears” epoch", but a good first defense against "being sold pffts as badabooms" is to blanket distrust all the marketing copy and whatever the salespeople say, and rely on your own understanding or experience. You may lose out on becoming an early adopter of some good things, but you'll also be spared wasting money on most garbage. With that in mind, I stil…

Idk, I find their output mediocre and sometimes misleading. But that’s not the worst part and is often cheaper than doing things yourself. The worst part is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43314958 . We may be still blind to this, but new generations may find themselves on the other side of the fence, so to say.

IDK, I think the linked comment is right. LLMs drop some of the barriers to experimentation so much, that previously rejected project ideas may just become worth trying out (especially when we're talking about hobby or research ideas, not full products). It also has the same effect on ideas you may have now, that before you'd reject as "too much work".

Case in point: my wife needed a QR code generator so she could stop asking me every time she needs to make some codes. There are tons of such generators out there - webapps, mobile apps, downloadable programs, plugins to graphics software, etc. But the software world is such a pile of shit that I don't trust any single one of them - experience shows that most random utility software like this is ad-ridden garbage or malware.

Before a year ago, I'd just invest time to try and evaluate some solutions, find one that's least likely to record inputs, or show ads, or inject redirects into generated code, or run excessive surveillance of your phone, etc. But since this need manifested last week, I just asked Claude to make me a client-side generator up to my specific needs, and quickly got a static page with (vendored) JS library, to host from a domain I own.

There's tons of super-specific or one-off utilities a person could use to help them with some task - utilities that make no sense as products, and if they exist, they're just loaded with ads and garbage. LLMs today make it feasible to just get the computer to write you such utilities from scratch, on demand, which guarantees they're garbage-free.

Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#77

Post by globnomulous »

relaxing wrote: post #71
wruza wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“That’s all they do” and “just” are interchangeable. All you do is transferring electric charges across synapses, and all molecules do is bouncing off each other, but this reduction doesn’t explain neither thinking nor flying. In this case you’re saying “That’s all they do”, which means “just” to others. Don’t even try to argue, cause all I do is typing letters and you’ll only get more letters in response ;)

> “That’s all they do” and “just” are interchangeable. I disagree. Whereas “do” is a verb, “just”, as an adverb, implies an entirety of being, an essence. And a system is not solely its actions.

I think the person you're answering is correct. "They just do X" and "All they do is X" are logically interchangeable. They define the exact same set -- and convey the same dismissive tone.

Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#78

Post by bulatb »

dingnuts wrote: post #72
bulatb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't interrogate your qualia. A lot of people think (or really, feel) that makes them magic. It doesn't. But if you feel they're magic, you'll never believe that a "random" mechanical process, which you think you can interrogate, could ever really have that spark.

LMAO really? Who said anything about qualia? LLMs lack the capacity for invention and metacognition. We're a long way from needing to talk about qualia; these things are NOT conscious and there is no question. This website is absurd. "I don't think LLMs are all they're cracked up to be" "YOU'RE JUST MAD BECAUSE QUALIA AND YOU WANT TO BE MAGIC" no the "magic" text generator just writes bad code, my dude Only the peopl…

Nobody is thinking about qualia. That's only how I framed it. They just know the machine will never replace them. They're a person, doing person things, and it's a machine.

So every time it proves it can, they move the goalposts and invent a truer Scotsman who can never be replaced by a machine. Because they know it can't do person things. It's a machine.

Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#79

Post by relaxing »

globnomulous wrote: post #77
relaxing wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “That’s all they do” and “just” are interchangeable. I disagree. Whereas “do” is a verb, “just”, as an adverb, implies an entirety of being, an essence. And a system is not solely its actions.

I think the person you're answering is correct. "They just do X" and "All they do is X" are logically interchangeable. They define the exact same set -- and convey the same dismissive tone.

You used the word do in both cases.

Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#80

Post by zadler »

johnisgood wrote: post #36
zadler wrote: post #30

Maybe this is propaganda and you are being told what to think. Of course AI isn’t going to be a good thing for the majority of humans at all. But it’s very important to manage sentiment within tech audiences.

Why not? Similarly to how "Google" and "Wikipedia" will make people more dumb? Or how the video killed the radio star? I think the cultural or intellectual decline does not have to do much with Google (in terms of search) nor Wikipedia. Heck, some people do not even know how to search properly.

A little sugar is fine. Alot of it kills you.
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