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No, she didn't have a chat with herself, and not even with an AI. I hate this complete and utter misrepresentation of facts. GPT is not an AI. It does not tal

by mavu 4y ago

No, she didn't have a chat with herself, and not even with an AI. I hate this complete and utter misrepresentation of facts. GPT is not an AI. It does not talk. It certainly does not understand. I wish AI researchers would spend some effort to educate the public instead of bathing in all the attention.

Guthur 4y ago
Here here. But there is also a broader absence (destruction?) of our classical understanding of thought and other domains such as classical objective reality and the platonic domain of ideas. Not yet sure if this is some weird post modernist view or intentional dummying down, maybe two sides of the same coin? But at least from what I can observe there is little push to teach people how to think.
- carabiner 4y ago
  *hear hear
grepLeigh 4y ago
Even if the headline isn't accurate by HackerNews technical standards, don't under-estimate the power of believing this kind of experience. For example, "What Happened to Make You Anxious?" by Jaime Castillo proposes a similar technique for addressing anxiety. The technique goes like this: Think of a traumatic moment in your past, where you wish you could go back in time and comfort or offer yourself advice. Then imagine yourself stepping into the frame of your memory and giving your younger self the support you needed in that moment (but lacked). This might sound woo-woo, but the efficacy is documented. Sure, GPT-generated text isn't actually equivalent to talking to yourself - but you can see the utility for therapeutic applications like this.
- narrator 4y ago
  >Think of a traumatic moment in your past, where you wish you could go back in time and comfort or offer yourself advice. Then imagine yourself stepping into the frame of your memory and giving your younger self the support you needed in that moment (but lacked). This might sound woo-woo, but the efficacy is documented. This is how the Internal Family Systems psychology technique deals with past trauma and it has been around since the early 1980s. No AI required. To go that deep though, it helps to have a therapist trained in the technique to guide the process.
  - grepLeigh 4y ago
    Yeah, I'm torn here because without a trained therapist supervising this technique can easily trigger a spiral. But health care costs in the US are extraordinarily steep. Mental health care is often out-of-network, if it's covered at all. I have a hunch that market demand for AI-guided "mental health wellness exercises" will out pace regulations or ethics. Calm would be the best example of this kind of demand. I wonder if they're talking about this internally, and what line is being drawn.
    - Retric 4y ago
      Therapist costs tend to be capped in a way most US medical care isn’t. Seeing someone once a week without insurance is on the order of 3,000$ to 7,000$ per year depending on area. Not trivial, but something most people could budget for even if they seek treatment for much of their life. It’s of course possible to spend more than that, especially in the short term. However, the major costs tend to be people being unable to work or take care of themselves rather than blockbuster drugs, emergency care, or surgery.
      - grepLeigh 4y ago
        If you're upper-middle class or wealthier, I think you're right that the cost can be budgeted. I just Googled the median US rent ($1,771). Based on that, if you frame the expense as an added 2 - 4 months rent per year, I'm guessing there are a lot of people forgoing therapy because the immediate cost is too high. I wish I could choose where my taxes were allocated. I'd subsidize cost of therapy. To really drive this home, one of my own memories is my mom (ashamed, embarrassed, depressed) asking to borrow money from me to pay our bills. I was 9. She had issues, I inherited a few, and I've only recently been able to drop 5-10 dimes on therapy each year to sort it out. Money well spent! But I wonder how my mom would've fared if even an AI facsimile of therapy were available to her cheap, instead of other cheap coping mechanisms. Churches and drugs are the cheapest coping tools available in the US.
visarga 4y ago
GPT is like a universal human template that can be prompted with a persona of your liking.
eagsalazar2 4y ago
I've heard this sentiment before (that AI != ML, always weirdly hostile) but I've also heard key figures in the AI world say strongly that ML of any kind is a subset of the broader AI umbrella. Are you sure it is strictly wrong to refer to this example as AI? Also why are you using such strong words? I'm genuinely curious why there is so much emotion when people, maybe, misuse these terms.
- carabiner 4y ago
  He's going for a middlebrow dismissal. This is like the "bitcoin isn't money!" or "twitter is not a serious medium for communication!" oldschoolism that some HN traditionalists defend in spite of real world application. At the end it doesn't uncover a salient point but gets stuck on semantics to shut down an entire idea.
  - mavu 4y ago
    You're not 100% wrong, but I'm not trying to shut down an entire idea of AI. Let me put it this way: It's called AI, Artificial intelligence. Are trees inteligent? Because they are a clump of cells that manage to achieve amazing results. growing to be some of the largest living things on the planet. Extracting nutrients and transporting them 20 or more meters above ground, where they are used to harvest energy from the sun, all the while producing offspring every year and fighting off predators. I don't think many people would call them "natural intelligence". The I admit that I maybe apply a narrow definition of "intelligence", but I think the core concept is one of "understanding". And we are not even close to al ML algo actually understanding anything. And this is the problem. It masks the inherent shortcommings of ML. People are delivered the impression that applications that use ML actually do what they are expected to do, because like a person, you train them and then they understand their job and do it. This is NOT HOW THAT WORKS. The ML algo does not understand that it is asked to identify oncoming traffic. It does not know that it is looking a cancer cells that will soon kill someone. And even worse, we humans who make these things, are 100% unable to understand the models we create. We can feed them data, and compare the result. But that is it. There is no real way to understand how it works in detail. They get used anyway. With predictable results. see Tesla Autopilot for a prominent example. Also, I call them AI researchers for the same reason I call Nuclear Fusion researchers that, not because they are doing it, but because they are researching it.
airgapstopgap 4y ago
Do you have some principled definition of what AI is or what it means to "understand"? GPT-3 outputs certainly show enough high-level non-scripted information processing to qualify as "understanding" in my book – not human understanding, clearly, but an artificial one. AI researchers do in fact educate the public. [1] They face serious pushback from obscurantists like Hofstadter [2] and Marcus who refuse to commit to any definition and instead go by hunches about what architecture or data representation can support "understanding" and what certain behaviors indicate. 1. https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificial-neural-networks-are-making-strides-towards-consciousness-according-to-blaise-aguera-y-arcas https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificia... 2. https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificial-neural-networks-today-are-not-conscious-according-to-douglas-hofstadter https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificia...
erehweb 4y ago
I dunno. ELIZA is not an AI, and doesn't understand anything, but colloquially it makes sense to say people chatted with ELIZA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
belugacat 4y ago
It is her performing talking to herself. She's as much "talking to herself" than if she had written and then performed a play about talking to herself. The computer/AI aspect of it is "just" a prop for the performance.
leesec 4y ago
can't believe people are still so sure AI's can't understand something when they've clearly demonstrated many times now they understand a whole lot
bananamerica 4y ago
I know this is a technical forum, but you are allowed to appreciate the subjective meanings an artist ascribes to technological output, as well as the sentiments it provoked.
mastazi 4y ago
To me, it sounds like you are conflating AI and AGI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc... The way I and many others use the term "AI", is based on the understanding that AI is an umbrella term that includes modern deep learning as well as the broader field of machine learning, and also the other pre-machine-learning types of AI such as symbolic AI, expert systems etc. If the stuff running on Lisp Machines was referred to as AI, I don't see why GPT-3 can't be labelled as such.
- debugnik 4y ago
  To me, "an AI" implies an autonomous agent, even if it is dumb. But many of those you listed are techniques for AI, not AIs themselves. The same goes for these ML models: most are techniques or components suitable for AI, not AIs themselves. I'd consider these language models AI if they initiated conversations themselves or used conversation as part of a plan to achieve some objective. But so far, game bots are more deserving of the title than these trendy language models and painting generators, IMO.
halpmeh 4y ago
I think you're committing a yet-unnamed logical fallacy that I see a lot on HN. I'm going to call this "the logical fallacy of uncharitable interpretation." The basic premise is this: Take an assertion like X implies Y. Unfortunately, due to the imprecision of language, X may have multiple definitions, e.g. D1 and D2, such that D1 implies Y but D2 does not. The fallacy of uncharitable interpretation is to take a definition for X such that the stated premise does not hold, even though there exists another definition where the premise would hold. In this case, large ML algorithms are commonly called AI. Even the company that made GPT-3 is called OpenAI. Even you, yourself referred to them as "AI researchers." What do "AI researchers" produce if not AI? Finally, "talk" can colloquially mean to use words in an prompt-response pattern.
- dvt 4y ago
  I'm not going to downvote you because I think you're respectful and thoughtful, but I want to vociferously disagree. These clickbait blogs know what they're doing. There's been so much contention about what is and isn't artificial intelligence (including the Google weirdo that thought it was sentient earlier this year), that just about anyone semi-educated on the subject knows how GPT and related models work. We know it's smoke and mirrors; we know it's plagiarizing and combining other, third-party, materials half the time. She's not "having a conversation with her younger self" and this is incredibly disingenuous and misleading, per @mavu's point. More importantly, it doesn't really educate the uneducated or move the technology forward in any meaningful way. It's pure garbage clickbait nonsense. I regret giving them the impression.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - fjkdlsjflkds 4y ago
    "we know it's plagiarizing and combining other, third-party, materials half the time" does not seem like an accurate description of what a model like GPT3 does either, though, since: 1) No explicit content (that could be plagiarized or combined) is actually stored by GPT3: only statistical relationships between tokens are retained. You can't point at a specific subset of weights and say "see... this is where phrase/idea X is stored". 2) GPT3 makes no specific claim to be generating "original, own work" (which would be required for something to be considered "plagiarism")
planetsprite 4y ago
Ok, then according to you What is AI? What is "talking"? What is "understanding"?
msla 4y ago
Stuff a lot simpler than GPT-3 has been called AI by people much more accomplished than you for a lot longer than you've been alive. The term is not ambiguous, "Intelligence" does not exclusively mean human-level or human-like intelligence, and trying to redefine it now would only cause confusion.

by mavu 4y ago

Guthur 4y ago

Here here. But there is also a broader absence (destruction?) of our classical understanding of thought and other domains such as classical objective reality and the platonic domain of ideas. Not yet sure if this is some weird post modernist view or intentional dummying down, maybe two sides of the same coin? But at least from what I can observe there is little push to teach people how to think.

carabiner 4y ago
*hear hear

grepLeigh 4y ago

Even if the headline isn't accurate by HackerNews technical standards, don't under-estimate the power of believing this kind of experience. For example, "What Happened to Make You Anxious?" by Jaime Castillo proposes a similar technique for addressing anxiety. The technique goes like this: Think of a traumatic moment in your past, where you wish you could go back in time and comfort or offer yourself advice. Then imagine yourself stepping into the frame of your memory and giving your younger self the support you needed in that moment (but lacked). This might sound woo-woo, but the efficacy is documented. Sure, GPT-generated text isn't actually equivalent to talking to yourself - but you can see the utility for therapeutic applications like this.

narrator 4y ago
>Think of a traumatic moment in your past, where you wish you could go back in time and comfort or offer yourself advice. Then imagine yourself stepping into the frame of your memory and giving your younger self the support you needed in that moment (but lacked). This might sound woo-woo, but the efficacy is documented. This is how the Internal Family Systems psychology technique deals with past trauma and it has been around since the early 1980s. No AI required. To go that deep though, it helps to have a therapist trained in the technique to guide the process.
- grepLeigh 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm torn here because without a trained therapist supervising this technique can easily trigger a spiral. But health care costs in the US are extraordinarily steep. Mental health care is often out-of-network, if it's covered at all. I have a hunch that market demand for AI-guided "mental health wellness exercises" will out pace regulations or ethics. Calm would be the best example of this kind of demand. I wonder if they're talking about this internally, and what line is being drawn.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Therapist costs tend to be capped in a way most US medical care isn’t. Seeing someone once a week without insurance is on the order of 3,000$ to 7,000$ per year depending on area. Not trivial, but something most people could budget for even if they seek treatment for much of their life. It’s of course possible to spend more than that, especially in the short term. However, the major costs tend to be people being unable to work or take care of themselves rather than blockbuster drugs, emergency care, or surgery.
    - grepLeigh 4y ago
      If you're upper-middle class or wealthier, I think you're right that the cost can be budgeted. I just Googled the median US rent ($1,771). Based on that, if you frame the expense as an added 2 - 4 months rent per year, I'm guessing there are a lot of people forgoing therapy because the immediate cost is too high. I wish I could choose where my taxes were allocated. I'd subsidize cost of therapy. To really drive this home, one of my own memories is my mom (ashamed, embarrassed, depressed) asking to borrow money from me to pay our bills. I was 9. She had issues, I inherited a few, and I've only recently been able to drop 5-10 dimes on therapy each year to sort it out. Money well spent! But I wonder how my mom would've fared if even an AI facsimile of therapy were available to her cheap, instead of other cheap coping mechanisms. Churches and drugs are the cheapest coping tools available in the US.

visarga 4y ago

GPT is like a universal human template that can be prompted with a persona of your liking.

eagsalazar2 4y ago

I've heard this sentiment before (that AI != ML, always weirdly hostile) but I've also heard key figures in the AI world say strongly that ML of any kind is a subset of the broader AI umbrella. Are you sure it is strictly wrong to refer to this example as AI? Also why are you using such strong words? I'm genuinely curious why there is so much emotion when people, maybe, misuse these terms.

carabiner 4y ago
He's going for a middlebrow dismissal. This is like the "bitcoin isn't money!" or "twitter is not a serious medium for communication!" oldschoolism that some HN traditionalists defend in spite of real world application. At the end it doesn't uncover a salient point but gets stuck on semantics to shut down an entire idea.
- mavu 4y ago
  You're not 100% wrong, but I'm not trying to shut down an entire idea of AI. Let me put it this way: It's called AI, Artificial intelligence. Are trees inteligent? Because they are a clump of cells that manage to achieve amazing results. growing to be some of the largest living things on the planet. Extracting nutrients and transporting them 20 or more meters above ground, where they are used to harvest energy from the sun, all the while producing offspring every year and fighting off predators. I don't think many people would call them "natural intelligence". The I admit that I maybe apply a narrow definition of "intelligence", but I think the core concept is one of "understanding". And we are not even close to al ML algo actually understanding anything. And this is the problem. It masks the inherent shortcommings of ML. People are delivered the impression that applications that use ML actually do what they are expected to do, because like a person, you train them and then they understand their job and do it. This is NOT HOW THAT WORKS. The ML algo does not understand that it is asked to identify oncoming traffic. It does not know that it is looking a cancer cells that will soon kill someone. And even worse, we humans who make these things, are 100% unable to understand the models we create. We can feed them data, and compare the result. But that is it. There is no real way to understand how it works in detail. They get used anyway. With predictable results. see Tesla Autopilot for a prominent example. Also, I call them AI researchers for the same reason I call Nuclear Fusion researchers that, not because they are doing it, but because they are researching it.

airgapstopgap 4y ago

Do you have some principled definition of what AI is or what it means to "understand"? GPT-3 outputs certainly show enough high-level non-scripted information processing to qualify as "understanding" in my book – not human understanding, clearly, but an artificial one. AI researchers do in fact educate the public. [1] They face serious pushback from obscurantists like Hofstadter [2] and Marcus who refuse to commit to any definition and instead go by hunches about what architecture or data representation can support "understanding" and what certain behaviors indicate. 1. https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificial-neural-networks-are-making-strides-towards-consciousness-according-to-blaise-aguera-y-arcas https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificia... 2. https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificial-neural-networks-today-are-not-conscious-according-to-douglas-hofstadter https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/06/09/artificia...

erehweb 4y ago

I dunno. ELIZA is not an AI, and doesn't understand anything, but colloquially it makes sense to say people chatted with ELIZA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

belugacat 4y ago

It is her performing talking to herself. She's as much "talking to herself" than if she had written and then performed a play about talking to herself. The computer/AI aspect of it is "just" a prop for the performance.

leesec 4y ago

can't believe people are still so sure AI's can't understand something when they've clearly demonstrated many times now they understand a whole lot

bananamerica 4y ago

I know this is a technical forum, but you are allowed to appreciate the subjective meanings an artist ascribes to technological output, as well as the sentiments it provoked.

mastazi 4y ago

To me, it sounds like you are conflating AI and AGI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc... The way I and many others use the term "AI", is based on the understanding that AI is an umbrella term that includes modern deep learning as well as the broader field of machine learning, and also the other pre-machine-learning types of AI such as symbolic AI, expert systems etc. If the stuff running on Lisp Machines was referred to as AI, I don't see why GPT-3 can't be labelled as such.

debugnik 4y ago
To me, "an AI" implies an autonomous agent, even if it is dumb. But many of those you listed are techniques for AI, not AIs themselves. The same goes for these ML models: most are techniques or components suitable for AI, not AIs themselves. I'd consider these language models AI if they initiated conversations themselves or used conversation as part of a plan to achieve some objective. But so far, game bots are more deserving of the title than these trendy language models and painting generators, IMO.

halpmeh 4y ago

I think you're committing a yet-unnamed logical fallacy that I see a lot on HN. I'm going to call this "the logical fallacy of uncharitable interpretation." The basic premise is this: Take an assertion like X implies Y. Unfortunately, due to the imprecision of language, X may have multiple definitions, e.g. D1 and D2, such that D1 implies Y but D2 does not. The fallacy of uncharitable interpretation is to take a definition for X such that the stated premise does not hold, even though there exists another definition where the premise would hold. In this case, large ML algorithms are commonly called AI. Even the company that made GPT-3 is called OpenAI. Even you, yourself referred to them as "AI researchers." What do "AI researchers" produce if not AI? Finally, "talk" can colloquially mean to use words in an prompt-response pattern.

dvt 4y ago
I'm not going to downvote you because I think you're respectful and thoughtful, but I want to vociferously disagree. These clickbait blogs know what they're doing. There's been so much contention about what is and isn't artificial intelligence (including the Google weirdo that thought it was sentient earlier this year), that just about anyone semi-educated on the subject knows how GPT and related models work. We know it's smoke and mirrors; we know it's plagiarizing and combining other, third-party, materials half the time. She's not "having a conversation with her younger self" and this is incredibly disingenuous and misleading, per @mavu's point. More importantly, it doesn't really educate the uneducated or move the technology forward in any meaningful way. It's pure garbage clickbait nonsense. I regret giving them the impression.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- fjkdlsjflkds 4y ago
  "we know it's plagiarizing and combining other, third-party, materials half the time" does not seem like an accurate description of what a model like GPT3 does either, though, since: 1) No explicit content (that could be plagiarized or combined) is actually stored by GPT3: only statistical relationships between tokens are retained. You can't point at a specific subset of weights and say "see... this is where phrase/idea X is stored". 2) GPT3 makes no specific claim to be generating "original, own work" (which would be required for something to be considered "plagiarism")

planetsprite 4y ago

Ok, then according to you What is AI? What is "talking"? What is "understanding"?

msla 4y ago

Stuff a lot simpler than GPT-3 has been called AI by people much more accomplished than you for a lot longer than you've been alive. The term is not ambiguous, "Intelligence" does not exclusively mean human-level or human-like intelligence, and trying to redefine it now would only cause confusion.