[HN Gopher] Unexpected ways generative AI will change how you wo... ___________________________________________________________________ Unexpected ways generative AI will change how you work forever Author : jbcranshaw Score : 73 points Date : 2023-01-18 20:14 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (maestroai.substack.com) (TXT) w3m dump (maestroai.substack.com) | a13o wrote: | On the topic of Content is King, I have a different view than the | author. I think in the case of these trained AIs, 'content' | refers to the training datasets and not the generated outputs. | | Trained AIs are in something like the early digital streaming | days where there was only one provider in town, so that provider | aggregated All The Content. Over the next decade we would see the | content owners claw their content back from Netflix, and onto | competitor platforms -- which takes us to where we are today. | Netflix's third party content has dwindled and forced them to | focus on creating their own first party content which can not be | clawed away. | | When these generative AIs start to produce income, it will be at | the expense of the artists whose art was in the training dataset | nonconsensually. This triggers the same content clawback we saw | in digital streaming. Training datasets will be heavily | scrutinized and monetized because the algorithms powering | generative AIs aren't actually carrying much water. Content is | King. | 29athrowaway wrote: | If social media resulted in a deluge of low quality crap, now you | can expect that same phenomenon to the power of infinity. | commitpizza wrote: | I paid for Tabnine pro since it was 50% off for a year but I | won't renew it unless it massively improves. | | I mean, it does give good completions sometimes but the time | saved isn't that great imho. Maybe chatgpt is better but it feels | like AI still have some way to go to actually be so useful you | would be less sucessful without it. | [deleted] | RyanShook wrote: | Does anyone else feel like the crypto crowd just migrated to AI? | d_burfoot wrote: | I don't have a problem with the main point of the article, but | there is a huge terminology confusion that is rapidly gathering | force to confuse people. The key breakthroughs of GPT3 et al are | not primarily about generative AI. People had been building | generative models long before GPT3, and it was generally found | that discriminative models had better performance. | | They key to the power of GPT3 is that it has billions of | parameters, AND those parameters are well-justified because it | was trained on billions of documents. So the term should be | something like "gigaparam AI" or something like that. Maybe GIGAI | as a parallel to GOFAI. If you could somehow build a gigaparam | discrimative model, you would get better performance on the task | it was trained on than GPT3. | jbcranshaw wrote: | Good point on the terminology. What do you think the right | terminology should be? LLMs is too much of a mouthful and is | not as informative for the general public, imo. People are also | using Foundation Models, which I rather like. | zone411 wrote: | I don't like "Foundation Models" because it's a term invented | by Stanford and they're pushing it hard while not really | doing all that much in the field. | impalallama wrote: | ChatGPT help me solve a refactoring bug today. I had spent hours | messing around trying to figure out what the issue was until I | realized, via asking ChatGPT, that I had misunderstood a piece of | the code and the docs. It was able to answer and provide examples | (until it had error and crashed) in a way a senior engineer might | have been able to. | | The funny thing is I had tried just pasting in code and saying | "find the bug" and it wasn't helpful at all, but when I posted in | a portion and asked it to explain what the code was doing I was | able to work backwards and solve the issue. | | Its nice anecdote where the AI felt additive instead of | existentially destructive which has been a overbearing anxiety | for me this last month. | ape4 wrote: | That works for a really small amount of code (like 100 lines). | teddyh wrote: | Sounds a lot like "rubber duck" debugging. | henry_bone wrote: | From Star Trek: First Contact: "When you build a machine to do | a man's job, you take something away from the man." | | You surrendered the need to think to the machine. You are | lesser for it. I don't think these AIs are just removing | drudgery, like, say, a calculator. They actually do the work. | Or more correctly, they produce something that will pass for | the work. | | Wholesale embracing of this sort of technology is bad for us. | RhodesianHunter wrote: | That sounds pretty Luddite to me. | | I don't think the average person wants to be doing the menial | work, vs architecting a grander vision IE the purpose for the | work. | RosanaAnaDana wrote: | Meh. I'd rather find out where it can take us. That sounds | more fun and interesting. | XorNot wrote: | Does this mean pair programming makes you a worse engineer? | | Or even just "asking for a second opinion"? | Karunamon wrote: | I don't know about you but if I had the ability to dictate | requirements and to get a program out the other side that | matches those requirements, the process of coding has become | mere busywork that can be eliminated for the benefit of me | and everyone else. | | I'm sure the buggy whip makers had pride in their work as | well. | acchow wrote: | That's how Socrates thought about books. Yet here we are 2400 | years later and our minds are mostly fine. | k__ wrote: | I used ChatGPT for my work as a writer, and it's pretty nice. | | I wouldn't let it write a whole article, but it can really save | time at research. Just needs a bit of fact checking in the end. | astockwell wrote: | Can you elaborate more on your process, and the venue/focus of | the writing? | k__ wrote: | I write educational technical articles for a living. Dev | tools, frameworks, security, APIs, infrastructure, web3, etc. | | I talk to the AI as if I would interview an expert on a | subject matter. | | This usually gives a good starting point for an article, if | the subject is general enough, and not too new. | | It's also good at structuring and rewriting texts. If you | already have all the correct data, you can use it to write an | outline or something like that. | | The problems I saw were that it can't follow a coherent | thought for more than a few paragraphs, and the writing style | is generally a bit boring. | | Also, the system uses sampling of results to sound more | interesting and to prevent overfitting, it happens regularly | that it tells you crap. One time you get a good answer, then | you change one word in your prompt and the results isn't | accurate anymore. | | But I worked for years as a developer, so I usually notice | when things are off, and I also fact check manually with | Google when I want to be sure. | samvher wrote: | No offense but this approach worries me - it seems like a | novel mechanism to (perhaps inadvertently) generate and | spread false information. It takes a lot of fact checking | to make sure everything is right, and if you do the | research yourself that's a natural part of the process. It | seems way too easy to minimize that effort in a process | like this. | | I was already worried about ChatGPT-like systems generating | mass-produced nonsense and polluting the internet, but if | people are also going to edit ChatGPT output just enough to | make it seem right (a mechanism I hadn't thought of so | far), that might make the nonsense a lot harder to detect. | | I totally understand the reasoning though, it sounds like a | productive workflow. | thundergolfer wrote: | Do you have examples you can provide of these technical | articles? Because those topics your offered are really | broad and very few people are knowledgeable about all of | them, so it sounds like you're filling in your knowledge by | querying ChatGPT. | | Using ChatGPT to fill in knowledge for a technical articles | sounds bad. If I'm reading an article about security, I | want it written by a security expert not a semi-layman plus | a ChatGPT model. | zabzonk wrote: | > The results are often wildly creative and spookily accurate, | giving these models a human-like feel. | | or wildly inaccurate, particularly in fields such as programming | toss1 wrote: | Yup. What seems to be largely missed is that these models have | zero understanding, and are actually destroyers of information, | not creators. In classic Information Theory, information is | basically surprise value -- how much _unexpected_ info is in | the message? -- yet these "AI" systems put out the _most | expected_ subset in each instance. This highly averaged output | is very recognizable and so very striking, but it is not | actually very informative (perhaps except in cases where it is | specifically used as a verbose search engine, where the query | takes advantage of the breadth of the AI 's training). | Gh0stRAT wrote: | > In classic Information Theory, information is basically | surprise value -- how much unexpected info is in the message? | -- yet these "AI" systems put out the most expected subset in | each instance. | | Forgive me, but isn't this kind of moving-the-goalposts? | Information is the surprise value from the recipient's point | of view, which meas the recipient's bayesian prior | probability is "expected". Saying "these "AI" systems put out | the most expected subset in each instance" assumes that the | recipient's priors exactly equal those of the model which | would only be the case when the model is talking to itself. | (or I suppose to an even more complex model with perfect | knowledge of ChatGPT's weights) | | The fact that no information is transferred when the model | talks to itself should not be surprising and would apply to | any AI. (even including a superhuman post-singularity god- | like AI) | aero142 wrote: | I've been asking friends in non-programming engineering fields | how ChatGPT does in their area of expertise, and I believe | programming is the area that ChatGPT is the most accurate. | Finding solution to general engineering problems seems | blatantly wrong in almost all cases, whereas in programming, it | seems to be able to generate mostly correct code for simple, | boiler-plate like tasks. | zabzonk wrote: | why is "mostly correct" ok for programming? also, i don't | believe that good programmers want to have boiler-plate in | their code. | fooker wrote: | Because that's what most programmers achieve too. | | You can iterate from there by taking advantage of the last | 50 years of software engineering wisdom. | ccozan wrote: | yes, but why? Why is GPT so much better at programming than | other tasks? | | can it be that programming itself can be so easily predicted | in a generative way, while others require more ingenuity and | real world model to be solved? | | In this case I would totally offload programming to a GPT | /LLM AI, while my job is simply to specify largely the | business case. | lancesells wrote: | Is it because programming is a more limited and specific | language than the ones people speak? There's less room for | double-meanings, slang, meaning, or even sentence | structure. | impalallama wrote: | I have to imagine its because so much of its training data | is readily available programming docs, tutorials, and | general Q&A that there is an amazing abundance of online. | How many times have you just pasted an error into google | and hoped someone else has asked the exact same question on | stack overflow? | petra wrote: | True. Also there's a lot of commented open-source code | out there. | benkay wrote: | [dead] | blablablerg wrote: | Or worse, subtly inaccurate. The problem I have with generative | AI right now, its product looks like it makes sense and | sometimes it does, but there is always the risk of total | nonsense hidden somewhere in the middle. So you still need | someone capable to check and correct for most professional | work, and sometimes that is harder or more time consuming than | making the product itself. | | The same sort of problem with self driving cars, they are often | correct but not often enough, and staying alert to correct the | AI is worse than driving yourself which is more work, | paradoxically enough. | | AI might manage to push through these barriers, but I remain | skeptical with the technology in the current state: statistical | machines that are good in the common cases but sketchy at the | edges. | smoldesu wrote: | > Widespread adoption of generative AI will act as a lubricant | between systems, | | I largely agree with this article, but I feel like you have to be | careful with these general predictions. Many technologies have | purported themselves to be this "business lubricant" tech (ever | since the spreadsheet), but the actual number of novel | spreadsheet applications remains small. It feels like the same | can be said for generative AI, too. Almost every day I feel the | need to explain that "generation" and "abstract thought" are | distinct concepts, because conflating the two leads to _so much_ | misconception around AI. Stable Diffusion has no concept of | artistic significance, just art. Similarly, ChatGPT can only | predict what happens next, which doesn 't bestow it heuristic | thought. Our collective awe-struck-ness has left us vulnerable to | the fact that AI generation is, generally speaking, hollow and | indirect. | | AI will certainly change the future, and along with it the future | of work, but we've all heard idyllic interpretations of benign | tech before. Framing the topic around content rather than | capability is a good start, but you easily get lost in the weeds | again when you start claiming it will change _everything_. | jbcranshaw wrote: | > Our collective awe-struck-ness has left us vulnerable to the | fact that AI generation is, generally speaking, hollow and | indirect. | | This totally resonates with me. This is absolutely correct. | Thinking about the future of work, there's much of what I do | every day in my job that is hollow and indirect. And I would be | totally okay if I could have something like ChatGPT do it for | me. | [deleted] | teknopaul wrote: | "but the actual number of novel spreadsheet applications | remains small." | | That's not my experience, I am continuously amazed by the | amount of tasks worker bees manage to do in excel. | | I kind of wish MS access was more of a thing, because when | eventually it doesn't scale and you need a "proper" system, it | takes a rewrite. | oogali wrote: | It's not just that a system built in MS Access facing scale | concerns needs a rewrite from an engineer's perspective. | | It's that the business will _also_ accept that it needs a | rewrite. As opposed to the current status quo where they 'll | ask what's wrong with continuing to use $Slick_and_Fancy_Tool | (then act surprised when it stops scaling with regards to | whatever business, performance, or compliance barriers you've | then reached). | smoldesu wrote: | That's fair enough, I've seen some pretty cool things in | spreadsheet software too. | | My larger point, though, is that most people end up using | spreadsheets to do the same thing. It's fun to imagine novel | uses for a spreadsheet, like a DAW or video game, but | ultimately it's not very _useful_ for that. Similarly, | ChatGPT is great for writing convincing text - that 's what | everyone uses it for. Can it solve math though? Not very | well. Future applications of the tech are more likely to be | specialized, in that sense. | | Mostly, I'm a curmudgeon and I despise these "flying car of | the future" articles. Popular Mechanics printed them for | decades, and half a century later nothing has changed (not | even the culture writing them). | mxkopy wrote: | I think we knew from the get-go that spreadsheets would be | used for pretty much anything to do with numbers. That | there aren't any new applications past that understates | their general applicability. | | I agree though, chatGPT isn't a real flying car. Imagine if | someone revolutionized the paper clip. The day-to-day of | millions would be forever and irrevocably changed; and | almost nothing would happen. | ChrisMarshallNY wrote: | Weren't we all supposed to be lollygagging about, as our robots | did everything for us, by now? | | I can't wait for Wall-E! | | https://www.thelist.com/img/gallery/things-only-adults-notic... | thih9 wrote: | Wall-E was about as much about post-scarcity as it was about | escaping reality. To me it looks like we've focused on the | second part and we got pretty good at it. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-01-18 23:00 UTC)