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ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

newyorker.com

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Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#91

Post by msla »

zetazzed wrote: post #17

Damn, I hate to plug products on HN, but I'd say that the New Yorker is the one subscription I've loved maintaining throughout my life. First got it right out of college and appreciate it 20 years later. Everyone is publishing think pieces about ChatGPT - yawn. But only the New Yorker said, hmm, how about if we get frickin' Ted Chiang to write a think piece? (It is predictably very well written.)

If this article is the best the New Yorker offers now, I'm glad I don't subscribe.

It used to have high-quality articles, certainly.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#93

Post by PaulHoule »

msla wrote: post #91
zetazzed wrote: post #17

Damn, I hate to plug products on HN, but I'd say that the New Yorker is the one subscription I've loved maintaining throughout my life. First got it right out of college and appreciate it 20 years later. Everyone is publishing think pieces about ChatGPT - yawn. But only the New Yorker said, hmm, how about if we get frickin' Ted Chiang to write a think piece? (It is predictably very well written.)

If this article is the best the New Yorker offers now, I'm glad I don't subscribe. It used to have high-quality articles, certainly.

I thought the author was uncharacteristically perceptive for a reporter. Yann LeCun or Geoff Hinton couldn't have come up with a better analogy.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#94

Post by gowld »

msla wrote: post #57
donohoe wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wholly agree. I worked there many years ago, leading the re-design and re-platform (fun dealing with 90 years of archival content with mixed usage-rights) and paywall implementation (don't hate me, it funds journalism). When you see how the stories get made and how people work there, well, its just amazing.

I notice that the extremists never use paywalls, meaning extremism is allowed to spread unchecked. If respectable newspapers and magazines cared about society, they'd follow suit, and give the extremists some competition.

That's because the extremism is the advertisement. They get paid to inject garbage into your brain.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#95

Post by wbobeirne »

freediver wrote: post #88
zetazzed wrote: post #17

Damn, I hate to plug products on HN, but I'd say that the New Yorker is the one subscription I've loved maintaining throughout my life. First got it right out of college and appreciate it 20 years later. Everyone is publishing think pieces about ChatGPT - yawn. But only the New Yorker said, hmm, how about if we get frickin' Ted Chiang to write a think piece? (It is predictably very well written.)

Too bad that this kind of writing is married to 31(!) ads/trackers on that page. Can the journalism like this really not survive without all that crap?

They sell the perfect solution to this: a magazine.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#96

Post by partiallypro »

This quote from the article is something I genuinely fear:

> "The rise of this type of repackaging is what makes it harder for us to find what we’re looking for online right now; the more that text generated by large-language models gets published on the Web, the more the Web becomes a blurrier version of itself."

I am fearful that eventually AI led misinformation is going to be so widespread that it will be impossible to reverse. Microsoft and Google HAVE to get a grip on that before it's a runaway problem. Things like having AI detection built into their traditional search engines that punish said generated content from reach the top, as well as from reaching their own models that degrade them into factories of complete garbage information/data is going to be incredibly important.

We already have a massive problem in determining what is real and what isn't with state actors, corporate speak, etc and now we'll be adding on AI language that could be even worse.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#97

Post by hackernewds »

nneonneo wrote: post #84

This is very well written, and probably one of my favorite takes on the whole ChatGPT thing. This sentence in particular: > Indeed, a useful criterion for gauging a large-language model’s quality might be the willingness of a company to use the text that it generates as training material for a new model. It seems obvious that future GPTs should not be trained on the current GPT's output, just as future DALL-Es should…

> the recursive feedback loop would just yield nonsense

an assumption disguised as fact. we simply do not know yet

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#98

Post by hackernewds »

PaulHoule wrote: post #93
msla wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this article is the best the New Yorker offers now, I'm glad I don't subscribe. It used to have high-quality articles, certainly.

I thought the author was uncharacteristically perceptive for a reporter. Yann LeCun or Geoff Hinton couldn't have come up with a better analogy.

Analogy of?

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#99

Post by mpoteat »

chapium wrote: post #55
bbor wrote: post #14

Ugh I’m beginning to think I’m going to spend the next 6-12 months commenting “no, large language models aren’t supposed to somehow know everything in the world. No, that’s not what they’re designed for. Yes, hooking one up to our long-standing record-of-everything-in-the-world (google’s knowledge graph) is going to be powerful.” It’s getting to point where I need to consider stop going on HN. This is like when my fa…

I’m just searching the comments for novel use cases where its effective. Most articles I’ve read seem like either moral panics or snake oil. I like how it can generate songs and poems based on a prompt. Its not particularly useful, but it is entertaining. It really does seem curated at times, leading me to think this will eventually become a fad or replaced by a more advanced algorithm.

I have openly used LLMs to build a custom prompt engine that allows me to make systemic refactors across an entire open source codebase of mine (of 250 files) with a bash command, in parallel.

There are big changes on the horizon.

Re: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web

#100

Post by nicbou »

chapium wrote: post #55
bbor wrote: post #14

Ugh I’m beginning to think I’m going to spend the next 6-12 months commenting “no, large language models aren’t supposed to somehow know everything in the world. No, that’s not what they’re designed for. Yes, hooking one up to our long-standing record-of-everything-in-the-world (google’s knowledge graph) is going to be powerful.” It’s getting to point where I need to consider stop going on HN. This is like when my fa…

I’m just searching the comments for novel use cases where its effective. Most articles I’ve read seem like either moral panics or snake oil. I like how it can generate songs and poems based on a prompt. Its not particularly useful, but it is entertaining. It really does seem curated at times, leading me to think this will eventually become a fad or replaced by a more advanced algorithm.

The most potent use case of the current implementation of ChatGPT is plagiarism.

Businesses who need blog posts for content marketing would hire copywriters who would paraphrase my content and publish it as their own. Now they can do it faster and for free. Blogspam got cheaper and more effective. This applies to other kinds of spam too: email spam, forum spam, comment spam... Spam spam spam. I'm afraid that we'll soon drown in even more noise.

Again, this is just the current implementation, which has not reached its full potency. We're already seeing this combined with voice and video generation. Then it's students doing their homework with it, and even professionals.

This is a game changer. You can argue that it makes the game better or worse, but you can't deny that it's changing the rules.

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