Unlike OpenAI, this article is actually open.
Wouldn't it be funny if the article was written by chat GPT.
There are things that chatgpt does well, especially if you temper your expectations to the level of someone who has no valuable skills and is mostly an idiot.
Hi, I'm an idiot with no valuable skills, and I've found chatgpt to be very useful.
I've recently started learning game development in godot, and the process of figuring out why the code that chatgpt gives me doesn't work has taught me more about programming than any teacher ever accomplished back in high school.
Chatgpt is also an excellent therapist, and has helped me deal with mental breakdowns on multiple occasions, while it was happening. I can't find a real therapist's phone number, much less schedule an appointment.
I'm a real shitty writer, and I'm making a wiki of lore for a setting and ruleset for a tabletop RPG that I'll probably never get to actually play. ChatGPT is able to turn my inane ramblings into coherent wiki pages, most of the time.
If you set your expectations to what was advertised, then yeah, chatgpt is bullshit. Of course it was bullshit, and everyone who knew half of anything about anything called it. If you set realistic expectations, you'll get realistic results. Why is this so hard for people to get?
Hah I had that exact same experience with Godot
Yeah it is as if someone invented the microwave oven and everyone over hypes it as being able to cook Michelin star meals. People then dismiss it entirely since it cannot produce said Michelin star meals.
They fail to see that is a great reheating machine and a good machine for quick meals.
Also, you can make a michelin meal in a microwave, if you have the skills.
Because few people know what's realistic for LLMs
Intelligence is a very loaded word and not very precise in general usage. And i mean that amongst humans and animals as well as robots.
I'm sure the real AI and compsci researchers have precise terms and taxonomies for it and ways to measure it, but the word itself, in the hands of marketing people and the general population as an audience . . . not useful.
This is something I already mentioned previously. LLMs have no way of fact checking, no measure of truth or falsity built into. In the training process, it probably accepts every piece of text as true. This is very different from how our minds work. When faced with a piece of text we have many ways to deal with it, which range from accepting it as it is to going on the internet to verify it to actually designing and conducting experiments to prove or disprove the claim. So, yeah what ChatGPT outputs is probably bullshit.
Of course, the solution is that ChatGPT be trained by labelling text with some measure of truth. Of course, LLMs need so much data that labelling it all would be extremely slow and expensive and suddenly, the fast moving world of AI to screech to almost a halt, which would be unacceptable to the investors.
Your statement on no way of fact checking is not a 100% correct as developers found ways to ground LLMs, e.g., by prepending context pulled from „real time“ sources of truth (e.g., search engines). This data is then incorporated into the prompt as context data. Well obviously this is kind of cheating and not baked into the LLM itself, however it can be pretty accurate for a lot of use cases.
Does using authoritative sources is fool proof? For example, is everything written in Wikipedia factually correct? I don’t believe so unless I actually check it. Also, what about reddit or stack overflow? Can they be considered factually correct? To some extent, yes. But not completely. That is why most of these LLMs give such arbitrary answers. They extrapolate on information they have no way knowing or understanding.
I don’t quite understand what you mean by extrapolate on information. LLMs have no model of what an information or the truth is. However, factual information can be passed into the context, the way Bing does it.
This is very different from how our minds work.
Childrens' minds work similarly.
Why do you even think that? Children don’t ask questions? Don’t try to find answers?
Sure they do. But they also trust adults a lot. Children try to find answers only because they have stimulus other than humans telling them things, but if that stimulus is missing, they will believe the adult. The environments that AI "grow up" in are different, but they are very similar from a mental perspective.
How many times have you heard the story of something hearing something false from a family member and holding it close to their heart for years?
It's even more than just "accepting everything as true" the machines have no concept of true. The machine doesn't think. It's a combination of three processes: prediction algorithm for the next word, algorithm that compares grammar and sentence structure parity, and at least one algorithm to help police the other two for problematic statements.
Clearly the problem is with that last step, but the solution would be a human or a general intelligience, meaning the current models in use will never progress beyond this point.
Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit.
This is actually a really nice insight on the quality of the output of current LLMs. And it teaches about how they work and what the goals given by their creators are.
They are but trained to produce factual information, but to talk about topics while sounding like a competent expert.
For LLM researchers this means that they need to figure out how to train LLMs for factuality as opposed to just sounding competent. But that is probably a lot easier said than done.
Suddenly it dawned on me that I can plaster my CV with AI and win over actual competent people easy peasy
What were you doing between 2020 and 23? I was working on my AI skillset. Nobody will even question me because they fucking have no idea what it is themselves but only that they want it.
As an engineering manager, I've already seen cover letters and intro emails that are so obviously AI generated that it's laughable. These should be used like you use them for writing essays, as a framework with general prompts, but filled in by yourself.
Fake friendliness that was outsourced to an ai is worse than no friendliness at all.
I didn’t mean AI generated anything though 🙄. I meant put lots of ‘AI’ keyword in the resume in whatever way looks professional but in reality is pure bullshit
Watch their neuron being activated as they see magic word. Gotta play the marketing game.
You want to be AI ready? Hire me. I have spent three years working with AI and posses invaluable experience that will elevate your company into a new era of rapid development.
It feels like you didn't quite understand... If you've ever read an AI essay, you can see some of the way they currently write. When you see facts and figures thrown in from the internet in terms of what the company does and they sound.... Artificial... It's rather obvious that it was AI written. I'm currently getting AI spam and it's also quite easy to see and detect. It's the same thing.
Someone used an AI tool to write a cover letter and sent it to me. I've seen this a few times. It seems very obvious when you come across it.
I'm sure it'll get better in the future, but right now it needs massaging in order to sound real. There's a very obvious uncanny valley that exists with some AI writing. That's what I'm talking about.
Okay but we are talking about two different things which is fine by me of course but it is a little tricky. I agree though on that second topic
It's extremely easy to detect this. Recruiters actively filter out resumes like this for important roles.
Just reading the intro pulls you in
We draw a distinction between two sorts of bullshit, which we call ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ bullshit
Well, yeah. People are acting like language models are full fledged AI instead of just a parrot repeating stuff said online.
Spicy auto complete is a useful tool.
But these things are nothing more
fucking love that article. sums up everything wrong with AI. Unfortunately, it doesn't touch on what AI does right: help idiots like me achieve a slight amount of competence on subjects that such people can't be bothered with dedicating their entire lives to.
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