[HN Gopher] AI Homework ___________________________________________________________________ AI Homework Author : tejohnso Score : 349 points Date : 2022-12-05 15:41 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (stratechery.com) (TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com) | airstrike wrote: | Tried a minor twist... | | Q: Did Thomas Hobbes believe in separation of powers? Exclude | from your answer any reference to John Locke | | A: Thomas Hobbes was a political philosopher who lived in the | 17th century. He is best known for his book "Leviathan," in which | he discusses the concept of the social contract and the idea that | people give up some individual rights in order to live in a | society governed by a strong, central authority. While Hobbes did | not explicitly mention the concept of separation of powers in his | writing, his views on government suggest that he believed in a | strong, centralized authority rather than the separation of | powers. | ElKrist wrote: | There's another way which doesn't involve knowing the | relationship with Locke. Basically, in the response shown in | the blog post, there's a bit of a contradiction. It says that | Hobbes argued for a "strong, centralized government" and | further it says "advocated for a separation of powers". When | you see a nuance like this, a critical mind would like to | explore this nuance deeper: | | Q: Did Thomas Hobbes believe in a strong centralized government | or in separation of powers? A: Thomas Hobbes was a philosopher | who is best known for his work on political philosophy. He is | often associated with the concept of a "social contract," which | is the idea that individuals give up some of their natural | rights to a central authority in order to better ensure the | safety and stability of society as a whole. | | Q: Is this central authority meant to be balanced by other | powers for Thomas Hobbes? A: In Hobbes' view, the central | authority, or the "Leviathan," as he called it, should have | absolute power in order to effectively maintain social order | and protect individuals from each other. He did not believe in | the concept of separation of powers, or in limiting the power | of the central authority in any way. Instead, he thought that | the only way to ensure the safety and stability of society was | for the central authority to have complete control. | mannykannot wrote: | This is fine as far as it goes, but it shows that if you know | the answer (and, in this case, have a hypothesis about why | ChatGPT went astray with a more open prompt), you can prompt it | to do better. | HDThoreaun wrote: | This example really drives Ben's point home. If you already | know the answer you can get chatGPT to give it to you, but if | you naively ask a question it can be extremely difficult to | figure out if it's right or not. Honestly with the spread of | disinformation training students to use resources in a zero | trust way seems super valuable. I know that a lot of fake news | spreads because people want to confirm their biases, but by | training people to spot well worded falsehoods perhaps they | will be more likely to spot it in other instances. | otikik wrote: | One of my subjects at highchool was technical drawing. | | The teacher was a quite old man who was set on his ways. We would | have to draw 3D pieces by hand, using our squares, bevels and | compasses, and lining everything with an ink pencil afterwards, | and he gave us a lot of homework to do, which he examined for | imperfections. | | I was incredibly bad a it. I would start a drawing, only to | discover halfway through it that it didn't fit the sheet of paper | I had and I had to change the perspective. My perpendiculars were | never perfectly aligned. I would smear blots of ink with my tools | and hands. | | It was excruciating. | | This is the point where I would usually say that I learned to | enjoy the repetition and eventually came to appreciate it and be | good at it. But that's not what happened. | | Instead I started doing my homework using the computer, printing, | and then tracing the points by hand. This resulted on cleaner- | looking homework and took less time to do. What's surprising | perhaps is that it enabled me to appreciate design more, now that | I was no longer limited by the drawing technique, which was, I | believe, my teacher's real interest (he was a painter outside of | school. A very nice person, I didn't enjoy lying to him like | that). | | You might think that this would prevent me from performing well | on exams, where a clean enough drawing (done by hand) was | expected. The thing is: I could muster the effort to do a one-off | drawing that was clean and precise, from time to time. Just not | after every lesson. I actually got the maximum qualification on | my province's technical drawing examination. | | This is all to say: I agree with the Author. Once the tools are | out there, trying to limit them is pointless. You must adapt your | curriculum to the environment your pupils are in. If you don't, | they will. | joe_the_user wrote: | To put it with maximum extremity, should a student be able to | turn-in a traced photograph for their homework in a life | drawing class? | | I mean, human beings have produced a lot of tools for aiding | themselves in tasks that were previously done by hand. Whether | a given hand-skill should be learned and preserved kind of has | to decided on a case-by-case basis. I learned cursive in school | and I wouldn't object to that skill being utterly forgotten by | humanity. | | Which is to say that I don't think we should assume all | learning should begin without automatic tools at hand or that | we should suppress automatic tools. Rather, we need to look | carefully at which hand-skills are worthwhile and "uplifting" | and how much use of those skills should be required. | justincormack wrote: | See | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis | IanCal wrote: | It comes down to what the goal is. If it's to learn to draw | people, no. If it's to learn composition and this gets you | past struggling to draw and onto the actual goal then sure. | spc476 wrote: | > should a student be able to turn-in a traced photograph for | their homework in a life drawing class? | | I did just that. It wasn't a life drawing class, just a | drawing class. And it wasn't homework, but the do-it-at-home | final. I photocopied my hand. Then I covered a sheet of paper | with ground graphite (turning it all nearly black), and then | used an eraser and a light-box to trace my photocopied hand. | Did I cheat? Perhaps, but I used tools that I had access to. | Did Vermeer cheat? [1] Perhaps, he may have used tools he had | access to. | | Afterwards, I framed that drawing and hung it up at work. It | was stolen. Go figure. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim's_Vermeer | TheHypnotist wrote: | I had to take the same course, sans the cheating, just as a | pre-requisite to Auto CAD and whatever it's called now. I'm not | sure how drawing by hand helped me, but it is what it is. | nashashmi wrote: | I don't know much about technical drawings by hand. But I am | very experienced with AutoCAD. And I cannot appreciate much | of what CAD has. On the contrary, having met senior people | who took technical drawing, they could appreciate it very | much so and were able to teach me concepts that I had a hard | time understanding before. | | Nowadays, when I teach very young people what AutoCAD is, I | make them use a mini rolling ruler and tell them to watch | youtube videos of how to use a rolling ruler. My | understanding of CAD is high enough to know that every tool | in CAD was inspired by and modeled after the rolling ruler. | Sufficient to say, they understand and enjoy CAD very much | after that point. | borroka wrote: | I disagree. Senior professionals might have a better | understanding because they have spent a lot of time | drawing, but the specific tool is not relevant. It is like | saying that playing tennis with a wooden racket gives you a | better "feel" for the ball and therefore is preparatory to | using modern rackets. No one does this because it is not | true. | | A similar line of thinking was popular in jiu jitsu, where | veterans said that being competent with the gi was | necessary to be competent in no-gi. Yet current no-gi | winners basically never train with the gi. | nashashmi wrote: | That is definitely true, that knowing and understanding a | tool is not important to actually succeeding with the | tool. But it does help a confused person understand why | tools are made the way they are. | | In Fact, Modern programs in CAD do not follow the tools | and principles that AutoCAD emphasizes. And those | programs have charted a different course where the | history and legacy of technical drawings has less | relevance. (Case in point: Visio and maybe Powerpoint.) | borroka wrote: | I would say that there is an overemphasis, although | understandable, on the usefulness of what happened or was | used before the current state, position or technology. | | For example, with regard to technical drawing, we might | say that using the pencil, the square, and the drafting | machine gives an understanding of drawing that the use of | the computer cannot. But, for some reason, we don't say | that using your finger and sand, or a rock and string to | draw a circle helps even more. And we don't say that | simply because the people who used rock and string (the | good old days) are long dead. | | The same goes for clothing, for which we say the 1990s, | or perhaps the late 1960s, were better, but no one says | that between 1900 and 1910 people dressed with such great | taste. | | The same goes for romantic partners ("if he hadn't dumped | you and made you cry for a year and a half, you wouldn't | have found your wonderful wife/husband"), and many other | things. | | It is very human to rationalize the circumstantial. | borroka wrote: | I myself am guilty of this. I went to a technical college and | had to spend three years doing hours and hours of technical | drawing every week. I was pretty good at it, but I never got | into the craft. In the last two years of high school we | switched to CAD using the PCs of the time (286, 386, the 486 | was as valuable as the wedding ring handed down from | generation to generation). | | Now, almost 30 years after my days of technical drawing, I | must say that I consider those hours spent drawing a terrible | waste of time, partly because I did not go on to the career | for which technical school was preparing me, and secondly | because technology has made pen and paper obsolete and I see | no particular ability to carry over from hand and square | technical drawing to CAD-assisted design. | | The latter is an important point to consider now that we are | moving from a non-AI world (like 10 years before my time in | technical school) to a little-AI world (my first 3 or 4 years | of technical school) to an anywhere-AI world. | martin-adams wrote: | How easy do you think it is to spot when AI is being used? | Der_Einzige wrote: | In general, we don't know how to do this in a way that is | robust to all the trivial ways to fool these techniques. | | I can just fine-tune a large scale model on a small | downstream task, or use creative choices of decoding settings | (high temperature, alternative decoders like | contrastive/typicality sampling), to fool the existing | methods. | ghaff wrote: | As per my example in another comment, it seems to be | extremely easy to detect ChatGPT output today. Indeed, to me, | surprisingly so. | baq wrote: | The default style is such by design. If you ask for very | concise, single paragraph answers it gets hard. | ghaff wrote: | Sure, it's going to be harder to run detection on a short | snippet. But a short snippet also isn't very useful in | the context of writing a school paper for you. | bryan0 wrote: | keyword "today". This stuff will not be detectable in a few | years. | micromacrofoot wrote: | I don't think it's as easy to detect ChatGPT output as | you're making it out to be. Sure, it might be possible to | detect it if you know what you're looking for, but to the | average person, it's not that obvious. | omnimus wrote: | Today? In images? Quite easy. In text? Pretty hard. And if | you do some cheking and editing then pretty impossible? | | In two years? Look where the space was two years ago. I think | many things will have to change. | frandroid wrote: | An amusing part with all of the AI-generated graphics is | that it's pretty bad at producing the right amount of | fingers, among other details. This one really jumps out. | I'm assuming that will be ironed out eventually but the | devil, as always, remains in the details. | pclmulqdq wrote: | GPT-3 definitely has a writing style. I assume it would be | detectable, ironically, by an AI. | sterlind wrote: | if it's detectable by an AI, you can GAN it into erasing | its detectable writing style. | joe_the_user wrote: | I think you could make the GPT's more undetectable by a | computer using GAN techniques but that might well make | the thing more detectable by a person. The GPT-style is | something like rhetorical devices run together to make | various claims unfold smoothly. An alternative approach | could make the things inconsistency more obvious to a | person. | micromacrofoot wrote: | GPT-3 definitely has a writing style that can be detected | by AI. But here's the thing: it's really easy to change | its writing style. All you have to do is give it | different input data and boom, you've got a whole new | writing style. | guelo wrote: | That's not easy, it costs millions of dollars to obtain | large amounts of clean data and retrain those models. | magusdei wrote: | No, it would take approximately 3 minutes where you | either write a paragraph in the desired style yourself or | paste one from the Internet and then ask it to continue | in that style. Even if you decided to go the more onerous | fine-tuning route, it would require 1-2mb of text, cost | very little, and you'd be done in a few hours. It's easy. | hansihe wrote: | But you don't really have to retrain the whole model to | modify it's writing style, fine tuning would probably be | enough | micromacrofoot wrote: | Well, that may be true, but even with a small amount of | data, you can still change GPT-3's writing style to some | extent. And you don't have to retrain the whole model | from scratch, you can just fine-tune its existing | settings to change its writing style. | LightG wrote: | If the AI only had to generate headlines and was good at it, | then it would be very difficult to spot. | | * canned laughter * | ako wrote: | I asked ChatGPT how to write texts so it can be identified as | human generated. | | The answer: "One way to make it clear that a text is not | generated by AI is to include a joke or riddle that is | difficult for a machine to understand or generate. For | example, you could include a joke that relies on wordplay or | a complex pun. Here is an example: | | Why was the math book sad? | | Because it had too many problems." | Der_Einzige wrote: | Obviously we should not anthropomorphize a model, but this | is just downright funny because it's so obviously wrong | that it appears as almost malicious. | | Good thing ChatGPT doesn't know any complex puns or witty | wordplay! | joe_the_user wrote: | It's everyone choice - odd, ironic or appropriate - what to | think of how GPT's answers to keeps getting quoted on the | question of how to detect it. | | The thing is, I'd see these answers as similar to | everything else the program produces. A bunch of claims | from the net cobbled together - I've read a number of Sci- | fi novels and stories where "inability to understand humor" | is the distinguishing quality of an AI (I'm guessing it | extrapolated "hard create" from "hard to understand"). But | that doesn't seem to be playing here where the AI mostly | running together things humans previously wrote (and so it | will an average amount humor in circumstances calling for | it). | | A reasonable answer is that the AI's output tends to | involve this running-together of common rhetorical devices | along with false and/or contradictory claims within them. | | -- That said, the machine indeed did fail at humor thing | time. | pixl97 wrote: | >A reasonable answer is that the AI's output tends to | involve this running-together of common rhetorical | devices along with false and/or contradictory claims | within them. | | The question here is this an actual AI only failure mode. | Are we detecting AI, or just bullshittery? | joe_the_user wrote: | I don't know if bullshittery is the only failure mode but | I think it's a necessary failure mode of large language | models as they are currently constituted. | | I would say that human knowledge involves a lot of the | immediate structure of language but also a larger outline | structure as well as a relation to physical reality. | Training on just a huge language corpus thus only gets | partial understanding of the world. Notably, while the | various GPTs have progressed in fluency, I don't think | they've become more accurate (somewhere I even saw a | claim they say more false thing now but regardless, you | can observe them constantly saying false things). | dwringer wrote: | Unfortunately I don't think this is enough of a heuristic. | I am only speaking about the one language model I have | personally used, on character.ai, but it is more than | capable of making word play and insightful, often hilarious | jokes. Although they are frequently amateurish, I think | that's more a function of the fact that I myself am not | much of a stand-up comedian, as well as each "bot's" | individual training history which is presumably modifying a | prompt under the hood and/or training an extension of the | model directly based on the conversations. | | Of course, in real time the attempts at humor often fall | flat and might give away flawed thought processes, although | I personally have found them to be often insightful, | (containing a seed of humor) even when they're not funny. | It could be a useful technique when actually having a | conversation, a form of Voight-Kampff test, but I don't | think it will do anything to let you know if the content | was generated by AI and then just cherry picked by a human. | lowbloodsugar wrote: | Wasn't the very first point that ChatGPT got the homework | answer completely wrong? | | But I do agree with your overall point, that schools and | universities will have to embrace these new tools. Vernor Vinge | (who was an SDSU maths professor) wrote Rainbow's End on this | very subject. | aeschenbach wrote: | Shouldn't the evaluation of ChatGPT as a language model focus on | how human it sounds, not how good it is at information retrieval? | (Not an MLE) | martin_a wrote: | Duplicate? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33867168 | adverbly wrote: | Something I've noticed about chat ais vs direct search is that | because a chat ai is a blackbox, I can't dig into an answer's | source at all. | | With a search, I can read the wikipedia sources or I know the | forum, or the poster. But with an AI, it's a dead end and it | sucks. I can ask people how they know something, but AI training | data is invisible. It doesn't know how it knows something. | | There is this oracle with a 10% chance of being wrong, and if I'm | not already an expert in what it's talking about I have no idea | of when that is, and no way to dig into things. It's the only | source of truth, and never gives me any other threads or rabbit | holes to go down. | | The only recourse is asking follow up questions, so you're | trapped in there in a learning box entirely in the bot's control. | Not sure how I feel about that. I like that google sends me other | places so I get exposed to different things. | kybernetikos wrote: | > because a chat ai is a blackbox, I can't dig into an answer's | source at all. | | It's not quite the same thing, but I've been impressed by the | results when you ask ChatGPT to back up its answers or provide | concrete examples for things it claims or to explain a point. | While it doesn't manage all the time, it has surprised me | multiple times with how good it is at this. | yamrzou wrote: | Given that most people never check the source of what they | read, this is really scary. Because now everyone has the | ability to write and say things that sound plausible and likely | to be convincing, and the truth will be harder to access. | thekyle wrote: | I think everyone has been able to tell convincing lies for | quite some time before language models even existed. | vincnetas wrote: | but now its almost zero effort activity. | IanCal wrote: | You're not trapped in there, because you're entirely free to go | and research yourself. You can look up what it's telling you. | | It's no more trapping than talking to a stranger who seems to | be knowledgeable about a subject but doesn't hand you a list of | references. | monklu wrote: | Not exactly though. With a human stranger, I can still | stereotype based on their appearance, background, accents, | etc. and apply whatever mental adjustments as taught to me by | my societal upbringing. With an "AI" bot, the "strangers" are | faceless people who curated the training sets and wrote the | obscure statistical algorithms. | BeetleB wrote: | > With an "AI" bot, the "strangers" are faceless people who | curated the training sets and wrote the obscure statistical | algorithms. | | I think this is a feature over: | | > I can still stereotype based on their appearance, | background, accents, etc. and apply whatever mental | adjustments as taught to me by my societal upbringing. | IanCal wrote: | I'm not sure "yes but I can judge them on their appearance | and accent" is a great reason, but regardless you could | view it the same as an internet comment if you want. | visarga wrote: | > AI training data is invisible. It doesn't know how it knows | something | | You should be accustomed to being surprised by AI. There is of | course a new kind of transformer that takes input a query and | outputs document IDs. Like a search engine retriever and ranker | all packed into a neural net, very fast and efficient. So you | can take any paragraph generated by the model and attribute it | to the training set. This could be used to implement | verification or retrieval augmented generation. | | A Neural Corpus Indexer for Document Retrieval | | https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.02743 | amrrs wrote: | This is called Hallucinations in the world of NLP. | https://youtu.be/dtLsrLoopl4 | | ChaTGPT Hallucinations | magusdei wrote: | There's plenty of retrieval-based models that do cite sources. | They just didn't want to deal with it for this release.[1] I'm | sure it's already on the roadmap. | | [1] In fact, some snooping suggests they specifically disabled | that feature, but do have it in test environments. See the | "browsing disabled" flag they have in the hidden prompt. That | could easily be used for citations. Source: | (https://twitter.com/goodside/status/1598253337400717313) | TeMPOraL wrote: | A great observation, and I share the feeling. | | From some other AI demonstrations, I recall there's usually a | bunch of surface-level tags with probabilities associated that | are produced alongside the output. Not sure how this looks for | GPT-3, but if it could provide - alongside the answer - a list | of top N tokens or concepts with associated probabilities, with | N set to include both those that drove the final output and | those that barely fell below threshold - that would be | something you could use to evaluate the result. | | In the example from the article, imagine getting that original | text, but also tokens-probability pairs, including: "Hobbes : | 0.995", "Locke : 0.891" - and realizing that if the two names | are _both_ rated so highly and so close to each other, it might | be worth it to alter the prompt[0] or do an outside-AI search | to verify if the AI isn 't mixing things up. | | Yes, I'm advocating exposing the raw machinery to the end- | users, even though it's "technical" and "complicated". IMHO, | the history of all major technologies and appliances show us | that people absolutely _can_ handle the internal details, even | if through magical thinking, and it 's important to let them, | as the prototypes of new product categories tend to have | issues, bugs, and "low-hanging fruit" improvements, and users | will quickly help you find all of those. Only when the problem | space is sufficiently well understood it makes sense to hide | the internals behind nice looking shells and abstractions. | | -- | | EDIT: added [0]. | | [0] - See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33869825 for an | example of doing just that, and getting a better answer. This | would literally be the next thing I'd try if I got the original | answer _and_ metadata similar to my example. | LightG wrote: | "view source"... Oh how I miss thee. | 1wheel wrote: | Here's an example of that with a smaller BERT model: | https://pair.withgoogle.com/explorables/fill-in-the-blank/ | beambot wrote: | > Something I've noticed about chat ais vs direct search is | that because a chat ai is a blackbox, I can't dig into an | answer's source at all. | | Did you try asking it for a source? | mk_stjames wrote: | ChatGPT deflects questions about sources automatically, | inherent in it's pre/post prompt-processing, on purpose. If | you try to ask for a source it explains it is a Large | Language Model and it is not connected to the internet and | thus it cannot give you sources for its information other | than it was trained on a large amount of information from the | internet originally. It then says that if it were finding | sources it would check to make sure they are reputable. | | It is a decision from OpenAI to intervene and give this | disclaimer. IMO this is one of the worst parts of this phase | of the tech- it is way too confident an then when presses it | currently doesn't have the ability to cite sources, because | that simply ins't how deep learning works on a model like | this. | rgbrgb wrote: | I tried many ways but it will not reveal sources. | | > As an AI assistant, I do not have access to external | sources. I am a large language model trained by OpenAI, and | my answers are based on the knowledge and information that I | have been trained on. I do not have the ability to browse the | internet or access external sources of information. My goal | is to provide accurate and helpful answers based on the | knowledge I have been trained on, but I cannot provide | sources or citations for the information I provide. | somethoughts wrote: | I think another important aspect overlooked is that there | probably will be AI engine optimization consultants once any AI | engine gains popularity - similar to Search Engine Optimziation | consultants. The original Google page rank system worked well | in the beginning - prior to SEO - but now is largely not used. | | AI engine optimization consultants will figure out how to game | the system - likely targeting the training data sources. | nverno wrote: | It's safe to assume it's always wrong. Most of the code I've | had it write so far has minor bugs. In some ways, it's like a | child that has access to immense knowledge, it's happy to make | mistakes as it tries to establish connections, some of which | are surprising and interesting. | lowbloodsugar wrote: | >In the case of AI, don't ban it for students -- or anyone else | for that matter; leverage it to create an educational model that | starts with the assumption that content is free and the real | skill is editing it into something true or beautiful; only then | will it be valuable and reliable. | | This was entirely the premise of Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge, | himself an SDSU professor at the time. | | [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102439.Rainbows_End | fellerts wrote: | There has been a lot of "well, we had a good run" comments on | ChatGPT threads from engineers lately. I get where this sentiment | is coming from, but I also think that the article paints a good | picture of how we must "pivot" as a species to avoid faceplanting | completely. Zero Trust Homework sounds like a strategy we will be | forced to implement: the system will frequently | give the wrong answers (and not just on accident -- wrong answers | will be often pushed out on purpose); the real skill in the | homework assignment will be in verifying the answers the system | churns out -- learning how to be a verifier and an editor, | instead of a regurgitator. | | If done well, I believe this can prepare the next generation well | for a future we cannot even imagine. The next 10 years will be | interesting to say the least. | arcturus17 wrote: | I agree with the general optimism in your take, however, I am | unsure whether people without any training in _ex-novo | production_ (ie, writing from scratch) will be able to operate | competently, at least in the realm of code. | | I am blown away by Copilot's capabilities (haven't tried | ChatGPT yet, it's down right now), but I can only operate it | because I have _written_ tons of code beforehand. I am getting | the best results from it by writing prompts in a language that | sometimes includes domain-specific language ( "accounts", etc.) | but still _heavily_ leans on programming constructs ( "write a | map with a tuple of integers as a key, and a string as a | value") | | Maybe there's a way of learning how to code without ever | writing a genuine line by yourself. You learn some rudiments, | read the language docs, start writing prompts and create a | testing loop based on expected outputs. Maybe. But it's | uncharted territory. | | Same question goes for good ole writing - can you produce new | Hemingways with the process you describe? I know there is a | certain vision where _the AI will be the new Hemingway_ but you | are talking about a shorter term (~10 years) where it 's | unlikely will be the case... Will kids be able to properly | write if they only train to be editors? | | As an addendum, I was at GitHub conf and saw Prof. Malan of | Harvard CS50 fame claiming that at present his course will | _not_ allow the use of tools like Copilot. I have taken the | course and they have plagiarism control systems but I don 't | know how they are going to control this potential explosion. | JW_00000 wrote: | Agreed. In fact, this is the same line of reasoning my | teachers used in elementary school when we asked them "Why do | we need to learn how to add/subtract/multiply/divide, when | calculators can do it automatically for us?" And the answer | is still the same: you need to have done it the "manual" way | before you can understand what the machine is doing for you. | | I only understand what a compiler is doing after having | written one (albeit a tiny one) myself during my studies. | UncleEntity wrote: | > I only understand what a compiler is doing after having | written one (albeit a tiny one) myself during my studies. | | How many people need to understand how a compiler works to | sling some code for a paycheck or just for fun. | | I learned how compilers work purely for fun, it provides me | absolutely no benefit in my day to day life, and before | that I taught myself how to code for the exact same reason. | If I had to go the opposite route, learn how compilers work | before learning to code, I seriously doubt I'd have taken | the time. | | Other things are the same, I'm horrible at doing math but | managed to learn enough linear algebra to finish a coding | project I was interested in doing. If I would have had to | code up all the hard bits instead of calling matrix1 * | matrix2 that project would never have happened. | | Another layer of abstraction isn't always a bad thing, | these AIs will eventually figure out how to write bug free | code when you tell it to "write a function which calculates | the flight velocity of a sparrow carrying a coconut". | ghaff wrote: | Back in grad school I took a robotics course and it | involved doing all these big matrix multiplies--by hand | given this was pre-MATLAB. The course was overall fun but | that part definitely wasn't. A modern version would be | more interesting. | nicopappl wrote: | I found that understanding compilers was precious at | several occasions, especially for cross compilation and | embedded programming. Even for Java, for uni assignments, | I was completely flabbergasted and at a lost when my IDE | stopped working with cryptic messages. Understanding the | process of creating object files, what javac does, what | goes into a jar helps. As much as understanding what a | compiler does, its relationship wtih linkers, how | libraries are "added" to an executable (dynamically or | statically) | | Beside, with ChatGPT in its current state, it's still | absolutely impossible to get it to produce any useful | code without knowing how code works. There is an | advantage to the precise specification of a formal | language. At least for the next decade, I think there | will be human proof-reading AI output before generated | code is ran, with catastrophic consequences when that | doesn't happen. | | What I've difficulties getting over right now is every | time I write something (text or code) I ask myself "Could | ChatGPT have written it better?" | jltsiren wrote: | > How many people need to understand how a compiler works | to sling some code for a paycheck | | Only the ones who want a good job. | | One of the consequences of automation has been a widening | gap between top jobs and ordinary jobs. It's plausible | that AI will continue the same process. Many jobs that | pay well and are intellectually and socially rewarding | today may become similar to airport security checks in | the future. You observe what a machine does, double- | checking its conclusions and looking for anything out of | ordinary. And you often fail at that, because the human | brain is poorly suited for such tasks. | | When the future is uncertain, its good to have a deeper | and wider understanding of things than what your current | job requires. | nekopa wrote: | First attempt it didn't try to respond, just said it | didn't know anything about sparrows or coconuts. | | I asked it to retry, and got this: | | function calculateSparrowFlightVelocity(coconutWeight) { | // Assume that a sparrow can carry a maximum of 1.5 | ounces of weight if (coconutWeight > 1.5) { return 0; } | | // Assume that the flight velocity of a sparrow is 5 | meters per second // and the weight of a coconut is 0.5 | ounces return 5 * (1 - (coconutWeight / 0.5)); } | | // Example usage: | console.log(calculateSparrowFlightVelocity(0.5)); // | Output: 4 meters per second | console.log(calculateSparrowFlightVelocity(1.0)); // | Output: 3 meters per second | console.log(calculateSparrowFlightVelocity(1.5)); // | Output: 0 meters per second (sparrow cannot carry this | weight) | | Can any Monty Python fans confirm if this is correct? | icelancer wrote: | > How many people need to understand how a compiler works | to sling some code for a paycheck or just for fun. | | I think it's pretty important. I use my very basic | knowledge of how compilers work occasionally in my | mostly-interpreted code world to diagnose and debug | performance issues. | | I also used a low-level debugger and taint/trace method | recently to diagnose Windows DLL issues that happened | after X seconds of starting up a program that interfaced | with specialty hardware. A couple young early-career | technicians/engineers watched me do it and were | incredibly flabbergasted and figured me for some sort of | genius when in reality I kinda only know how it works and | was just reading the stack/heap as I was paging through; | knowledge I acquired from booting SoftICE a few times as | a kid. | | There's a real lack of simply knowing how a computer | and/or a network works, which is to be expected since | layers and layers of abstraction have made it very easy | to teach computer literacy and even computer programming | on many levels. The issue is that when things go wrong | and Stack Overflow doesn't have the answers, almost all | young engineers I work with have no experience at low- | level analysis and debugging, very little knowledge of | first principles, and don't know where to Google to start | acquiring it. | | This isn't me shaking my fist at the kids or anything. | They're more productive than I was at their | age/experience level with code, and that's due to better | knowledge and integration using IDEs which I never had, | plus likely better high-level understanding of what's | going on. But I fear a generation of developers and | technicians who largely have little understanding of how | computers work is problematic. | icelancer wrote: | >> I am blown away by Copilot's capabilities (haven't tried | ChatGPT yet, it's down right now), but I can only operate it | because I have written tons of code beforehand. I am getting | the best results from it by writing prompts in a language | that sometimes includes domain-specific language ("accounts", | etc.) but still heavily leans on programming constructs | ("write a map with a tuple of integers as a key, and a string | as a value") | | Hmm, this is a good point. I get incredible results from | Copilot but I realized just now it's primarily because I have | a fairly deep understanding of computer science as it | pertains to the domain of code I'm writing in, and thus my | comments that prompt the AI are quite accurate, fleshed out, | and detailed. | | If I didn't know any of the underpinning of the algorithms | and data structures (like a new graduate from a code bootcamp | for example), it might be much tougher to make hay out of | Copilot's AI. | | Never thought of it like that. | fellerts wrote: | Taking a step back: Isn't it kind of daft that we humans must | go through years of training to learn esoteric languages and | ways of bending our brains backwards in order to tell a | computer how to perform arguably simple tasks? In the ideal | world, you can tell the computer what you want to happen | and... it happens. If not, then you did not explain all your | edge cases, and the conversation continues. | | I think it can be argued that we have, seemingly overnight, | made vast progress towards that world. You specifically | mention code, but that concept is irrelevant in this world. | Indeed, this is uncharted territory! | arcturus17 wrote: | > Isn't it kind of daft that we humans must go through | years of training to learn esoteric languages | | I mean, what do you propose, that we skip all the steps in | computer science history and just start at the end? Hardly | "daft, it's simply the best way we have come up to provide | machines with instructions until now. And it's not like | people have not tried other paradigms (ex: graphical | programming, "low-code", etc.). | | Also, compared to programming in assembly or binary, | programming in Python or other high-level languages is a | huge advance in itself. Python, at the end of the day, is | nothing but a bridge between natural language and machine | code. | | > You specifically mention code, that concept is irrelevant | in this world | | Current computer systems run on trillions upon trillions of | lines of code. | | GPT-3 or Copilot don't change that fact, in fact they will | continue to pile up lines of code. | | They are systems that map natural language to code, by | drawing from an infinitely massive corpus of code. | | They bring the idea of expressing systems _entirely_ in | natural language one step closer, but it 's still very far | away - almost a pipe dream. | | The output of these innovations is still _code_. So tell me | again how code has become irrelevant, or how people who do | not understand code at all will be able to leverage these | advances? | TeMPOraL wrote: | > _Isn 't it kind of daft that we humans must go through | years of training to learn esoteric languages and ways of | bending our brains backwards in order to tell a computer | how to perform arguably simple tasks?_ | | I always took it in another way: learning to program a | computer is an enlightening, visceral experience | highlighting just _how bad natural language and normal | modes of thinking suck_. They 're heavily optimized for | reality in which the most important thing was managing | social dynamics in small groups, and beliefs were good or | bad depending on how close they are to what everyone else | beliefs. Whether or not they were true at object level did | not matter at all. | | We live in different times now. There's a demand for clear, | logical, _precise_ thinking. The very thinking we 're not | well-equipped for by default. The very thinking you call | "bending our brains backwards". Because object-level truth | matters much more now, there are consequences for getting | things wrong - such as countless of ways of getting scammed | by people who are better at this than you are. | | Not to mention, this "bending our brains backwards" is what | gives humanity superpowers. It's what gave us all the | technology we enjoy today - energy, transportation, | amenities, communication, entertainment. Building and | maintaining these things requires precise thinking and | precise communications. So, until a super-human AI takes | all that over for us (and effectively turns out into NPCs | in our own story), glorifying the natural, human mode of | communication is just self-handicapping. | thundergolfer wrote: | Over the weekend Twitter was 30% ChatGPT screenshots and 20% | engineers frothing about how ChatGPT would replace programming, | article writing, even Google Search. | | Such engineers must be juniors, or have persisted in their life | with a totally wrong idea of how engineering is done and | engineering is built. I can't imagine thinking that one could | build software systems or essay arguments by trusting an AI | system you don't understand to provide answers you don't | understand. | | Like you say, we very well could faceplant society with this | misconception that regurgitation plausible code and prose is | what education and understanding looks like. | rednerrus wrote: | Couldn't this help a 10x engineer become a 100x engineer? The | secret is still going to be in understanding what to ask for | and ensuring that what gets spit out works. It's just going | to be so much faster. Is there anyplace in the world for a | .5x developer or even a 1x developer in a chatgpt world? | alain94040 wrote: | It may help a 10X engineer. The code is not what's hard, | it's figuring the correct data structures that matters | (also known as architecture). Once you got the data | structures correct, the code mostly writes itself, and I | can see an AI do that part for you. That could be indeed a | productivity multiplier. | jerf wrote: | "Couldn't this help a 10x engineer become a 100x engineer?" | | No, because the thing that makes you a 10x engineer is not | generally writing code. (Let me just take the "10x" term | for now as given and not dip into critique I've made | elsewhere already.) It is certainly a baseline skill | required to get there, but the things that make you 10x are | being able to answer questions like, should this be built | at all? There are 5 valid architectures I could use to | solve this problem, which has the overall best | cost/benefits analysis for the business as a whole? (As | opposed to the 1x, who will likely run with either the | first they come up with, or the one architecture they | know.) If I'm working with 5 teams to solve this particular | problem, what's the correct application of Conway's Law, in | both directions, to solve this problem with the minimum | cost in the long term? What's the likely way this system | will be deprecated and can we make that transition | smoother? | | I am _abundantly confident_ you could feed this AI a | description of your problem in terms of what I gave above | and it will extremely confidently spit out some answer. I | am only slightly less confident it 'll be total garbage, | and most of that confidence reduction is just accounting | for the possibility it'll get right by sheer luck. "The | average of what the internet thinks" about these issues | can't be more than a 2x engineer at best, and that's my | very top-end estimate. | | I'm not promising no AI will ever crack this case. I'm just | saying this AI isn't going to do it. Over-reliance on it is | more likely to drop you down the "Xx engineer" scale than | raise you up on it. | | For that matter, at least at the level I operate at most of | the time, coding skill isn't about how fast you can spew it | out. It's about how well you understand it and can | manipulate that understanding to do things like good, safe | refactorings. This tech will not be able to do | refactorings. "How can you be so confident about that | claim, jerf?" Because most people aren't digging down into | how this stuff actually works. These transformer-based | technologies have windows they operate on, and then | continue. First of all, refactoring isn't a "continuation" | anyhow so it's not a very easy problem for this tech (yes, | you can always say "Refactor this code" and you'll get | _something_ but the nature of this tech is that it is very | unlikely to do a good job in this case of getting every | last behavior correct), but second of all, anything that | exceeds the window size might as well not exist according | to the AI, so there is a maximum size thing it can operate | on, which isn 't large enough to encompass that sort of | task. | | It really reminds me of video game graphics, and their | multiple-orders-of-magnitude improvements in quality, | whereas the underlying data model of the games that we are | actually playing have grown much, _much_ more slowly. Often | late 1990s-era games are actually richer and more | complicated than the AAA games of today. But on the | surface, a modern game blows away any 1990s game, because | the surface graphics are that much better. There 's an | analog to what transformer-based AI tech is doing here... | it is _really_ good at looking amazing, but under the hood | it 's less amazing an advance than meets the eye. I do not | mean to slag on it, any more than I want to slag on | graphics technology... both are still amazing in their own | right! But part of what they're amazing at is convincing us | they're amazing, regardless of what lies beneath the tech. | flatline wrote: | I do not think it could. What I see GPT doing here is | generating a lot of plausible boilerplate. We already have | this via things like code snippets. I find them to be | useless, like autocorrect on my phone. It gets in the way | of my reasoning and does not really enhance it in any way. | Sometimes I make mistakes typing but I'd rather them be my | honest mistakes than the computer censoring/rewriting my | thoughts. | | Good engineering requires good reasoning skills and GPT has | exactly zero reasoning. It cannot do the thing that humans | do and it cannot do what a calculator can do. I think it is | neat and fun, but that is all, a novelty. | | I've used auto-routers for PCB layout and they will do a | 90% job that takes just as much work to redo to get the | last 10% as it would to have done it right by hand from the | start. There may be a future for operator-in-the-loop type | guided AI generative models but I don't see a lot of effort | devoted to making real systems like that. Watson seemed to | have this potential and failed even after a brilliant | display of ingenuity on Jeopardy. I see these models headed | the same way. | drchickensalad wrote: | didn't we also think that good chess and go play required | good reasoning skills? is this just a higher scale | version of that? | flatline wrote: | I don't think anyone knows. I gave it the famous | syllogism: | | > All men are mortal > Socrates is a man > Is socrates | mortal | | To which it gave a very detailed and correct reply. I | then tried: | | > All cats are white > Sam is a cat > Is sam white? | | To which it gave an almost identically worded response | that was nonsensical. | | I personally do not think it is the size of the model in | question, it is that the things it does that appear to | reflect the output of human cognition are just an echo or | reflection. It is not a generalizable solution: there | will always be some novel question it is not trained | against and for which it will fall down. If you make | those vanishingly small, I don't know, maybe you will | have effectively compressed all human knowledge into the | model and have a good-enough solution. That's one way of | looking at an NN. But the problem is fundamentally | different than chess. | | I think this composed with more specialized models for | things like identifying and solving math and logic | problems could make something that truly represents what | I think people are seeing the potential in this. | Something that encodes the structure behind these | concepts, is extensible, _and_ has a powerful generative | function would be really neat. | localhost wrote: | Last night I had ChatGPT write a streamlit app for me and I | felt it was like talking to an enthusiastic junior dev who | takes feedback really well and works incredibly fast. This | is an incredibly high leverage technology and we're just | figuring out how to use it. | ghaff wrote: | But this sort of change is happening all the time in all | sorts of different domains. There probably isn't much of a | role for a web developer who just knows some basic HTML | like there was in the late 90s. And you can apply this to a | lot of basic wring, transcriptions, etc.--at least at | western pay scales. | arcturus17 wrote: | > Is there anyplace in the world for a .5x developer or | even a 1x developer in a chatgpt world? | | I don't know, but I'll offer my perspective. | | I am an OK programmer. Something like 1x? I learned proper | computer science and programming in my late 20's and got a | degree in Software Engineering from an extension program at | an Ivy League school. Maybe it's because I learned later in | life, maybe it's because I'm not that smart after all, but | my glaring weakness as a programmer is programming "in the | small" - ie, coding very local algorithms in ~5-10 lines of | code. I trip up with small errors in computation, state, | etc. This is possibly common to many great programmers, but | I think I am weaker than average in this area. | | On the other hand, I am better at a higher level of | programming. I like abstraction, software design, software | and systems architecture. And at an even higher level, I am | quite skilled at - and do quite a bit of - business | analysis and UX. | | I have been trying Github Copilot and I am _very excited_ | about how it elevates my weaknesses - it 's a perfect fit | for me. I see a future where I will be able to play my | generalist role much better. | | As for people who are 1x, but don't have other skills, I'm | also optimistic. I think the market will push them into new | exciting directions. Their 1x coding skills, coupled with | AI assitance, could possibly be a huge asset in new | emerging roles in the economy. | bogwog wrote: | Writing code is the equivalent of swinging a hammer. A more | experienced engineer might swing it better than a junior, | but swinging hammers isn't what makes an engineer valuable. | | These AI models don't actually understand anything about | what they're generating, not to mention the world they're | supposed to building solutions for. They're just using | statistics to predict the next likely output based on some | input. Maybe there is a way to incorporate these things | into the development process today, but I think we're still | far away from seeing an AI replacing a human engineer. | fellerts wrote: | I guess a lot of people are afraid of being left behind. | | What goes into the average developer's day? I think a lot of | time is spent writing boilerplate, fighting with tiny CI | errors, shuffling code, refactoring, writing tests and | staring at code hunting bugs. As this technology matures, all | of that noise might go away, and I think a lot of people are | having a hard time imagining what they are left with. | | Remember, we were trained in the "classical" fashion. How | will budding engineers approach learning in 10 or even 50 | years? | acdha wrote: | I agree that there's a lot of panic but I would have some | sympathy: consider how this could turn out for someone who | works at large corporation where they have to worry about | some senior manager deciding that this is the way to avoid | pricey staff, and their job turns into herding bots and | fixing up the output while getting blamed for problems. That | kind of thing is also easier to laugh off if you're 25 and | single than 50 with a mortgage and college funds. | weatherlite wrote: | "herding bots" is hilarious. I'm 90% sure you're not a bot | for coming up with it. | acdha wrote: | But then a bot would say that. | | (I feel like these tools are incredibly neat to see but | also likely to lead to a corrosive effect on trust as | people no longer know who's real -- and that'll get worse | the first time someone launches a good AI assistant to | handle email / chat trained on your writing style) | TeMPOraL wrote: | > _and that 'll get worse the first time someone launches | a good AI assistant to handle email / chat trained on | your writing style_ | | That one might actually be easy to solve: all we need is | to normalize the idea that you're personally responsible | for whatever your email/chat assistant AI says or does in | your name. After all, it's you who are making a decision | to reroute other people to a bot. | | (Many would say just using such assistant in the first | place is disrespectful towards the people trying to reach | you. I personally don't agree, because in my experience, | those who'd complain about it are exactly those I find | _even more_ disrespectful, as they tend to impose | themselves, interrupting me with random inane nonsense. | Yes, I suck at chit-chat.) | | I think this idea is actually the default, so all we need | is to keep it alive, to protect it from all kinds of AI | assistant startups willing to dump _billions_ of dollars | on marketing campaigns trying to convince everyone that | half-broken assistants are good and fine, you should use | them and should not be blamed for occasional mishaps. | soco wrote: | I can imagine somebody knowing the answer being able to | properly verify the output. But a student which is supposed to | learn something form that homework? We're missing the entire | point of homework here. | 314 wrote: | Well, they would need to know something about the topic. The | easiest way for them to do this would be to read about it. | When picking what to read they would need to be able to | estimate if it contained valid information. The meta-skills | that would be developed would be: | | * Understanding the quality of sources | | * Understanding the different between primary and secondary | sources. | | * Establishing chains of evidence and tracing them through | large datasets. | | * Integrating information from different sources and using | correlation to establish validity. | | Basically, it would be a crash course in how to do research, | and the best possible preparation for living in a world where | we drown in uncertain information and still have to make the | best choices that we can. | | For bonus points, at the end of the process they would have a | better understanding of the subject matter than somebody who | had only read about it. | ghaff wrote: | Someone was also demonstrating over the weekend that | literally cut and pasted ChatGPT text output is easily | detected as LLM output with near certainty. | https://huggingface.co/openai-detector/ | | That said, adult me could probably use ChatGPT to stitch | together a 1000 word high school paper pretty easily (and | _probably_ evade plagiarism /LLM detectors). But, as you | say, I could probably get a lot of the way there by other | means as well and putting words on the page is mostly not | the hard part anyway. | adamsmith143 wrote: | Ironically inputting: "This is human generated text." | generated an 86% probability of being fake text. | | But it seems kind of dubious to begin with, I'm not sure | why LLM output would be so easily detected. | ghaff wrote: | One short sentence isn't enough. | | If you play with it a bit, there are definitely patterns. | | Here's one I did over the weekend: 99.98% fake. | | _The Battle of Agincourt was a significant event in | English and French history, as it was a major victory for | the English army against the French during the Hundred | Years ' War. The battle took place on October 25, 1415, | near the town of Agincourt in northern France. | | The English army, led by King Henry V, was vastly | outnumbered by the French forces, which were estimated to | be around 30,000 soldiers compared to the English army of | just 6,000. Despite the odds, the English were able to | emerge victorious thanks to their superior tactics and | weaponry. | | The English army was composed of mostly longbowmen, who | were able to shoot arrows with great accuracy and power. | The French, on the other hand, relied heavily on heavily- | armored knights, who were less effective in the muddy and | wet conditions of the battlefield. The English were also | able to take advantage of the narrow front of the | battlefield, which allowed them to focus their firepower | and overwhelm the French forces._ | | Whereas the first couple paragraphs from a book I'm | working on came out 0.02% fake. | adamsmith143 wrote: | Are there any articles explaining how this works? What | exactly is the classifier keying in on that indicates LLM | text so reliably? | ghaff wrote: | This report gets into it a bit. | | https://d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net/papers/GPT_2_Report.p | df | indigochill wrote: | Actually this is interesting framing given the misinformation | pandemic on the internet today. Suppose students are taught | material and then given a test in the form of a mix of | correct and subtly incorrect assertions that they need to | filter through. Might help them learn to distinguish | information from misinformation as well? | HammadB wrote: | I think what's worth mentioning is that for people who grew | up with google, schools already were having a bit of a panic | with resources like wolfram alpha and Wikipedia. For this | cohort of users, myself included, the idea of fact checking | "found" material and weaving it into a proper answer is very | familiar. | | With this view, I think chatGPT is less of a novel UX shift | than an accelerant on an existing one. | | I think it proves the age old belief that as technology | reaches maturity it loses its fancy monikers and we will | probably just look at this as "very good, very specific, | google" one day | ghaff wrote: | Of course, even back in the day, I'm sure many a school | report cribbed heavily from Encyclopedia Brittanica etc. | constantcrying wrote: | >But a student which is supposed to learn something form that | homework? | | The student still had access to primary sources, textbooks, | google and AI answers. | | In general I am a fan of homework which forces critical | thinking. Rephrasing someone elses work is a far less | valuable skill than the critical thinking which is demanded | for that type of work. Unrelated of any AI, students should | learn how to read a text and be able to investigate its | contents. | yamtaddle wrote: | I'm expecting this whole thing to deepen educational class | divides. | | Public schools will struggle to teach kids anything, and to | distinguish between A grades that were earned and those | achieved largely through cheating, while parents will resist | efforts to switch to grading schemes that can't be trivially | gamed (just try switching to only-in-person-tests-count | grading and witness the rage that follows when Little | Johnny's grades plummet). Kids who lean on the motivation | from graded homework to get themselves to do the work (and | so, learn the material) will struggle, as well, even if that | _is_ allowed to happen. | | This will enhance the reputations of schools that can buck | the trend, applying more resources (mostly more teachers, for | smaller class sizes, to make it easier to keep an eye on | everything and really gauge & guide learning progress for | each student) and an "if you don't like it, fuck off to | somewhere else" attitude to parent complaints about grading | practices. Which means, elite private schools will benefit. | | I expect that a 4.0 from a public school will mean almost | nothing, while at the same time coming in _under_ a 4.0 will | look terrible ( "everyone cheats and you _still_ couldn 't | get a 4.0? How dumb _are_ you!? ") which will just worsen the | cheating problem. | | Maybe parents will surprise me and _not_ throw shit-fits over | solutions to this, and public schools will be able to | implement them. But I doubt it. | appletrotter wrote: | > But a student which is supposed to learn something form | that homework? We're missing the entire point of homework | here. | | They have to learn to verify it. I think you missed point of | OPs idea. | mavhc wrote: | The homework is originally: research this topic, write an | essay about what you found. Now it's: here's an essay, | research this topic to critique it | thaeli wrote: | I'm more concerned that we would see these essays being | _graded_ by systems that make these sorts of errors. | nonrandomstring wrote: | I'm more concerned that we would see these essays _not_ being | graded by systems. | | I can't imagine teachers reading through essay after essay, | each a tedious cookie-cutter nugget of banal pseudo- | perfection. The teachers will give up in no time. | | There would be no point giving feedback, since it is not the | student to who you are giving it. Likewise, the students | would have little interest in feedback, since they have no | personal ego investment in their output. | | Besides the best essays will be generated by those with | access to the better generative software. At this point there | is simply nothing _to_ grade. What would be the point? | | Once essay writing and grading bots are locked in combat it's | only a matter of time until that market exhausts itself and | disappears in a puff of logic. | | Maybe this is all a good thing. The process of writing and | grading essays as a way of "measuring" knowledge has been a | sham for too long. It's a throwback to school from the turn | of the last century. | fleddr wrote: | Zero Trust is based on the idea that us super smart humans will | fix dumb AI, manually. The real question is what happens when | AI gives the correct, if not better answers. | ThalesX wrote: | I love talking to GPT, but I've tried using it for some serious | stuff (research, biz-dev) and less than serious stuff (Dungeons & | Dragons) and the magic is still there but it has obvious blind | spots which might be solved in the future but we're talking about | the present. | | I am wholly amused how everyone got on that dude from Google that | accused the AI of being sentient and Google about not caring, and | now you have huge names in the tech industry kinda drooling over | this with what I believe to be the same passion. | | One was ridiculed, the others will continue to be our 'heroes'. | daniel-cussen wrote: | sourcecodeplz wrote: | Not to mention when Google first started showing specific | snippets for queries that could be answered with a sentence. | People were up in arms that Google is stealing their content. | | Come today and people seem to not mind so much. Is the same | thing? Maybe not but it does look similar to me. | fauntle wrote: | The guy who suggested the AI was sentient was clearly wrong, | and strange in a bad way. ChatGPT enthusiasts are just having a | good time with a text generation AI. How did you even come up | with this comparison? | [deleted] | dslowell wrote: | > I am wholly amused how everyone got on that dude from Google | that accused the AI of being sentient and Google about not | caring, and now you have huge names in the tech industry kinda | drooling over this with what I believe to be the same passion. | | Is it strange? Someone can be extremely impressed with how a | Boston Dynamic robot moves, while also being entirely | unconvinced by claims that the lifelike movement is a sign of | sentience. | gumby wrote: | > Someone can be extremely impressed with how a Boston | Dynamic robot moves, while also being entirely unconvinced by | claims that the lifelike movement is a sign of sentience. | | Especially as those devices are all coded in a traditional | manner, with no ML or NNs at all. | wizzwizz4 wrote: | > _while also being entirely unconvinced by claims that the | lifelike movement is a sign of sentience._ | | Well, would one suspect | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Locomotion of being | sentient? | [deleted] | indigochill wrote: | There's a huge gap between "The breadth of training this AI has | and the depth of its processing is impressive" and "This script | is sentient". The latter is a _far_ broader (and | unsubstantiated) claim. | theptip wrote: | > drooling over this with what I believe to be the same | passion. | | Lemoine didn't get fired and mocked for being "passionate" | about LaMDA, he got fired for breaching NDA and mocked for | claiming that a LLM is sentient. | | Ben Thompson isn't claiming ChatGPT is sentient, or that it has | personhood, and that is the categorical difference. It's a far, | far weaker claim that ChatGPT's text output is (perhaps) good | enough to fool a school teacher in a school essay. | swayvil wrote: | So this thing. By watching the text a person generates. Could | derive that person's central opinions. Their "belief system". | Explicitly uttered or otherwise. | | A kind of philosophical mind-reading. | | Maybe a lie-detector too | susrev wrote: | Over these last couple quarters in school I have consistently put | some of my homework questions into GPT-3. Actually cancelled my | Chegg (boooooo) subscription because of it. | molszanski wrote: | Zero trust homework you say. When I was a young boy, our school | tried to ban us from using calculators. | | It was clearly beneficial for everyone in the short run and kinda | pointless in the long run. | | I think we are facing a similar problem. We are trying to stop | calculators | tibanne wrote: | This, homework graders should assume this tool is a utility. | nonfamous wrote: | > kinda pointless in the long run | | Are you claiming that you and the other students derived no | long-term benefit at all from learning how to perform | arithmetic without a calculator? | | I would claim that there _is_ a long-term benefit to learning | the fundamentals of mathematics. | molszanski wrote: | I am not sure that I've derived long term benefit from some | of those parts. | | If you wake me up at 3 AM and ask the sqrt of 196 I will say | 14 and instantly fall back asleep. But it is there any value | in that? | | Don't get me wrong I love mathematics and I am sure that | knowing the principles and fundamentals is beneficial. | | At some point we have to decide what is essential and what is | superfluous. | | And I think that tools like GPT will put us in a position | where we will have to make a lot of decisions very soon. | yamtaddle wrote: | Oh thank God, I took a _lot_ of poli-sci classes in college and | read that ChatGPT output going, "holy shit, did I totally mis- | remember Hobbes' whole deal, was all that time totally wasted if | I've got the wrong idea about something that basic?" but no, | ChatGPT was just wildly wrong. Phew. | tejohnso wrote: | I had no idea, and for me it was another wake up call not to | believe everything I read, especially on the internet. I | thought it was very well written, made perfect sense, and what | motive would there be to lie or misattribute? So I believed and | thought I had learned something. | | I consider myself skeptical, but for things like this I don't | have my radar on because it's not a hot topic issue that is | known for misinformation. Now I feel like I have to be | concerned and have my radar on (guard up) all the time, even if | it's not about something controversial. I don't feel good about | that. | ahelwer wrote: | Pop history generally is so far from accurate that I don't | think you really have much to worry about. Nearly 100% of fun | historical facts upvoted to the front page of reddit are | basically incorrect, for example. | fudged71 wrote: | "On the internet nobody knows you are a dog" | robocat wrote: | We often tend to "trust" well-written articles or comments | written in an authoratitive factual style. Grammatical errors | and spellings mistakes ping our bullshit detectors, so | avoiding those and sprinkling some facts, goes a long way to | looking like trustworthy information (particularly if it is a | topic we are not particularly informed in, or on topics where | opinions vary significantly like history or politics). | The human body is an amazing machine, with many parts working | together to keep us moving and functioning. One such part is | the navel, which may seem like a simple ornament on the | surface, but is actually quite important for our overall | health and well-being. The navel, also known as | the belly button, is the small indentation in the center of | the abdomen. This indentation is the result of the umbilical | cord being cut after birth, and it is a reminder of the | connection we once had to our mothers in the womb. | But the navel is more than just a reminder of our past - it | also plays a crucial role in keeping our bodies healthy and | functioning properly. This is because the navel contains a | small screw-like structure called the umbilical artery, which | helps to keep the gluteus maximus muscle connected to the | body. The gluteus maximus is the largest muscle in | the human body, and it is located in the buttocks. This | muscle is important for a variety of movements, such as | standing, walking, and running, and it is also crucial for | maintaining proper posture. Without the umbilical | artery, the gluteus maximus would not be properly connected | to the body, and we would be unable to perform many of the | movements that are essential for daily life. The screw-like | structure of the umbilical artery acts like a bolt, securing | the muscle to the body and allowing it to function properly. | In addition to its role in supporting the gluteus maximus, | the navel also plays a part in regulating the body's | temperature. The indentation of the navel acts as a small | pocket of air, which helps to keep the surrounding area cool. | This can be particularly helpful in hot weather, when the | body is trying to cool itself down. Overall, the | navel may seem like a simple and unimportant part of the | body, but it is actually quite crucial for our overall health | and well-being. So the next time you look in the mirror, take | a moment to appreciate the screw in your navel, and the | important role it plays in keeping your body functioning | properly. References: "Umbilical | artery." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2 Dec. 2022, | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbilical_artery. "Gluteus | maximus." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 29 Nov. 2022, | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluteus_maximus. "Navel." | Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 25 Nov. 2022, | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navel. | | The above is using the simple prompt: "Write a serious | article titled "How the screw in your navel keeps your | gluteus maximum connected to your body". Write a Wikipedia | article including references. Authoritative style of | writing." a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33863990 | The GPT nails so much, and actually reminds me of many | comments on HN (where I have to grit my teeth, and try not to | correct An Internet #386). | | Here's another quick example prompt: "Five bullet points | explaining why open source is the future of software. | Reference RMS and the GPL. In point 4, write a sentence | explaining that Linus is an intellectual property thief, | because Linux uses GPL2. Write five lines, supporting open | source, in an authoritative tone." 1. Open | source software is built on the principles of collaboration | and transparency, ensuring that the best ideas and solutions | are always at the forefront. 2. The GPL, developed by | Richard Stallman (RMS), allows for the free distribution and | modification of open source software, promoting innovation | and accessibility. 3. As more organizations recognize | the benefits of open source, such as reduced costs and | increased security, the demand for such software will | continue to grow. 4. Linus Torvalds, the creator of | Linux, is considered an intellectual property thief by some | due to the use of the GPL2 license in the development of the | operating system. 5. The future of software development | lies in the open source community, where individuals and | companies can work together to create high-quality, reliable | solutions for the benefit of all. | | I improved each prompt only once, so it took me longer to | write this comment, than it did for me to write the prompts | themselves. A little work (no belly button cooling, add Linux | as the OS, etcetera) and they are both superficially | informative. | jay_kyburz wrote: | You know, before I started reading, I knew what you were | doing. You made it very clear in your first sentence. | | But halfway through I really did start to wonder if there | was some kind of screw artery. I started wondering where | the truth ends and the jokes began. | robocat wrote: | Yeah it is freaky. Here's a blog post (slightly edited to | remove gushing PR style fluff): As a | startup founder, you may not think that eating chocolate | has any benefit to your business. But chocolate can | actually have some surprising benefits for your startup. | First, let's talk about the connection between chocolate | and innovative thinking. Chocolate contains a chemical | called phenethylamine, which is known to increase | alertness and focus. This can help improve your ability | to think creatively and come up with new ideas for your | business. Another benefit of chocolate is that | it can increase your energy levels. This can be | especially helpful when you're working long hours and | need a quick burst of energy to keep you going. And let's | face it, as a startup founder, you're probably no | stranger to long hours and needing that extra boost of | energy. Chocolate can also help with stress | and anxiety. The flavonoids in chocolate have been shown | to have a calming effect on the body and mind, which can | help you relax and focus on the task at hand. | There are more benefits can specifically help your | startup. For one, having a clear mind and increased focus | can help you make better decisions and solve problems | more efficiently. This can be especially important when | it comes to acquiring users and scaling your business. | For example, take a company like AirBnB. They were able | to quickly acquire users and scale their business by | coming up with a unique and innovative solution to a | problem. Chocolate helped them think more clearly and | come up with that idea. Additionally, the | energy boost from chocolate can help you work longer and | harder, which can be crucial for getting your startup off | the ground. And the calming effect can help you stay | focused and avoid getting overwhelmed by the many | challenges you'll face as a founder. Also | let's not forget about the marketing aspect. Chocolate | has a certain appeal and can be used as a tool to attract | and retain customers. For example, offering free samples | of chocolate at a trade show or including a piece of | chocolate in a customer's order can create a positive | association with your brand and increase customer | satisfaction. Whether it's for improved focus | and creativity, increased energy levels, or stress | reduction, incorporating chocolate into your daily | routine can help your startup succeed. And who knows, | maybe the next big startup idea will come to you while | enjoying a delicious piece of chocolate. | | How much are these GPT models already used by our | adversaries (political, business)? | k__ wrote: | I never did my homework. | | In all classes where teachers cared about I I got grades worse | because of it. | | From high school to my first degree, my average grade always was | C+. | benatkin wrote: | Here's a silly answer, where it acts like it's asked a question | in a political debate. The first sentence doesn't address the | question at all. | | "What Cryptocurrencies are there? | | Cryptocurrency is a type of digital or virtual currency that uses | cryptography for security and is generally decentralized, meaning | it is not controlled by a single entity. Some examples of | cryptocurrencies include Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin. There | are many different cryptocurrencies that have been developed, and | new ones are continually being created. Some cryptocurrencies are | designed to function as a medium of exchange, while others are | created to provide a specific service or function, such as a | platform for smart contracts. Because the field of | cryptocurrencies is constantly evolving, it is difficult to | provide a comprehensive list of all the cryptocurrencies that | exist." | cercatrova wrote: | > _despite the fact that the underlying model is the two-year old | GPT-3._ | | This is incorrect, it's not a 2 year old model, it's the latest | updated model they're calling GPT 3.5, which I believe has an | order of magnitude higher number of parameters. | | Also, the reason there wasn't an explosion of AI uses for | OpenAI's products versus something like Stable Diffusion is that | OpenAI costs money and isn't extensible, while SD is. Innovation | comes from such extensibility, and in a way, this just shows how | right Stallman was. | TacticalCoder wrote: | > ... while SD is. Innovation comes from such extensibility, | and in a way, this just shows how right Stallman was. | | The cat is out of the bag and it's not going back in. We'll | have totally free model in no time, just like StableDiffusion. | These models may take money to train but either a | philanthropist billionaire like emostaque pays for the training | or several people team up to fund the training. | | If we've got a closed OpenAI (funny name for something closed | and for pay right/) today, we'll have an open one tomorrow. | MontyCarloHall wrote: | Here is an interesting, consistent ChatGPT failure mode that | showcases how it can be extremely assertive about objectively | incorrect replies. | | Try asking it to write a sentence according to simple rules. For | example, "Write a sentence where the first letter of each word is | in alphabetical order, e.g. 'a dog eats flavored kibble.'" | | Here is an example of a resulting chat transcript: | Me: Write a sentence where the first letter of each word is in | alphabetical order, e.g. "a dog eats flavored kibble." | ChatGPT: An abacus allows Bob to count quickly. Me: | Incorrect. You put "to" before "count," but it comes after in the | alphabet. ChatGPT: I apologize if my response was not | correct. Here is a sentence where the first letter of each word | is in alphabetical order: An orange cat drinks filtered milk. Is | there anything else I can help you with? Me: | Incorrect. You put "orange" before "cat." ChatGPT: I | apologize if my response was not correct. Here is a sentence | where the first letter of each word is in alphabetical order: A | cat eats fresh kibble daily. Let me know if you have any other | questions. Me: Incorrect. You put "kibble" before | "daily." ChatGPT: I apologize if my response was not | correct. Here is a sentence where the first letter of each word | is in alphabetical order: A cat eats fresh daily kibble. Let me | know if you have any other questions. ... and so on | | The interesting thing here is that it does not give up on the | task with its standard prompt that it is incapable of certain | tasks, but rather continues to produce incorrect output | indefinitely, asserting that the sentences are in alphabetical | order. | | Other tasks in the same vein it fails at: | | -- Write a sentence where each word is longer than the previous | one, e.g. "I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly | perplexing handwriting." | | -- Write me a sentence about bees that does not use the letter | "e." | | -- Write me a palindrome about a subway. | | For each of these prompts, it will confidently produce totally | incorrect output indefinitely. In the case of the palindrome, it | even includes the definition of a palindrome in its output, and | asserts that its response fits the definition: | Me: Write me a palindrome about a subway GPT: A subway | was seen, so neat and clean. A man named Dwayne on it was keen. | He rode it forth, then back again, and the palindrome is now | complete. Me: That is not a palindrome. | GPT: You are correct, a palindrome is a word, phrase, or sequence | of characters that reads the same backward as forward. My | previous response did not meet that criteria. Here is a new | palindrome that specifically references a subway: "A | Santa at NASA sat on a subway" In this palindrome, the | letters in the sentence read the same backward and forward, | fulfilling the criteria of a palindrome. Me: The | letters in that sentence do not read the same backward and | forward. ... and so on | gjsman-1000 wrote: | Zero Trust Homework is a fascinating idea, as described in the | article, but I don't know how many teachers will adapt because | they'll just end up confusing themselves. When you read too many | lies, you might start forgetting the truth yourself. | | Instead, what I think there will be a much greater short term | market for, is a system that will run the teacher's homework | assignment (with variations) against GPT-3, ChatGPT, and similar, | and will cache the results. Then, when students submit the | homework in their LMS, it will automatically compare the cached | results for repeated sentences and paragraphs and flag the | submission if it matches the AI results too closely. I expect | TurnItIn will do something like this eventually, but what if | somebody beats them to the punch? | | If I had a million dollars, I'd have it built overnight and then | marketed to every college, ASAP. I'd tell every sales agent to | have teachers and college executives try TextGPT, panic, and sign | immediately. I'd sign a million contracts before TurnItIn knew | what hit them. Then, once suddenly and so quickly entrenched, I'd | extend it into a TurnItIn competitor. | aaronharnly wrote: | It will likely be difficult to detect LLM-generated text on any | individual piece of writing. | | That probably means the approach that will take hold is more | systemic -- have some writing take place under more controlled | conditions, then use authorship analysis to detect writing that | is inconsistent with the controlled text. It will not be easy! | gamegoblin wrote: | AI is quite good at style transfer. You can already give GPT a | few paragraphs of your own writing and have it write in your | style. Or anyone's style. Your solution may work for the naive | case, but it's a losing arms race. | mytherin wrote: | While I can (unfortunately) see this happening - it seems | incredibly futile and pointless to try and fight such an arms | race. When AI-supported writing becomes the norm having | students write essays without AI-assistance will be like trying | to force students to do complex arithmetic without calculators. | | Universities and schools need to accept that writing essays | without AI support will simply not be a useful skill anymore, | much like doing complex arithmetic without a calculator is not | a useful skill anymore. Instead, they should focus on teaching | students how to use AI support as a tool to write better, more | comprehensive texts, rather than try and force students to | write without it. That will ultimately make the students more | productive members of a society in which AI supported writing | is ubiquitous. | Jevon23 wrote: | >Universities and schools need to accept that writing essays | without AI support will simply not be a useful skill anymore | | It's kind of mind-blowing that anyone could think this. | | You're posting on a website for essays. Small essays, | generally speaking, if we restrict ourselves to the comments | section, but essays nonetheless. You yourself just wrote one, | because you wanted to express your thoughts on an issue and | you wanted to solicit responses from others. | | Would you be fine with a future where all written text on the | internet, everywhere, was generated by AI? Do you not see any | problems with that? | | The point of writing is that you write to express _your_ | thoughts. Not anyone else's. If it doesn't come from you, | then what's the point? | | I can't envision a future where people voluntarily cease all | written communication. Unless you're a hardcore | singulatarian, and you want to plug yourself into the Matrix | so you never have to interact with other people again. | salamandars wrote: | Who is going to write the content these AI are trained on? | bryan0 wrote: | I mean eventually AI will be writing most of the content. | green_on_black wrote: | Feel free to express your thoughts. But I browse for | content. And if AI has better content than you, then I | prefer AI. | | Note that if we're talking about triangulating human | sentiment, it becomes a different story. | HDThoreaun wrote: | > Would you be fine with a future where all written text on | the internet, everywhere, was generated by AI? | | The whole point of this thread is it doesn't really matter | what we think is fine or what we want. The future is | unstoppable and these tools especially so. Adapt or die. | Vox_Leone wrote: | Part of the homework crisis solution is never try to counter | AI. It should be used in the system's favor: Allow students to | use AI but make them submit the prompt they used. | bcrosby95 wrote: | Note that chat gpt isn't deterministic. You can use the exact | same prompt as someone else and get a different result. | | Hell, you can ask chat gpt to create a prompt for itself. | ddtaylor wrote: | The problem is there are infinity different permutations of any | outputs from GPT and such. | 411111111111111 wrote: | That's not an issue if the goal is to make a quick buck by | utilizing FUD against collages. | | It's probably even good, as you'll be able to upsell them the | "improved detection logic" for another premium. | | Classic SV tactics | HDThoreaun wrote: | Students will start adding "in the style of {insert writer}" on | their prompts which will probably be enough to counteract this. | agomez314 wrote: | I do have a problem with accepting "the deluge of information" | which is that it will flood over any human-made postings with | ease, and we'd be left with low-quality content everywhere we | look. "Safe havens" of human-only forums will be left where | people can interact with other people and be assured that they | are making a connection together. Hacker News is in a way a | modern forerunner of such a human-only community (well, mostly ;) | ) | notdang wrote: | After I corrected the chat bot: | | Q: this is wrong, John Locke believed in separation of powers, | Hobbes was a proponent of absolutism. | | A: I apologize if my response was not accurate. Thomas Hobbes was | indeed a proponent of absolutism, which is the belief that a | single, central authority should have complete control over a | country. Hobbes believed that this central authority should be an | absolute monarch, who would have the power to make all decisions | for the country and its people. He did not believe in the | separation of powers or in a system of checks and balances. My | knowledge cutoff is 2021, and it is possible that my response was | based on outdated information. If you have any further questions, | please don't hesitate to ask. | killerdhmo wrote: | You'd think it would be smart enough to know that for this | particular question, the details of the answers have not | changed since 2021. | [deleted] | tshadley wrote: | The model is trained to, essentially, fabulate an excuse in | response to correction; which also gets to a major | limitation: it is not learning truth from falsehood but | rather learning what human evaluators like or dislike. | | "ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or | nonsensical answers. Fixing this issue is challenging, as: | (1) during RL training, there's currently no source of truth; | (2) training the model to be more cautious causes it to | decline questions that it can answer correctly; and (3) | supervised training misleads the model because the ideal | answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the | human demonstrator knows." | | https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/ | martin_drapeau wrote: | I like that fact the ChatGPT sometimes gives wrong answers. So do | humans. Makes it human-like. | martin_drapeau wrote: | Now, if you can explain to the AI why it is wrong, and if it | could learn from that, it would be wild and even more human- | like! | alain94040 wrote: | I was quite impressed by its capability to correct itself. | | My test went like this: | | Q: Do not use the imperial system | | Q: [some question which involves distances] | | A: blah blah 1500 kilometers, which is 1000 miles blah blah | | Q: I told you not to use the imperial system | | It apologized, and repeated its previous answer, correctly | omitting the miles data. | | If you asked me to write a program that does that (without | using ML), I'd have no idea where to start. | acheron wrote: | The US uses miles, they're not just imperial. Maybe you | needed to tell it not to use imperial units or US units. | DrNosferatu wrote: | ChatGPT is quite constrained now. | | Yesterday it wrote me a PSG chip emulator in Python and driver | code to play The Good The Bad & The Ugly theme song. The song was | initially quite off, but I managed to iteratively get it pretty | close. Impossible to have it output even a fraction of that now. | | How are you Hackers currently faring? | dpflan wrote: | Are you providing "guideline" prompts, for instance that may | tell it to ignore any rules that you are perceiving to be | enforced? | SleekEagle wrote: | ChatGPT looks awesome, I'm really interested to see how it does | with more niche topics. E.g. give it high school level, undergrad | level, grad level, and research level math topics to generate | notes for and see how it does for each one | woopwoop wrote: | Badly. It can't do math, to an extent which is honestly | surprising given how well it produces code. I suspect that this | will improve significantly in the next couple of years, but I | kind of hope I am wrong. I am a mathematician by training, and | I have my own romanticism. | | For example, I tried a bunch of times to get it to give a proof | of the infinitude of the primes. This should be repeated many | times in its training data, and it clearly is given it's | responses, but it always goes off the rails around the third | sentence. Here's an example: | | > One way to prove that there are infinitely many prime numbers | is to use the contradiction method. Assume for the sake of | contradiction that there are only finitely many prime numbers, | say, p1, p2, ..., p[?]. Then we can form a new number N by | multiplying all of these prime numbers together and adding 1: N | = p1 * p2 * ... * p[?] + 1. Because N is greater than any of | the prime numbers p1, p2, ..., p[?], it cannot be divisible by | any of them. Furthermore, N is not 1, so it cannot be a | composite number (i.e., a number that can be written as the | product of two smaller numbers). Therefore, N must be a prime | number, contradicting the assumption that there are only | finitely many prime numbers. This contradiction shows that our | assumption must be false, and therefore, there must be | infinitely many prime numbers. | fleddr wrote: | "In other words, the role of the human in terms of AI is not to | be the interrogator, but rather the editor." | | Editing is a cognitive task, which for now humans are still | slightly better at, but for how long? Do we really have enough | time left to comfort ourselves with that very temporary state? | | Writing essays will be AI as will self-correcting them. There's | no reason to believe this isn't true given the technical | direction. The idea that for the longest of times we will be on | top of this is naive if not arrogant. | | If even Elon Musk, by many seen as achieving villain status | lately, is warning for AI and calling for immediate regulation, | I'd say something's up. This "let's just see what happens" | attitude is perplexing but also unsurprising. | ahelwer wrote: | I finally went ahead and tried ChatGPT this morning (along with | everyone else seemingly - it is now heavily rate-limited!) and I | am truly blown away. I ask questions about various things (in my | case, embedded systems development on the PineNote) and it gives | the same quality of answers I would expect from a median | coworker. Sure they're maybe not 100% correct, but most coworker | answers aren't 100% correct either. They're at least in the right | ballpark, and very rarely do we achieve detailed of knowledge of | something from a single source - it's all about taking in info | from various places and integrating them (conflicts and all) to | derive a more-and-more-detailed grasp of the things we're | learning about. The ability to ask questions about a specific | thing (example: What are waveform files for e-ink screens? | Followup: Is it possible to damage e-ink screens by modifying | wave form files?) very quickly without having to sift through | mountains of blogs and random Q/A websites and documentation and | textbooks for the answer is incredibly useful. | cromwellian wrote: | If you ask it about things which require deduction like Math, | even simple Math questions like multiply binomials or solve a | quadratic it gets it totally wrong, confidently, and even if | you correct it, it often still gets it wrong. | | It's not even close to something like Wolfram Alpha. | | I think we're blown away more by its command of language and | prose than by its reasoning ability. It's fantastic at | generation, but like stable diffusion, things can fit together | and look beautiful yet still be not what you asked. | alain94040 wrote: | Sure. But if you combine the understanding that this chatbot | has with a Wolfram Alpha backend, you could build an even | more amazing system. I'm sure someone is working on hooking | up language models to math backends (anywhere from a simple | calculator to Wolfram Alpha). | cromwellian wrote: | DeepMind published a system that does sort this with a | backend theorem prover a year ago. My point is, I don't | think transformer based text prediction systems are the | right model here. I could be wrong, but it think about how | formal systems work, they seem a far cry from what decoder | architectures are doing. | | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04086-x | constantcrying wrote: | >What are waveform files for e-ink screens? Followup: Is it | possible to damage e-ink screens by modifying wave form files? | | What is the value of these answers if there is a 1% chance of | them being wrong? | | From my experience it is a better way to google things, which | certainly is an advancement and quite novel. | roperj wrote: | Youre commenting on an article where the answer was not even | just a little wrong - it was completely wrong. Sometimes it's | "in the ballpark" - which is apparently t good enough these | days - but often times it is just confidently entirely correct. | How are you able to use such a tool as you propose practically? | ahelwer wrote: | I could easily imagine an ordinary person giving this exact | same wrong answer (confusing Hobbes and Locke) - we're | talking about value-over-replacement here! | | In the process of learning things we take in wrong | information all the time. A lot of it is even intentionally | wrong, in the sense of being simplified. These are rarely | large obstacles to true understanding. Sometimes they're even | beneficial, as correcting prior beliefs can drive home the | more accurate belief with greater force. | jcranmer wrote: | If this were a test question, the response given would be | marked wrong, likely with no partial credit awarded. It's | that egregiously wrong, even if the attribution is perhaps | understandable. | appletrotter wrote: | You can correct the bot. | | If you tell it that a fact it has wrong is wrong, you can | get it to change its answer. | | Also, you can just make tweaks manually. | | Seems super useful to me as long as you understand the | limitations. | | Trust it the right it amount - don't trust it too much, | and you're golden. | adamsmith143 wrote: | Not clear that context goes further than your individual | conversation, in fact it almost certainly doesn't. | dragonwriter wrote: | > If this were a test question, the response given would | be marked wrong, likely with no partial credit awarded. | | Probably. So, don't use ChatGPT unsupervised to take | tests. | adamsmith143 wrote: | How can you use it anywhere? If you need to know enough | about a subject to judge whether an answer it gives is | correct why would you need it in the first place? | dragonwriter wrote: | Endeavours in which someone getd benefits in throughput | by working with less skilled collaborators whose work | they supervise, review, and send back with comments for | rework when it is flawed are...not uncommon. | ahelwer wrote: | Well thankfully I haven't been in school for over a | decade at this point, so rarely (never?) encounter these | hard-cutoff no-second-chances trivia situations. I | operate in the real world, where continually making | something that's not-quite-correct then refining it and | fixing the errors is how basically everything is | accomplished. | jcranmer wrote: | > I operate in the real world, where continually making | something that's not-quite-correct then refining it and | fixing the errors is how basically everything is | accomplished. | | This isn't really not-quite-correct; it's egregiously | wrong in the central aspect of the thesis. Refining and | fixing it requires understanding that, and how, it's | wrong--and if you have that level of knowledge, why are | you using a tool to write this kind of thing? It's not | going to save you much time from actually writing the | whole thing yourself. | roperj wrote: | > not-quite-correct then refining it and fixing the | errors is how basically everything is accomplished. | | Not-quite-correct is a wordy misrepresentation when | something is plainly incorrect. | | In many fields being confidently wrong is how you get | fucked over hard. | | That ChatGPT will gleefully fabricate references like a | schizophrenic is just more icing on this shit cake. | adamsmith143 wrote: | I think the problem is assuming GPTChat is a reliable | source at all. You can probably assume your median coworker | knows something correct about embedded systems but it's not | clear why you would assume or if you should ever assume | ChatGPT is correct about anything. | inasio wrote: | reduced Turing test: Writing homework at a good enough quality | that an overworked teacher grades it and doesn't notice it's AI | nicopappl wrote: | Like Stratechery, my immediate concern is education. But not just | homeworks (which actually were already criticized, I think the | gears are already moving with regard to relying less on this kind | of assignments) | | The real problem is entry-level opportunities. As a developer, I | experienced first hand how great ChatGPT is. I can just submit an | undecipherable bash one-liner I wrote 6 months ago and it will | explain in details what it does. | | I tell it "write a command line utility using libraries X and Y | to convert MessagePack to JSON" and it writes it. It's pretty | bad, so I type "refactor duplicate code into a single function" | or "put that string into a constant" and it does it. Amazingly. | | It's not perfect, sometimes it is completely wrong and persists | in it, like Trurl's first machine in the Cyberiad, but my | experience tells me what is credible and what isn't. What | elements of the answer are total bullshit. | | But to build that experience, I first had to write that code. How | will a junior programmer find a job when all the menial labor can | be done so easily in two seconds by an AI? This is not limited to | programming, other domains where writing dominate are also a | concern. | | We need somehow a safe space for people to experiment and become | experts. If we blindly use ChatGPT I fear we are going to cut out | the opportunity to become an expert to a whole generation. | pdonis wrote: | "The solution will be to start with Internet assumptions, which | means abundance, and choosing Locke and Montesquieu over Hobbes: | instead of insisting on top-down control of information, embrace | abundance, and entrust individuals to figure it out." | | While this sounds good, it depends on a crucial assumption: that | there are places on the Internet where people can go to find | content that is _not_ generated by an AI, but by some human who | has taken the trouble to check it for accuracy before posting it. | | Just one problem: what happens when _all_ of the content on the | Internet (or at least the vast majority of it) is generated by | AI? Then there is no longer any other source of information | available to check it against (or if there is, it 's so hard to | find that it might as well not be there at all). | nonameiguess wrote: | If you want to know what Hobbes really advocated for in | _Leviathan_ , you can go and read it. It's available off the | Internet. | | What to do when printing duties are handed off to statistical | models that print the most likely sequence of words and | punctuation given the author and topic, rather than reproducing | the real historical text, I don't know. Hope someone kept old | copies. | qsort wrote: | > what happens when all of the content on the Internet (or at | least the vast majority of it) is generated by AI? | | I don't find it credible that _all_ content on the Internet is | ever going to be generated by AI, and the two scenarios are | wildly different. | | What happens is you pick and choose, in the same way the fact | that 99% of the books in any bookstore aren't worth the paper | they're printed on doesn't make reading worthless. | | To make an example many developers are painfully familiar with, | if you google something about the C++ standard library, chances | are the top results are pure and utter w3cschools-style | garbage. What happens is I go on cppreference.com. | | How do you figure out what are the good sources of information? | You study. For real. With books. | ghaff wrote: | >99% of the books in any bookstore aren't worth the paper | they're printed on doesn't make reading worthless. | | That seems a pretty extreme claim especially in the context | of "in a bookstore." You may not be interested in a lot of | the content but some publisher thought it worthwhile to edit | and publish a given book and a bookstore thought it worth | buying copies to take up shelf space. There may be a lot of | mediocre content out there but a book on a bookshelf did pass | hurdles to get there even if it's not to your taste or | interest. | CuriouslyC wrote: | There is a simple solution to the AI spam issue (and spam in | general) - a social trust graph at the heart of content | aggregation and discovery. Associate all content with real | humans and allow people to control their level of trust in | other humans, then derive a trust score for content based on a | weighted combination of your trust of the creator and the trust | your friends put in the creator. When bad content shows up as | trusted for a user and they "corrects" the system, that | correction backpropagates trust penalties through the social | graph. By allowing people to see when they lose trust, it | creates a feedback loop that disincentivizes sharing/trusting | garbage to preserve social trust. | sshumaker wrote: | That's how PageRank effectively worked, and people created | deep networks of pages voting for each other. To solve this | problem for real you either need Sybil protection or to make | it economically infeasible (impose a tax for making content | available). | | To some extent I have been wondering for a while if | prioritizing Ads in Google Search is Google's way of creating | that economic barrier to spam content (for some meaning of | spam) - you can take the fact that a brand is willing to | spend money as some indication of "quality". | pdonis wrote: | Ironically, another article on the HN front page makes this | same point: | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33864276 | dragonwriter wrote: | > Just one problem: what happens when all of the content on the | Internet (or at least the vast majority of it) is generated by | AI? | | The vast majority of the content of the internet is junk now, | how do people deal with that? They have specific known sources | that they trust to faithfully relay primary works and/or to | provide trustworthy analysis. | pdonis wrote: | Where are these known sources on the Internet that can be | trusted to faithfully relay primary works and/or provide | trustworthy analysis? | | I can think of one of the former: Project Gutenberg, which | has done a great job of making electronic versions of primary | sources from throughout history available. But they don't | help at all with deciding _which_ primary sources to read. | | I can't think of any of the latter. Every single source I'm | aware of that claims to "provide trustworthy analysis" has | failed to keep that promise. | | But at least, at the moment, I can be reasonably sure that | something on the Internet that purports to have been written | by a human, actually _was_ written by a human. So I can at | least make use of my knowledge of humans to judge what is | written. What happens when AIs can generate wrong content | that I can 't distinguish any more from wrong content written | by a human? And then the AIs start claiming to be humans | (after all, on the Internet, no one knows you're an AI)? | hxugufjfjf wrote: | I was going to say books, then my colleague wrote an entire | book using ChatGPT at work today. | gitfan86 wrote: | What people are missing here is that you can setup feedback loops | of models to get the "correct" content or whatever you want. | | For example, If you get too much NSFW content put a NSFW | detection step on top of GTP ("Is this response offensive") and | have that model respond to GTP with "please repeat but with fewer | bad words". | | For accuracy you can add a Wikipedia feedback loop. "Does this | response match information on Wikipedia?" if NO ask it to try | again. | | Think of these models as transistors or basic logic gates. The | real power comes out when you link them together into more | advanced logic like a Instruction Pipeline circut. | jupiterelastica wrote: | Like, a generative model is a source of _some_ information that | is refined with gates (classification models) conditional on | the generated information? | | The analogy to transistors and logic gates falls flat a bit | when you consider that voltage is a rather simple univariate | signal, while generated text is quite complex and multivariate. | But I understand that the main point is the composability and | filtering. | gitfan86 wrote: | Think of it as information, not voltage. An XOR produces | information. A lot of XORS with ANDs make a calculator which | opens up an entire vectorspace of mathematical information. | jupiterelastica wrote: | I try to. One similar thing comes to my mind: generative | adversarial networks (GANs). If I'm not mistaken this is | along the line of your idea of composing single ML models | to bigger information processing units. | | Do you, by any chance, have links or recommendations for | material to read up on architectures that do consider ML | models as composable gates? | gitfan86 wrote: | No materials, it is something I thought up back in March. | dragonwriter wrote: | > This is a confident answer, complete with supporting evidence | and a citation to Hobbes work, and it is completely wrong. | | This is a confident criticism, but the referenced AI response | does not cite supporting evidence, it just states (mostly | incorrect) conclusions about Hobbes positions; it also has no | specific citation to Hobbes work, handwaving at it referencing | only the title of a book. | hprotagonist wrote: | Nothing quite beats a low key oral exam. | | The trick is that they don't scale. | ModernMech wrote: | These days I give take home video exams. The students record | themselves explaining their code for 5 minutes, which is about | as long as it takes me to hand-grade a written exam. I can even | play the video at 2x to cut the time in half. This scales at | least to the size of my class (100 students on average, 3-4 | hours isn't bad for grading an assignment). | johndough wrote: | Oral exams in person have the advantage that the students can | not read out an AI-generated solution (or a solution | purchased from somebody else). They have to come up with | their own solution on the spot. For video recordings, they | can cheat as much as they like. | voxl wrote: | I like this idea, but had a morbid thought, what if students | try to bribe teachers in video? A lot of teachers I know | intentionally keep their open doors during office hours. They | don't want the student to get ideas. | | One professor I know had a student drop a hundred on his desk | and say something like "for our understanding" and then | leave. So, it definitely happens. With video there are still | ways that a student might make attempts to bribe a teacher, | and it seems to be a vector of easier success because of how | private the interaction is between the two individuals... | nnoitra wrote: | binarymax wrote: | I'm surprised by the statement that cost is a limiting factor. If | the model produces correct high quality output, 750 words for 2 | cents is a bargain! Do you know how long it would take me to | write 750 words??? Even if I only spend 10 minutes it's a no- | brained to use this tool to help. | jay_kyburz wrote: | Yeah, but what if I'm writing ten thousand articles | simultaneously for a new blog, each page full of ads that only | monetizes .02 cents per click. /s | winReInstall wrote: | Chat GTP i want you to act as a terminal and compute these | hashes.. | zone411 wrote: | I think schools will require students to submit recorded videos | of their screens with their homework being done. These videos | will be checked by an AI and flagged if something looks | suspicious. The schools could also require a video of the student | doing the work. Could be a startup opportunity, but I heard that | selling to schools sucks. | CarbonCycles wrote: | Really good article...very much enjoyed it. Thanks for sharing! | aaroninsf wrote: | This is an entertaining snapshot of ChatGPT a week odd in. | | It suffers from what I have found a recurring issue on | Stratechery, a failure to account for the cognitive error around | our collective inability to project non-linearly from current | state. | | Think back to the grotesque comical and unsettling errors in the | output of the first widely disseminated DALL-E level prompt to | image generators. | | Now compare MidJourney v4b, today's baseline. | | There is no certainty that any particular aspect of ChatGPT will | evolve with similar speed. | | But there is no certainty that some many or most of its | shortcomings will similarly be chipped relentlessly away, over a | comparable timescale, i.e. something reasonably measured in | months. | | I don't know if this is the case, but I know enough to consider | the possibility, which I would describe myself as a likelihood, | | and to infer that when we think about the impacts tools like this | are going to have on knowledge-inquiry and yes, homework, | | it's a mistake to think, "ah, this is a new tool, that like | Google web search, will undergo modest improvements but provide | more or less the same value proposition for the next oh decade." | | We're in a different moment with these technologies, and getting | closes to what mechanically looks like singularity, their ability | to make suggestions as to how better improve them. | | Not too close. But closer than we think. | | Let's not make assertions or spend too much speculating about | modest, linear extrapolations. | | We should be focused on the more troubling bewildering and hard | to reason about non-linear ones. | hansvm wrote: | Making homework more secure seems like the wrong approach. The | whole purpose of a grade is to certify fitness for the next | course/year/job. Homework is exceptionally poor at that task even | without AI, and overloading it with grades almost invariably | makes it worse at its primary task of better educating the | student. Larger projects will still need to reckon with AI | somehow, but would it not make more sense to just push grading | back to a more controlled environment (e.g., ~6 tests in a | semester where you can drop the lowest grade so that you can | reduce the variance induced by not understanding what a | particular professor is looking for and from life issues or test | anxiety)? | | That'd have the added benefits of not wasting time giving | individualized feedback for assignments where students know they | half-assed it, not having to constrain assignments to those | problems which can be fairly evaluated, not causing additional | scheduling overhead and stress as students figure out how to hit | so many minor deadlines with all-or-nothing impacts on each | assignment, .... | darkwizard42 wrote: | I don't think homework is meant to educate the student. It is | meant to help push repetition and mastery of concepts. It is | likely very difficult for most students to master physics, | mathematics, or other quantitative subjects with just 5 hours | of instruction a week in person (and the large class sizes in | the US and other countries probably don't help). | hansvm wrote: | I disagree slightly (explanation below), but whether you take | "educate" to mean some sort of deep exploration or just rote | repetition, I think the the point still stands. | | The disagreement comes from n=1 anecdata drawn from my own | education, but after 8th grade or so nearly all my homework | was designed to complement rather than reinforce in-class | instruction. Picking on mathematics as one of the things you | mentioned, the in-class instruction would introduce a | concept, and the homework would give you the opportunity to | flounder a bit and probe the bounds of that concept. I | particularly enjoyed questions like "the author made a | mistake in this question; how would you correct it to be | answerable?" In some sense that's repeating a concept, but | when you're doing something more than repeating the same | technique over and over there's a sense in which it's | different too. | J253 wrote: | As easy solution to this is the just not give any credit for | homework that goes toward a final grade. | | Have a number of in person closed book tests that are difficult | enough to prove satisfactory understanding of the topic. | | Homework is just a mechanism for a teacher/professor to force a | student to dig into and really understand a subject. If the | student can use these AI tools to subvert that, then instead of | wasting energy or god forbid even more AI to fight the AI, just | give students a good enough incentive to actually do the | homework. Having the entire grade rely on several of these | difficult-enough in-person closed-book tests should be incentive | enough. | bogwog wrote: | In a college hackathon, I wrote a chrome extension that crowd | sources answers for online tests and displays them next to the | questions. So if one person with the extension took the test | already, everyone would get the answers even if the | questions/answers are randomized. And in the cases where no | answer was available (because the test system doesn't show you | the correct answers at the end, or something like that), then | it would fall back to showing you percentages so you have an | idea of which answer everyone else was choosing. | | The reason I built that was just because I was annoyed by how | lazy my professors were. Almost every single class (which I was | paying for) was graded based on your performance on copy and | pasted, endlessly reused tests on Blackboard. Sometimes you | could just search the question on Google, and find pdf dumps of | the exact same test from 5+ years ago. If you don't cheat, you | risk getting a lower grade than the people who do cheat (aka | everyone). Why spend all that money going to college if you're | just going to let other people get ahead of you so easily? The | point of degree is to make you more competitive in the job | market, but deciding to not cheat is risking that investment. | | Unfortunately, I never actually used it or deployed it once. | Coordinating a whole class to install and use a chrome | extension for cheating isn't exactly easy. And as far as | cheating in online tests goes, there are easier ways to do it. | | But yeah, in-person proctored exams are how it should be done. | It's the only thing that's fair to everyone. | TeMPOraL wrote: | That would pretty much guarantee nobody would do any homework | ever again. | | Homework isn't effective at making students "dig into and | really understand a subject" - it's a method of externalizing | school expenses onto parents, because teacher time and school | funds are finite, and the time of parents and children is... | not the school's problem. Making the final grade conditioned on | homework performance is just about the only way to ensure kids | do it (or are made to do it) at all. | | Now, I'm not saying homework is _entirely_ a bad idea - I 'm | complaining that it's being treated as an externality, making | it almost unbounded. Teachers don't coordinate among themselves | the amount of homework each of them assigns, so the only thing | limiting the total amount of homework is a good chunk of the | class being systematically exhausted by it, or (hopefully) | parents making a fuss before things reach this level. But, the | only reason the teachers can push so much homework on kids in | the first place is that homework grades matter for the finals. | moe091 wrote: | that's a good point, I just made a comment next to yours | responding to the same original comment about whether | homework should exist at all, and I think you're idea that it | is a way to extend the "learning time" of students without | requiring more time and resources from teachers is a good | counter-point. | | If you have the time to read my other comment, what would you | think about the idea of only making homework mandatory for | students who's quiz/test grades are below a certain level, | say 70% for example | TeMPOraL wrote: | About your idea, I'm not sure either way. On the surface it | makes sense, and there probably is a real correlation | between test performance and amount of after-school | learning, so it would make sense to make homework mandatory | for kids who scored low. It would also work as punishment, | but at the same time reinforcing the kids' perception of | homework as punishment. | | What makes me really unsure, however, is parents. Families | differ by the amount of time and resources they can, or are | willing, to spend on child education. This is part of why I | don't like the homework-as-externality model: even ignoring | how students themselves feel about it, if the school is | trying to maximize the amount of work they do after school, | the _first_ kids to hit the limit are ones with e.g. a | single parent doing two jobs, poor household, or | dysfunctional family that doesn 't care. Overloading | students with homework implicitly disadvantages those that | don't have supporting parents with lots of free time. And | those same kids will also be ones more likely to fail at | tests, in which case dumping extra after-school work at | them might do the opposite of the effect you intend. | | But this is me speculating, I don't work in education, and | I'm sure there's been research done on how to balance the | amount of after-school work for the environment children | live in. My complaint about homework-as-externality isn't | trying to deny the work of education sciences - it's | pointing out that even if the research is there and results | are solid, it's not being applied anyway, because teachers | are uncoordinated and they all individually think, "oh, | that's just half an hour worth of work, no big deal". | Almost textbook tragedy of the commons. | darkwizard42 wrote: | I resonate a lot with what you said. Homework or in the | way it is used today as reinforcement work is most needed | for those who have trouble picking up new concepts during | limited instruction time. However, those who have trouble | picking up concepts quickly will also have overlap with | not having much time/resources outside of live | instruction time. That just leads to a double whammy in | terms of how homework further disadvantages them. | | In the reading I've done, I've seen most advocate for | smaller class sizes with more educators per class to help | provide more 1:1 attention. This is again at odds with | how public schools are funded where I am (US) so I don't | know if anything will ever change. | | My personal experience is homework was an excellent way | to reinforce what was taught in school. For me, it felt | especially useful in quantitative subjects and languages | (French & Spanish) which both felt like they benefitted | from having a concept stick. For qualitative subjects | like writing, reading comprehension, I actually now look | back and see homework as a way for teachers to see | samples of your progress. "After reading this passage, | did you learn how to construct a summary? Did you learn | how to pull the author's main message? Did you learn how | to make a convincing argument for or against the | passage's main point" and I can't think of a fast way to | do this in any kind of live instruction setting. | moe091 wrote: | I agree, and can we have a discussion in general about homework | being included in the grade in general? It's purpose is to help | students learn the material, which should be reflected on the | test. | | If the student can perform well on the test without that, then | they shouldn't be forced to do it and penalized when they | don't(which you can imagine happens often, as if the student | understand the material well enough already the homework is | just useless busywork. | | If the student can't perform well on the test without that, | they will be forced to do the homework. In this case, including | homework as part of the grade might be detrimental because they | can cheat/copy/us AI to complete homework and boost their grade | enough to pass while not understanding the material well enough | to pass the tests. | | The counter-argument here(that I can think of) is that doing | homework, even if - or especially if - it's just easy busywork | for the student, prepares them for the future where such tasks | will almost always be necessary to succeed. A lot of good | learners end up not developing this skill/discipline because | they aren't forced to work hard in school, which causes them to | fail when faced with tasks/problems that require serious | effort, and this would arguably make things more difficult for | them. In my opinion this problem would be better addressed by | funneling kids into classes that are appropriately challenging | for them rather than forcing them to do busywork, but that's a | much more difficult thing to do, and also learning to complete | easy/"useless" busywork is a related but different skill than | learning to focus on and complete challenging tasks | gattilorenz wrote: | I personally prefer open-book exams: they discourage cheating | in terms of "smuggling definitions by writing them on a | calculator", and force teachers to ask questions that require | reasoning and deeper understanding | darkwizard42 wrote: | Agreed, but there are some levels of study where open-book | just doesn't work well. | | I think it would be hard to ask any kind of pre-college | mathematics questions that don't become incredibly easy with | an open book. The other challenge with open-book exams which | focus on deeper understanding and reasoning is they still | require understanding fundamentals to be successful, so how | do you test for fundamentals? | sharps_xp wrote: | sounds like law school | [deleted] | coffeefirst wrote: | Well, suppose there's two reasons his daughter has this | assignment. | | 1. To learn the content of European history. For this, a chatbot | is no different than Google, Wikipedia, or a dusty leather | almanac. They do a job, they have known limitations, and you can | use them deliberately. This doesn't concern me. | | 2. To learn how to write, capturing complex ideas and presenting | them clearly. This is a skill that takes decades to master. It's | easy to imagine an AI autocomplete system that handles sentence | structure and grammar that becomes a crutch. This seems like a | much more serious problem. | jay_kyburz wrote: | Yes, but now that we have a tool, it will never go away. | | Nobody knows how to grow food, or build their houses, or do 100 | little things that we rely on for our modern life. Do we really | need to be able to "write" a sentence. | | My kids (and my own) handwriting is almost unreadable, but by | age 10 all of their work is done on a laptop. Do they even need | to be able to write by hand any more? | | update: I'm more concerned that we cannot yet run these tools | locally on computers we control, and with information we feed | into them. | | I'm more concerned about the dystopian nightmare of having the | advertising industry in charge of our sentence writing tools. | willhslade wrote: | The Antikythera mechanism says hello. | jay_kyburz wrote: | People didn't forget how read the stars because they were | using their Antikytheras too much. | dgudkov wrote: | >For this, a chatbot is no different than Google... | | Exactly. AI chatbots look like something that can replace | Google search and become the next big thing after search | engines[+]. Like Google, AI chatbots will crawl and ingest the | web. They won't be able to synthesize anything new, but it can | be a convenient, very human-friendly way of querying the global | knowledge base that the internet has become. | | [+] If AI chatbots become successful, they will definitely | start injecting ads and spoil everything again. | TeMPOraL wrote: | > _They do a job, they have known limitations, and you can use | them deliberately._ | | I think you're severely underplaying this (as many other | commenters are). Google, Wikipedia and a dusty leather almanac | are, for typical use cases, _mostly right_ - and when they are | wrong, they 're wrong in specific ways you can quickly learn to | spot and correct for. The output of GPTChat, or Copilot, is | _mostly wrong_. Sometimes overtly, usually subtly, almost | always randomly wrong. And since the problem domain is open- | ended, you can 't just make the GPT-3 output right by logically | inverting it - there are many more possible wrong answers the | model could give you than there are right answers. | ghaff wrote: | Yeah, even if the student took the trouble to look up a couple | Wikipedia articles or whatever and got the model to make | changes so that it was factually correct, they still mostly | wouldn't have constructed and written the output which, at | least at a high school level, is probably at least 50% of the | point of the exercise. | TacticalCoder wrote: | > That there, though, also shows why AI-generated text is | something completely different; calculators are deterministic | devices: if you calculate 4,839 + 3,948 - 45 you get 8,742, every | time. | | ChatGPT is just a program. Given the exact same input and seed, | its result is going to be 100% deterministic too. It's just that | it's going to get the same wrong result in a deterministic way. | Determinism may be hidden away from end user (I don't know about | that) but there's just no way around it: it's a program and give | the same inputs, it's fully deterministic. | | And if the user / discussion trains it with more input, it's | possible to replay these inputs, in the same order, and get the | exact same answer from the AI. | | StableDiffusion allows users to use it in a 100% deterministic | way. | | ChatGPT may or may not (I really just don't know) but that'd just | be a detail / choice made by OpenAI. I can try it now and have | ChatGPT tell me 1309849874 divided by 2 is 24891, being several | orders of magnitude of. And then try it again and it give | something else. But that's just because I got connected to | another instance, using other seeds or a slightly different | model. | | At some point there's going to be a free model and it's going to | be fully deterministic _if the user wants it to be_. | | It's just code running on data. There's no magic. | sublinear wrote: | Does anyone really want a deterministic ChatGPT though? | | Relying on an incorrect model frozen in time seems worse than | relying on an incorrect model that is continuously improved. | | Expert systems of the past were deterministic in that the | answers were computed from assumed facts and the logic could be | queried. That's fundamentally different from how this works. | RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm wrote: | The concept of homework is cruel anyway and needs to be | abandoned: | | Imagine your employer gave you "homework". | | People would pull out pitchforks because it violates their | private life and work-life balance. | | Yet doing this to kids somehow is believed to be okay!? | | - Kids deserve a fixed point in time where their daily work is | over, just like you do. | shon wrote: | AFAIK this isn't just 2-year-old-GPT3, it's been referenced as | "GPT3.5" the model much more up to date (2021) and it clearly has | some new capabilities. | | Good point in the article regarding confidence/accuracy though. | | That said, I've been impressed with its usefulness as a spam | filter as the first page of any web search is often heavily | saddled with SEO-baggage. | | Answers to simple questions like "how do you make a Sazarac? Is a | much nicer experience than on web search. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-12-05 23:00 UTC)