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I guess we can look forward to weeks of "Show HN: $X created by ChatGPT" but people should be cautioned not to read to much into these results. Always remember

I guess we can look forward to weeks of "Show HN: $X created by ChatGPT" but people should be cautioned not to read to much into these results. Always remember that almost all of what is being presented here is the work of humans, regurgitated by a very much non-intelligent machine, despite its name. It's basically: Human creation -> ChatGPT -> Human query -> Human interpretation The last bit, the interpretation, is particularly important. Just like we're predisposed to seeing faces everywhere, we're predisposed to seeing meaning, and perhaps "intelligence", everywhere. In this case the meaning is very convincing since it comes from other humans, diced and sliced, but is merely presenting ourselves to ourselves in an interactive way, using our style of discourse.

jvanderbot 4y ago
That "attribution of agency" is probably what brought us myths of human-like gods with human-like intelligence that control everything we didn't understand. More of the same.
- seydor 4y ago
  when all you know is an agent, everything looks like an agent
- timeon 4y ago
  Human-like gods were tools - understandable interface.
ubj 4y ago
More broadly, I think we'll see a proliferation of internet content generated by ChatGPT--blog posts, essays, product summaries, tutorials, news articles, etc. The danger is that the content generated by ChatGPT is very coherent, but technical details are frequently wrong. It's going to become increasingly difficult to separate the signal from the noise on the internet.
- synu 4y ago
  I also wonder what the effect of more and more model outputs being fed back in as inputs will be.
- diydsp 4y ago
  If this AI is so amazing, it can save us all a lot of grief by translating the Linux kernel to Rust now in one fell swoop rather than enduring 1,000 incremental posts of "now $X is written in rust..."
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  This is what concerns me. Many people worry about being replaced by AI, but I'm far more worried about AI completely polluting digital communication. I think stuff like this is going to make it harder for companies to assess candidates, fight fraud and generally operate. I hope I'm wrong, but thinking about AI entering the digital communications arms race is only going to make things more difficult, i.e. more personalized spam call scripts, more intelligently targeted ads/spam/scams. I think AI is going to force us on some level to reclaim some of our communication to the physical world, if for no other reason than it's going to be one of the only ways we can truly verify that we're talking to another person.
  - anticristi 4y ago
    Alternatively, we might become more journalistic/academic. Naming and checking your sources will become paramount.
    - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
      I hope so, but the cynic in me doesn't see this happening because this has long been a problem that isn't going away. The better that computers get at generating content and behaving in ways that only humans used to be able to is going to make it harder to determine if a source is human or not.
    - ubj 4y ago
      To an extent yes, but this can quickly become overwhelming. For example, editors and reviewers for academic journals / conferences will likely see a deluge of AI-generated "scientific" papers. Their time is limited, and odds are that more papers with incorrect information will slip through the peer review process. To be clear, peer review today certainly isn't perfect at catching bad papers. But AI generation has the potential to exaggerate the problem.
wizeman 4y ago
Almost all the comments I've seen criticizing ChatGPT run into the same fallacy: they're applying a double standard compared to humans. What you said applies to output produced by humans as well. Similarly, many humans also have difficulty doing multiplication with large integers, differentiating between truth and fiction, answering with non bullshit answers, etc. Sure, it's probably a question of degree (and it's an important limitation), so we could probably say it's at the level of a dumb human, but even so, it can already exceed the average human's capabilities in many interesting and useful tasks! And not only that, what's most amazing is that it can exceed humans at abilities that many years ago, most people thought only humans could accomplish (tasks including creativity, including creating art, writing poems/literature, interpreting ambiguous human questions and text, doing analogy-based reasoning and problem solving, grasping and explaining puns, making new jokes, etc). And these models can only improve in the future!
- benjaminjosephw 4y ago
  Tools are often objects that "exceed the average human's capabilities" in some respect or another but assigning the quality of intelligence to tool itself is like calling a hammer strong or a chisel brave. It maybe true in a metaphorical sense but it doesn't have any objective meaning.
  - wizeman 4y ago
    I really don't understand the argument you're making. From my perspective, you're doing exactly what I said: you're setting a double standard, like the previous poster. If I have a robot that talks like a human, including answering questions like a human, behaves like a human in any way that is important... wouldn't this "tool" be intelligent, just like a human? How are robots different from ChatGPT except having a physical presence and being able to manipulate the world physically? Or are humans so special to you (or intelligence so subjective) that you can't possibly answer "yes" to the above statement about a robot being intelligent?
    - skor 4y ago
      what you are saying here basically is: if it quacks and can fly, it’s obviously a duck.
seydor 4y ago
We can look forward to a ChatGPT-frontpage with articles generated by chatgpt, which we will PREFER compared to the real thing.
mring33621 4y ago
The only things that really matter: 1) is the end result useful/valuable? 2) did the GPT-based 'coding' process provide any of the following benefits: [reduce cost | reduce time to market | increase quality]?
- guerrilla 4y ago
  .
  - reidrac 4y ago
    > The language doesn't completely run, but it was just a two-hour experiment. Do you mean?
gfodor 4y ago
You are jumping to conclusions and it’s leaking into your framing like using the word “regurgitation”
drdaeman 4y ago
Next on HN: connecting two ChatGPT accounts together, giving one the assignment of thinking of projects and tasking/guiding another to implement those.
- ImHereToVote 4y ago
  More specifically, making paper clips.
jchw 4y ago
I'm sure this line of logic is very comforting, but frankly, this comfort disappears quickly when you actually use ChatGPT. What you find is that you can interact with it in a quite natural way, and it is able to synthesize and iterate at a level that feels easily on par with a moderately skilled human software engineer. I know it's uncomfortable, but it doesn't even matter if the machine is "non-intelligent." Nobody gives a damn. What matters is what you can do with it, and every iteration of GPT the goal posts keep moving further, but this time it's really difficult to deny: you really, really can describe a program at a high level and ChatGPT can implement it. You can point out an error and it can fix it. Hell, you can feed it compiler errors. Is it literally as good as a human software engineer? No, but it's also better too. I doubt ChatGPT could debug as effectively as a veteran software engineer (... In fairness, most humans can't either.) It can debug pretty decently, but there's still work there. That said, the breadth of knowledge encoded in a language model is stunning. I'm pretty sure you can't just regurgitate an implementation of the discrete cosine transform in Rust without at least pulling up Wikipedia, but ChatGPT can, because well. It doesn't have to pull it up. I still don't think ChatGPT is ready to replace human programmers. It may be a long time before we have general enough intelligence to replace knowledge work meaningfully with AI. However, if you think it's not happening ever, because machines are not "intelligent" based on some set of goal posts, I've got bad news: that's not part of the job listing. It's easy to laugh at MSN publishing articles written by GPT; that's just stupid. However, at some level you have to admit that the input to ChatGPT is almost as high level as directives from project managers, and the output is almost low level enough to simply input directly into source control. That leaves very little to the imagination for how this could quickly spiral out of control.
- ricardobayes 4y ago
  Still, it's a tool that requires human input. Similarly how Photoshop didn't make artists obsolete, it elevated the trade to a new level and capabilities.
  - passion__desire 4y ago
    "And what would excite me about actually the birth of superintelligent AI - one of the things, apart from solving obvious problems like curing disease and energy issues and all the rest, perhaps differs a little bit with what Stuart said. I’m not so worried about idiocracy or all of us just losing our way as apes and living unproductive lives in dialogue with these oracles. I think actually, I would want a truly value-aligned superintelligence to incrementally show us, not merely conserve what we want, but show us what we should want to keep improving our values so that we can navigate in the space of all possible experiences and converge on better and better ones." - Sam Harris Source : https://youtu.be/h0962biiZa4?t=2486 https://youtu.be/h0962biiZa4?t=2486
anon7725 4y ago
> Always remember that almost all of what is being presented here is the work of humans, regurgitated by a very much non-intelligent machine, despite its name. Then why does it seem to have some kind of theory of computation? I gave it code to compute a Fibonacci sequence with nonsense names for functions and it immediately recognized the code (explainable by pattern matching). I gave it a function and told it to modify the function so that it passes a test, and it did it without a problem. I’ve had it build a function up by feeding it different test cases. I had it explain kmeans to me, give me a first-pass solution, asked it how to optimize the first solution, had it do that for me … I don’t know - it feels different. It also feels like it’s 1-2 years away from being the most useful co-worker on any given team and 5-10 years away from putting a number of us out of a job (or at least changing that job so much as to be something unrecognizable to us today)
- pyinstallwoes 4y ago
  What's funny is that most of human intelligence is of itself the work of a few select humans regurgitated by the rest of humans.
peterth3 4y ago
> We're predisposed to seeing meaning, and perhaps "intelligence", everywhere. I’m guilty of this with my dog. I can’t help it with her head tilts and deep stares! Her inner monologue is probably less sophisticated than I like to think it is.
- pyinstallwoes 4y ago
  Why are you inclined to think that way?
jmugan 4y ago
I love the "Show HN: $X created by ChatGPT" We need people seeing what useful things can be done with this new hammer, things that haven't occurred to us yet.
bjornsing 4y ago
> In fairness, most humans can't either. This. I think we’re already seeing superhuman performance here, in the sense that many / most people can’t e.g. read a specification for a programming language and write simple programs in that language.
fathrowaway12 4y ago
It is not just regurgitating. It is synthesizing. You can ask it to update its answers. You can ask it to evaluate possible solutions, then write the code for one of the solutions. Then write the code to test the code. And so on. It turns the coder into a curator, editor, and code reviewer.
- arcturus17 4y ago
  > It turns the coder into a curator, editor, and code reviewer. Cool? Doesn't sound half bad to me. I've enjoyed learning to code more than actual coding. I'd be happy in a paradigm where only code to learn, to practice, to express ourselves and leave the boring bits to the machines.
Waterluvian 4y ago
I think the “it’s just welding together bits and pieces made by humans” is actually a complete non-answer. From one perspective, that’s what humans have always been doing. We create new things by welding other things together. From another perspective, that’s not even a bad thing. Every word exists in the dictionary so what value are books? Unless the value is the structuring of all those things that already exist.
pyinstallwoes 4y ago
If you believe in evolution then you by principle believe in less intelligent entities organizing to make more intelligent entities than their progenitor. In that case Human-kind does not have to be very intelligent to make something much more intelligent down-the-line. Mind the consequence and bias of interpretation.
verdenti 4y ago

jvanderbot 4y ago

That "attribution of agency" is probably what brought us myths of human-like gods with human-like intelligence that control everything we didn't understand. More of the same.

seydor 4y ago
when all you know is an agent, everything looks like an agent
timeon 4y ago
Human-like gods were tools - understandable interface.

ubj 4y ago

More broadly, I think we'll see a proliferation of internet content generated by ChatGPT--blog posts, essays, product summaries, tutorials, news articles, etc. The danger is that the content generated by ChatGPT is very coherent, but technical details are frequently wrong. It's going to become increasingly difficult to separate the signal from the noise on the internet.

synu 4y ago
I also wonder what the effect of more and more model outputs being fed back in as inputs will be.
diydsp 4y ago
If this AI is so amazing, it can save us all a lot of grief by translating the Linux kernel to Rust now in one fell swoop rather than enduring 1,000 incremental posts of "now $X is written in rust..."
thr0wawayf00 4y ago
This is what concerns me. Many people worry about being replaced by AI, but I'm far more worried about AI completely polluting digital communication. I think stuff like this is going to make it harder for companies to assess candidates, fight fraud and generally operate. I hope I'm wrong, but thinking about AI entering the digital communications arms race is only going to make things more difficult, i.e. more personalized spam call scripts, more intelligently targeted ads/spam/scams. I think AI is going to force us on some level to reclaim some of our communication to the physical world, if for no other reason than it's going to be one of the only ways we can truly verify that we're talking to another person.
- anticristi 4y ago
  Alternatively, we might become more journalistic/academic. Naming and checking your sources will become paramount.
  - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
    I hope so, but the cynic in me doesn't see this happening because this has long been a problem that isn't going away. The better that computers get at generating content and behaving in ways that only humans used to be able to is going to make it harder to determine if a source is human or not.
  - ubj 4y ago
    To an extent yes, but this can quickly become overwhelming. For example, editors and reviewers for academic journals / conferences will likely see a deluge of AI-generated "scientific" papers. Their time is limited, and odds are that more papers with incorrect information will slip through the peer review process. To be clear, peer review today certainly isn't perfect at catching bad papers. But AI generation has the potential to exaggerate the problem.

wizeman 4y ago

Almost all the comments I've seen criticizing ChatGPT run into the same fallacy: they're applying a double standard compared to humans. What you said applies to output produced by humans as well. Similarly, many humans also have difficulty doing multiplication with large integers, differentiating between truth and fiction, answering with non bullshit answers, etc. Sure, it's probably a question of degree (and it's an important limitation), so we could probably say it's at the level of a dumb human, but even so, it can already exceed the average human's capabilities in many interesting and useful tasks! And not only that, what's most amazing is that it can exceed humans at abilities that many years ago, most people thought only humans could accomplish (tasks including creativity, including creating art, writing poems/literature, interpreting ambiguous human questions and text, doing analogy-based reasoning and problem solving, grasping and explaining puns, making new jokes, etc). And these models can only improve in the future!

benjaminjosephw 4y ago
Tools are often objects that "exceed the average human's capabilities" in some respect or another but assigning the quality of intelligence to tool itself is like calling a hammer strong or a chisel brave. It maybe true in a metaphorical sense but it doesn't have any objective meaning.
- wizeman 4y ago
  I really don't understand the argument you're making. From my perspective, you're doing exactly what I said: you're setting a double standard, like the previous poster. If I have a robot that talks like a human, including answering questions like a human, behaves like a human in any way that is important... wouldn't this "tool" be intelligent, just like a human? How are robots different from ChatGPT except having a physical presence and being able to manipulate the world physically? Or are humans so special to you (or intelligence so subjective) that you can't possibly answer "yes" to the above statement about a robot being intelligent?
  - skor 4y ago
    what you are saying here basically is: if it quacks and can fly, it’s obviously a duck.

seydor 4y ago

We can look forward to a ChatGPT-frontpage with articles generated by chatgpt, which we will PREFER compared to the real thing.

mring33621 4y ago

The only things that really matter: 1) is the end result useful/valuable? 2) did the GPT-based 'coding' process provide any of the following benefits: [reduce cost | reduce time to market | increase quality]?

guerrilla 4y ago
.
- reidrac 4y ago
  > The language doesn't completely run, but it was just a two-hour experiment. Do you mean?

gfodor 4y ago

You are jumping to conclusions and it’s leaking into your framing like using the word “regurgitation”

drdaeman 4y ago

Next on HN: connecting two ChatGPT accounts together, giving one the assignment of thinking of projects and tasking/guiding another to implement those.

ImHereToVote 4y ago
More specifically, making paper clips.

jchw 4y ago

I'm sure this line of logic is very comforting, but frankly, this comfort disappears quickly when you actually use ChatGPT. What you find is that you can interact with it in a quite natural way, and it is able to synthesize and iterate at a level that feels easily on par with a moderately skilled human software engineer. I know it's uncomfortable, but it doesn't even matter if the machine is "non-intelligent." Nobody gives a damn. What matters is what you can do with it, and every iteration of GPT the goal posts keep moving further, but this time it's really difficult to deny: you really, really can describe a program at a high level and ChatGPT can implement it. You can point out an error and it can fix it. Hell, you can feed it compiler errors. Is it literally as good as a human software engineer? No, but it's also better too. I doubt ChatGPT could debug as effectively as a veteran software engineer (... In fairness, most humans can't either.) It can debug pretty decently, but there's still work there. That said, the breadth of knowledge encoded in a language model is stunning. I'm pretty sure you can't just regurgitate an implementation of the discrete cosine transform in Rust without at least pulling up Wikipedia, but ChatGPT can, because well. It doesn't have to pull it up. I still don't think ChatGPT is ready to replace human programmers. It may be a long time before we have general enough intelligence to replace knowledge work meaningfully with AI. However, if you think it's not happening ever, because machines are not "intelligent" based on some set of goal posts, I've got bad news: that's not part of the job listing. It's easy to laugh at MSN publishing articles written by GPT; that's just stupid. However, at some level you have to admit that the input to ChatGPT is almost as high level as directives from project managers, and the output is almost low level enough to simply input directly into source control. That leaves very little to the imagination for how this could quickly spiral out of control.

ricardobayes 4y ago
Still, it's a tool that requires human input. Similarly how Photoshop didn't make artists obsolete, it elevated the trade to a new level and capabilities.
- passion__desire 4y ago
  "And what would excite me about actually the birth of superintelligent AI - one of the things, apart from solving obvious problems like curing disease and energy issues and all the rest, perhaps differs a little bit with what Stuart said. I’m not so worried about idiocracy or all of us just losing our way as apes and living unproductive lives in dialogue with these oracles. I think actually, I would want a truly value-aligned superintelligence to incrementally show us, not merely conserve what we want, but show us what we should want to keep improving our values so that we can navigate in the space of all possible experiences and converge on better and better ones." - Sam Harris Source : https://youtu.be/h0962biiZa4?t=2486 https://youtu.be/h0962biiZa4?t=2486

anon7725 4y ago

> Always remember that almost all of what is being presented here is the work of humans, regurgitated by a very much non-intelligent machine, despite its name. Then why does it seem to have some kind of theory of computation? I gave it code to compute a Fibonacci sequence with nonsense names for functions and it immediately recognized the code (explainable by pattern matching). I gave it a function and told it to modify the function so that it passes a test, and it did it without a problem. I’ve had it build a function up by feeding it different test cases. I had it explain kmeans to me, give me a first-pass solution, asked it how to optimize the first solution, had it do that for me … I don’t know - it feels different. It also feels like it’s 1-2 years away from being the most useful co-worker on any given team and 5-10 years away from putting a number of us out of a job (or at least changing that job so much as to be something unrecognizable to us today)

pyinstallwoes 4y ago
What's funny is that most of human intelligence is of itself the work of a few select humans regurgitated by the rest of humans.

peterth3 4y ago

> We're predisposed to seeing meaning, and perhaps "intelligence", everywhere. I’m guilty of this with my dog. I can’t help it with her head tilts and deep stares! Her inner monologue is probably less sophisticated than I like to think it is.

pyinstallwoes 4y ago
Why are you inclined to think that way?

jmugan 4y ago

I love the "Show HN: $X created by ChatGPT" We need people seeing what useful things can be done with this new hammer, things that haven't occurred to us yet.

bjornsing 4y ago

> In fairness, most humans can't either. This. I think we’re already seeing superhuman performance here, in the sense that many / most people can’t e.g. read a specification for a programming language and write simple programs in that language.

fathrowaway12 4y ago

It is not just regurgitating. It is synthesizing. You can ask it to update its answers. You can ask it to evaluate possible solutions, then write the code for one of the solutions. Then write the code to test the code. And so on. It turns the coder into a curator, editor, and code reviewer.

arcturus17 4y ago
> It turns the coder into a curator, editor, and code reviewer. Cool? Doesn't sound half bad to me. I've enjoyed learning to code more than actual coding. I'd be happy in a paradigm where only code to learn, to practice, to express ourselves and leave the boring bits to the machines.

Waterluvian 4y ago

I think the “it’s just welding together bits and pieces made by humans” is actually a complete non-answer. From one perspective, that’s what humans have always been doing. We create new things by welding other things together. From another perspective, that’s not even a bad thing. Every word exists in the dictionary so what value are books? Unless the value is the structuring of all those things that already exist.

pyinstallwoes 4y ago

If you believe in evolution then you by principle believe in less intelligent entities organizing to make more intelligent entities than their progenitor. In that case Human-kind does not have to be very intelligent to make something much more intelligent down-the-line. Mind the consequence and bias of interpretation.

verdenti 4y ago