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ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

hedgehogreview.com

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Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#71

Post by panstromek »

wilg wrote: post #10

> But look at what people actually use this wonder for: brain-dead books and videos, scam-filled ads, polished but boring homework essays. Another presenter at the workshop I attended said he used AI to help him decide what to give his kids for breakfast that morning. The last example is actually the most interesting! The essays are whatever, dumb or lazy kids are gonna cheat on their homework, schools have long need…

There's also a selection bias, people use AI for a ton of stuff but you don't notice because it's not slop. The most sloppy examples are the most visible ones.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#72

Post by potato-peeler »

Slightly meta, this entire article is filled with quotes from other speakers to highlight a point the author is trying to make, in many cases too hard.

It’s as if the author himself didn’t have his own thoughts, and borrowed some sentences others made to write this piece.

I don’t know what kind of writing style this is.

If you are writing an opinion, why not devote some effort to articulate your own thoughts, or at the very least, provide reasons why other people which the author relies on to make their point, is correct?

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#74

Post by hatefulmoron »

jiggawatts wrote: post #41
danlitt wrote: post #6

It is refreshing to see I am not the only person who cannot get LLMs to say anything valuable. I have tried several times, but the cycle "You're right to question this. I actually didn't do anything you asked for. Here is some more garbage!" gets really old really fast. It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.

Something I noticed a long time ago is that going from 90% correct to 95% correct is not a 5% difference, it’s a 2x difference. As you approach 100%, the last few 0.01% error rates going away make a qualitative difference. “Computer” used to be a job, and human error rates are on the order of 1-2% no matter what level of training or experience they had. Work had to be done in triplicate and cross-checked if it matter…

I don't think the length you're talking about is that much of an issue. As you say, depending on how you measure it, LLMs are better at remaining accurate over a long span of text.

The issue seems to be more in the intelligence department. You can't really leave them in an agent-like loop with compiler/shell output and expect them to meaningfully progress on their tasks past some small number of steps.

Improving their initial error-free token length is solving the wrong problem. I would take less initial accuracy than a human but equally capable of iterating on their solution over time.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#75

Post by keiferski »

kumarvvr wrote: post #69
keiferski wrote: post #27

These “AI is a gimmick that does nothing” articles mostly just communicate to me that most people lack imagination. I have gotten so much value out of AI (specifically ChatGPT and Midjourney) that it’s hard to imagine that a few years ago this was not even remotely possible. The difference, it seems, is that I’ve been looking at these tools and thinking how I can use them in creative ways to accomplish a goal - and n…

> value out of AI (specifically ChatGPT and Midjourney) The one area I would agree that AI and ML tools have been surprisingly good, art generation. But then, I see the flood of AI generated pictures and overall, feel it has made a already troublesome world, even more troublesome. I am starting to see the "the picture is AI made, or AI modified" excuses coming into mainstream. A picture now, has lost all meaning. > b…

The fact that most ai art is generic garbage just reflects the lack of imagination most people have when making it. Sad but true. The actual tools themselves are incredible.

And I meant myself thinking and analyzing a piece of writing with the help of ChatGPT, not ChatGPT itself “thinking.” (Although I frankly think this is somewhat of an irrelevant point, if the machine is thinking.) Because I have absolutely gained tons of new insights and knowledge by asking ChatGPT to analyze an idea and suggest similar concepts.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#76

Post by liamwire »

jrflowers wrote: post #68
liamwire wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that what I did, though? I disagree. Rather, what I hoped to articulate was a sense that being able to viscerally feel that an author holds a very obvious position from the outset of an article, and then not seeing them make even the faintest attempt to proactively argue their point against the most obvious—the easiest—criticisms, comes across lazy. I expect arguing in good faith, and this wasn’t that.

Good faith argument has at no point in history required supporting an opposite proposition. “Taking a position and arguing it” is literally what an argument is. That is what the endeavor entails. Anything else is just aesthetics and personal preference

So, to recap, your gripe, with my gripe, is that I hold the author to aesthetic standards that differ from your own—and that that’s… wrong? Do I have that right?

I ask genuinely. I want to understand your position better here.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#77

Post by sausagefeet »

danlitt wrote: post #6

It is refreshing to see I am not the only person who cannot get LLMs to say anything valuable. I have tried several times, but the cycle "You're right to question this. I actually didn't do anything you asked for. Here is some more garbage!" gets really old really fast. It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.

I've had the same feeling for awhile. I tried to articulate it last night actually, I don't know to how much success: https://pid1.dev/posts/ai-skeptic/

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#78

Post by pishpash »

jiggawatts wrote: post #41
danlitt wrote: post #6

It is refreshing to see I am not the only person who cannot get LLMs to say anything valuable. I have tried several times, but the cycle "You're right to question this. I actually didn't do anything you asked for. Here is some more garbage!" gets really old really fast. It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.

Something I noticed a long time ago is that going from 90% correct to 95% correct is not a 5% difference, it’s a 2x difference. As you approach 100%, the last few 0.01% error rates going away make a qualitative difference. “Computer” used to be a job, and human error rates are on the order of 1-2% no matter what level of training or experience they had. Work had to be done in triplicate and cross-checked if it matter…

You are having low expectations here. People used to enter machine code on switches and punched paper tape, so yes they made sure it worked the first time. Later, people had code reviews by marking up printouts of code, and software got sent out in boxes that couldn't be changed until the next year.

Programmers who "iterate" buggy shit for 10 rounds until they get it right are a post-Google push-update phenomenon.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#79

Post by nsteel »

keiferski wrote: post #27

These “AI is a gimmick that does nothing” articles mostly just communicate to me that most people lack imagination. I have gotten so much value out of AI (specifically ChatGPT and Midjourney) that it’s hard to imagine that a few years ago this was not even remotely possible. The difference, it seems, is that I’ve been looking at these tools and thinking how I can use them in creative ways to accomplish a goal - and n…

> These “AI is a gimmick that does nothing” articles

I don't think that's an accurate summary of this article. Are you basing that just on the title, or do you fundamentally disagree with the author here?

> We call something a gimmick, the literary scholar Sianne Ngai points out, when it seems to be simultaneously working too hard and not hard enough. It appears both to save labor and to inflate it, like a fanciful Rube Goldberg device that allows you to sharpen a pencil merely by raising the sash on a window, which only initiates a chain of causation involving strings, pulleys, weights, levers, fire, flora, and fauna, including an opossum. The apparatus of a large language model really is remarkable. It takes in billions of pages of writing and figures out the configuration of words that will delight me just enough to feed it another prompt. There’s nothing else like it.

Re: ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

#80

Post by professor_v »

keiferski wrote: post #27

These “AI is a gimmick that does nothing” articles mostly just communicate to me that most people lack imagination. I have gotten so much value out of AI (specifically ChatGPT and Midjourney) that it’s hard to imagine that a few years ago this was not even remotely possible. The difference, it seems, is that I’ve been looking at these tools and thinking how I can use them in creative ways to accomplish a goal - and n…

Your examples are both quite gimmicky and not a fundamental value shift.
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