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Unsurprising given how it works, but the higher-level implications are somewhat unexpected. These model are extremely good when they have creative freedom and a

Unsurprising given how it works, but the higher-level implications are somewhat unexpected. These model are extremely good when they have creative freedom and are used to produce some kind of art. Poems, text in various styles, images without important details, and so on. But they fail miserably when you give them tasks that require world knowledge or precision. For example, when I asked a programming question I got a wrong answer. It looked just right on the surface, but the details were all wrong. I say this is unexpected because a few years ago most people expected AI models to solve mundane tasks like automating Excel spreadsheet, while artists were considered pretty safe. Now the opposite has come to pass. The artistic power of these models is amazing, but I would never trust them to do anything that requires precision. The biggest problem these models have is not necessarily that they produce "incorrect" (in quotes because they are not actually incorrect, just not what it's trained on) outputs, but rather that they have no built-in mechanism to express uncertainty in a meaningful way that's calibrated for the end-task of producing correct information.

yeknoda 4y ago
Art is precision.
ghusbands 4y ago
The artistic output of things like DALL-E is also "incorrect" in varied and obvious ways, though. A lot of people with an artistic bent can't stand to inspect DALL-E output due to the clearly visible incoherency and inconsistency.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I've had better luck with Stable Diffusion using impressionist/surrealist/etc. styles because you don't really expect the results to be "right" in a literal sense.
K0balt 4y ago
Not surprising considering the sentience in question is completely disembodied so it has no way to distinguish between real and unreal. Efforts to limit hallucination will just turn it into a powerful natural language query engine for the training data set. The real value in AI lies in its creative power, so although a strict mode will probably be a very useful tool, especially in recursion, I don’t think that it is the ultimate path. In order to be relatable to humans, AI will have to have either a real or a physical embodiment so that there is distinction between the real and the imaginary; without this distinction, it will likely prove difficult to advance.
andix 4y ago
The quality of creative work they produce is also not so good. An AI may pass a high school creative writing class, but they would probably do that for computer science too („implement fizz buzz“). But try to give them the assignment to write stories, poems, lyrics. The result is at best mediocre. No professional artist is threatened by that at all.
hackernewds 4y ago
This is precisely why Google would not adopt this format. Diff goals, needs and gender approaches
ghaff 4y ago
I was playing around with ChatGPT yesterday and what I found was: - Ask a straightforward question like what are business models for open source software or what are the advantages of GPL vs. AGPL vs. MIT and the answers were pretty shallow and boilerplate but they were correct as far as they went. - But ask a question like "Why didn't large SMP systems become more mainstream?" (which basically requires synthesizing a lot of knowledge about the last 25 years of computing history) and it spewed out an explanation that basically got enough right to be dangerous and got at least one thing pretty much entirely wrong. But it was coherent enough that someone who didn't have any background would probably think their question was answered.
- layer8 4y ago
  Also, if you’d ask it “Why did large SMP systems become mainstream?", it would (presumably) spit out a plausible-sounding explanation for that. The models seem to take the prompt as a premise, and then go from there. Maybe that’s also why when you point out a mistake, they oblige and provide a correction. I haven’t tried: If you point out something they said as a mistake when in fact it was correct, do they notice and object? Maybe if the evidence from the training data is strong enough.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Interesting. I'll have to try that. And, yes, you are correct. It gave a short pablum answer that pretty much focused on the benefits of multiple cores. The mistake in the original was somewhat subtle and gets into programming for large SMP vs. MPP/distributed systems. And it's actually true that parallel programming even on shared memory systems has challenges (and there was a lot of discussion at one point when multicore was coming in on desktops) but it's pretty much flat wrong to say that we didn't have large SMP systems primarily because they were hard to program for.
    - layer8 4y ago
      See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33844574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33844574 where the model acknowledges a non-existing mistake after prompting.
larksimian 4y ago
The art isn't that good either, it's just less obviously wrong(plus there's subjective taste involved). The bad code is good enough to fool a code illiterate person and the art is good enough to fool artistically ignorant people( which is most of us). Still huge progress though!
andrepd 4y ago
> good when they have creative freedom and are used to produce some kind of art Well is it? Maybe yes for purely aesthetically pleasing pieces, or simply illustrative art (there's going to be a revolution in the stock photo industry I expect). But "art proper" as it is commonly understood, with a meaning, a purpose, a feeling, etc? Only by accident.
DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
> Poems, text in various styles, images without important details, and so on. But they fail miserably when you give them tasks that require world knowledge or precision. So what you're telling me is that STEM is harder than humanities?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

yeknoda 4y ago

Art is precision.

ghusbands 4y ago

The artistic output of things like DALL-E is also "incorrect" in varied and obvious ways, though. A lot of people with an artistic bent can't stand to inspect DALL-E output due to the clearly visible incoherency and inconsistency.

ghaff 4y ago
I've had better luck with Stable Diffusion using impressionist/surrealist/etc. styles because you don't really expect the results to be "right" in a literal sense.

K0balt 4y ago

Not surprising considering the sentience in question is completely disembodied so it has no way to distinguish between real and unreal. Efforts to limit hallucination will just turn it into a powerful natural language query engine for the training data set. The real value in AI lies in its creative power, so although a strict mode will probably be a very useful tool, especially in recursion, I don’t think that it is the ultimate path. In order to be relatable to humans, AI will have to have either a real or a physical embodiment so that there is distinction between the real and the imaginary; without this distinction, it will likely prove difficult to advance.

andix 4y ago

The quality of creative work they produce is also not so good. An AI may pass a high school creative writing class, but they would probably do that for computer science too („implement fizz buzz“). But try to give them the assignment to write stories, poems, lyrics. The result is at best mediocre. No professional artist is threatened by that at all.

hackernewds 4y ago

This is precisely why Google would not adopt this format. Diff goals, needs and gender approaches

ghaff 4y ago

I was playing around with ChatGPT yesterday and what I found was: - Ask a straightforward question like what are business models for open source software or what are the advantages of GPL vs. AGPL vs. MIT and the answers were pretty shallow and boilerplate but they were correct as far as they went. - But ask a question like "Why didn't large SMP systems become more mainstream?" (which basically requires synthesizing a lot of knowledge about the last 25 years of computing history) and it spewed out an explanation that basically got enough right to be dangerous and got at least one thing pretty much entirely wrong. But it was coherent enough that someone who didn't have any background would probably think their question was answered.

layer8 4y ago
Also, if you’d ask it “Why did large SMP systems become mainstream?", it would (presumably) spit out a plausible-sounding explanation for that. The models seem to take the prompt as a premise, and then go from there. Maybe that’s also why when you point out a mistake, they oblige and provide a correction. I haven’t tried: If you point out something they said as a mistake when in fact it was correct, do they notice and object? Maybe if the evidence from the training data is strong enough.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Interesting. I'll have to try that. And, yes, you are correct. It gave a short pablum answer that pretty much focused on the benefits of multiple cores. The mistake in the original was somewhat subtle and gets into programming for large SMP vs. MPP/distributed systems. And it's actually true that parallel programming even on shared memory systems has challenges (and there was a lot of discussion at one point when multicore was coming in on desktops) but it's pretty much flat wrong to say that we didn't have large SMP systems primarily because they were hard to program for.
  - layer8 4y ago
    See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33844574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33844574 where the model acknowledges a non-existing mistake after prompting.

larksimian 4y ago

The art isn't that good either, it's just less obviously wrong(plus there's subjective taste involved). The bad code is good enough to fool a code illiterate person and the art is good enough to fool artistically ignorant people( which is most of us). Still huge progress though!

andrepd 4y ago

> good when they have creative freedom and are used to produce some kind of art Well is it? Maybe yes for purely aesthetically pleasing pieces, or simply illustrative art (there's going to be a revolution in the stock photo industry I expect). But "art proper" as it is commonly understood, with a meaning, a purpose, a feeling, etc? Only by accident.

DiogenesKynikos 4y ago

> Poems, text in various styles, images without important details, and so on. But they fail miserably when you give them tasks that require world knowledge or precision. So what you're telling me is that STEM is harder than humanities?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]