3 ms·

Re: TFA's complaints of blandness, and the several comments here about the narrator not being Watson, I'm always confused by how people expect ChatGPT to follow

Re: TFA's complaints of blandness, and the several comments here about the narrator not being Watson, I'm always confused by how people expect ChatGPT to follow constraints it wasn't given. I guess it's a testament to how good the engine is, that people humanize it this way. When Excel calculates a value, people normally assume that its math is correct and if the value looks wrong they need to change their inputs. But ChatGPT seems to cross over some kind of threshold, such that people ask it for a poem and then consider it a failure mode if the output doesn't rhyme - instead of thinking "oh maybe I should have asked for a poem that rhymes". I'm curious whether this is a temporary thing everyone will stop doing as they acclimate to AIs, or a fundamental issue with natural language interfaces.

iamflimflam1 4y ago
It's the same with the people who keep trying to make it solve maths problems. And then when it fails or produces nonsense they make a big song and dance about how it's rubbish and doesn't work.
ryanjshaw 4y ago
What's even weirder is these people can freely access ChatGPT and experiment to see this for themselves, but they'd rather sit here and dismiss the technology entirely. It's very odd. A few weeks ago I spent 30min going from "write the script for a movie with an unexpected plot twist" to understanding that you need to actually use a much more refined series of prompts if you want long-form content output. For example: (1) write an outline (2) write the first chapter covering points A-C of the outline, from character X's perspective etc.
ketzu 4y ago
> I'm always confused by how people expect ChatGPT to follow constraints it wasn't given. My hypothesis is, that excel has a somwwhat clear context (and constraints): Math and formulas in the compute part and data however we give it to excel. The interface is abstract in a way that makes it clear you have to interact with it in a special way respecting this context. On the other hand, the context of large language models is unknown. Should we consider everything in the training data as part of the context? What should I expect when asking chatGPT: > Tell me about when Christopher Columbus came to the US in 2015 Should I expect: * a story of when Columbus came to the US in 2015, because that is the context I gave it? * to be corrected by the AI because my factuals are wrong? OpenAIs example with this prompt is noticing that columbus is dead, but if he were to arrive what would happen. Further, the interface of large language models, asking things in natural language, leads us humas to interact with it as if it were a fellow human. This interface, and the examples we are usually shown, makes it easy to assume that it has a large context and we do not have to specify all constraints on something we expect other humas to pick up on based on the language used.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hooande 4y ago
> "I guess it's a testament to how good the engine is, that people humanize it this way." The creators chose to humanize it. It speaks in the first person, and often in a conversational style. Of course people are going to expect it to know things that the average human would know, ie that the narrator should be Watson or that most poems rhyme. I think the decision to give the AI a persona has both benefits and consequences. People seem to form a connection with this thing that they don't with other forms of software. It talks to them like a thinking being, and people form a sort of social connection with it. This has obviously been very good for adoption and product loyalty. I've seen many people refer to it as a friend or a buddy. The downside is that it sets expectations high by default. It responds with the level of knowledge that a human has around 80% of the time. But the 20% where it doesn't really stand out and create a cognitive dissonance. There's a chance that this will be a case of trading short term user growth for long term disappointment with the product.
notahacker 4y ago
> Re: TFA's complaints of blandness, and the several comments here about the narrator not being Watson, I'm always confused by how people expect ChatGPT to follow constraints it wasn't given. If you give it the constraints of not being bland or being exciting it writes something which is just as bland, and to all intents and purposes the same story (It can follow an instruction regarding narrator, doing Holmes just fine, quite well with Queen Victoria and predictably badly with Adrian Mole and Donald Trump). Hell it'll only slightly vary the story by pasting in words like "shadowy cabal" and "conspiracy" if you ask it to write in the style of Pynchon, though tbf it does a pretty elaborate (and funny) rewrite in the style of the Bible. Hidden abilities to coax more usable output out of a system by tweaking prompts to explicitly state things that should have been explicit (or do weird unintuitive stuff like tagging image generation prompts with UnrealEngine to get better contrast) is an issue with natural language interfaces, but that doesn't mean ChatGPT has an Excel like ability to find an acceptable answer and it's just the pesky humans getting in the way by not giving it good enough prompts. On the contrary, the more you vary your prompt and keep getting back variations on the same theme, the more you think "wow, this model is really low temperature and there's a lot less here than the initial appearance of being half decent at storytelling suggested".

iamflimflam1 4y ago

It's the same with the people who keep trying to make it solve maths problems. And then when it fails or produces nonsense they make a big song and dance about how it's rubbish and doesn't work.

ryanjshaw 4y ago

What's even weirder is these people can freely access ChatGPT and experiment to see this for themselves, but they'd rather sit here and dismiss the technology entirely. It's very odd. A few weeks ago I spent 30min going from "write the script for a movie with an unexpected plot twist" to understanding that you need to actually use a much more refined series of prompts if you want long-form content output. For example: (1) write an outline (2) write the first chapter covering points A-C of the outline, from character X's perspective etc.

ketzu 4y ago

> I'm always confused by how people expect ChatGPT to follow constraints it wasn't given. My hypothesis is, that excel has a somwwhat clear context (and constraints): Math and formulas in the compute part and data however we give it to excel. The interface is abstract in a way that makes it clear you have to interact with it in a special way respecting this context. On the other hand, the context of large language models is unknown. Should we consider everything in the training data as part of the context? What should I expect when asking chatGPT: > Tell me about when Christopher Columbus came to the US in 2015 Should I expect: * a story of when Columbus came to the US in 2015, because that is the context I gave it? * to be corrected by the AI because my factuals are wrong? OpenAIs example with this prompt is noticing that columbus is dead, but if he were to arrive what would happen. Further, the interface of large language models, asking things in natural language, leads us humas to interact with it as if it were a fellow human. This interface, and the examples we are usually shown, makes it easy to assume that it has a large context and we do not have to specify all constraints on something we expect other humas to pick up on based on the language used.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hooande 4y ago

> "I guess it's a testament to how good the engine is, that people humanize it this way." The creators chose to humanize it. It speaks in the first person, and often in a conversational style. Of course people are going to expect it to know things that the average human would know, ie that the narrator should be Watson or that most poems rhyme. I think the decision to give the AI a persona has both benefits and consequences. People seem to form a connection with this thing that they don't with other forms of software. It talks to them like a thinking being, and people form a sort of social connection with it. This has obviously been very good for adoption and product loyalty. I've seen many people refer to it as a friend or a buddy. The downside is that it sets expectations high by default. It responds with the level of knowledge that a human has around 80% of the time. But the 20% where it doesn't really stand out and create a cognitive dissonance. There's a chance that this will be a case of trading short term user growth for long term disappointment with the product.

notahacker 4y ago

> Re: TFA's complaints of blandness, and the several comments here about the narrator not being Watson, I'm always confused by how people expect ChatGPT to follow constraints it wasn't given. If you give it the constraints of not being bland or being exciting it writes something which is just as bland, and to all intents and purposes the same story (It can follow an instruction regarding narrator, doing Holmes just fine, quite well with Queen Victoria and predictably badly with Adrian Mole and Donald Trump). Hell it'll only slightly vary the story by pasting in words like "shadowy cabal" and "conspiracy" if you ask it to write in the style of Pynchon, though tbf it does a pretty elaborate (and funny) rewrite in the style of the Bible. Hidden abilities to coax more usable output out of a system by tweaking prompts to explicitly state things that should have been explicit (or do weird unintuitive stuff like tagging image generation prompts with UnrealEngine to get better contrast) is an issue with natural language interfaces, but that doesn't mean ChatGPT has an Excel like ability to find an acceptable answer and it's just the pesky humans getting in the way by not giving it good enough prompts. On the contrary, the more you vary your prompt and keep getting back variations on the same theme, the more you think "wow, this model is really low temperature and there's a lot less here than the initial appearance of being half decent at storytelling suggested".