5 ms·

Strongly agree. I don't understand the excitement around ChatGPT. It's a bullshit machine, unreliable and inconsistent. It just adds noise to the world, to the

by bambax 4y ago

Strongly agree. I don't understand the excitement around ChatGPT. It's a bullshit machine, unreliable and inconsistent. It just adds noise to the world, to the point where it could actually drown all form of signal.

alexklarjr 4y ago
Hey, this bullshit machine will drive IT profits up - hardware, cloud, development. Imagine MSN news fully rewritten by ChatGPT with ChatGPT articles, chatGPT ads and ChatGPT support! Sll delivered on each Microsoft Windows installation all over the globe! Don’t you want join the train while it is not too late? You know, next .NET will heavy use ChatGPT and ChatGPT AI developers are hot now!
- danielbln 4y ago
  You may want to peruse the HN comment guidelines, especially the part about not sneering: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
danielbln 4y ago
Yet it's extremely useful in various usecases. "Mutate this code so it adheres to XYZ pattern" "Factor this code out into a React component and wire it up" "Tell me what this code does, what do I need to change to make it do XZY" "I need to programatically access AWS <service>, guide me through AWS console to set up the right IAM policies and generate those for me, then generate the correct boto3 code to call this service" "Take this email, write a friendly and brief response and ask for setting up an appointment next week" "Write me a bash script that uses imagemagick to perform a bunch of transformations on image files with the following filenames" "Take this curl command, turn it into a Python function, add type annotations and comments where necessary" And many, many more usecases. Does it bullshit? Absolutely, but that's just not always an issue. A lot of the bullshitting can be circumvented by prompting it in the right ways and having the right discourse with it. It's a room full of employees, and you are the manager. Will you hear plenty of bullshit? Absolutely, but you will also get heaps of useful output that can solve your problem, make you think outside the box etc. It's all about how you interact with it. It's a significantly more pleasant and productive interaction mode than using a search engine and sifting through the SEO spam. I still do that, if I need to verify something or validate if something I don't have enough domain knowledge of is bullshit or not, but more often than not I don't need to. and that's been incredibly liberating.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  > It's a room full of employees, and you are the manager. Will you hear plenty of bullshit? Absolutely, but you will also get heaps of useful output that can solve your problem, make you think outside the box etc. It's all about how you interact with it. I find GPT very useful as well! Strictly from a rhetorical position, I’ve noticed that the “GPT fails like people fail” argument has not been very convincing in these discussions for whatever reason.
  - janalsncm 4y ago
    It’s the concept of thinking fast and slow. ChatGPT can write text that seems right at first glance but isn’t. That’s similar to the failure mode of a person. But if you ask it to reason slowly and show its work that’s where it falls apart. Most people are capable of slow cognition too.
xeyownt 4y ago
Do you complain that any Google search returns lot of bullshit as well? ChatGPT is only a tool, yet a powerful one. There are many uses that are quite reliable and producing no bullshit. If you don't see them, too bad for you. How should we call the rejection of AI? Intelligism? Artificialism?
- bambax 4y ago
  > Do you complain that any Google search returns lot of bullshit as well? No, I don't. Google Search has absolutely NOTHING in common with ChatGPT. The comparison arises often here and elsewhere, and it's absurd. I will keep repeating that as many times as necessary. I guess this is my plight now. Google Search produces no content at all. Zero. It returns page urls, and snippets of text extracted from those pages. It's always possible to verify where the information comes from, on which page. ChatGPT speaks in its own name and says "I", and asserts that it's right, even when it obviously has no clue what "right" even means. I don't reject AI; but ChatGPT isn't "intelligent". Yes, it's a tool. It's a hammer that randomly hits your thumb hard, and then claims it absolutely, positively was a nail.
  - xeyownt 4y ago
    So here another way to see ChatGPT that maybe could help you understand its value better. I see ChatGPT as a student and you as the teacher. The student can be sometimes smart but oftentimes quite stupid. She/he's in a hurry and always try to pretend she/he knows because she/he wants the best graduation. You, as the teacher, you have to detect the bad and the good. Later, you hire the student. Because, although she/he produces sometimes silly responses, she/he's very quick at collecting information from all kind of sources, and at making nice summaries of it, and can perform many "directed" tasks almost perfectly. And maybe, someday, she/he'll learn and produce less bullshit.
    - bambax 4y ago
      This is an interesting analogy. But a teacher is supposed to know more than a student does. If that's the case then all's good. Yet in most examples the user of ChatGPT knows less and asks it for help in a domain they don't master, be it political/philosophical essay writing or writing code in a language they don't practice, and then publishing said texts or putting said programs in production. This cannot end well.
b800h 4y ago
> It's a bullshit machine So are most humans
- bambax 4y ago
  That may be true. But there's an air of authority that comes from "computers" that most human bullshitters lack. The other problem is the lowering of the cost of producing bullshit. The combination of the two make bullshitting machines, I think, much more dangerous than their human counterparts.
  - mcv 4y ago
    Most humans are honest enough to admit they don't know something, or at least are very bad at lying. ChatGPT is an excellent liar. It can present complete gibberish with absolute confidence.
  - craigtp 4y ago
    > But there's an air of authority that comes from "computers" that most human bullshitters lack. I'm not so sure. For many human bullshitters, perhaps. But there's plenty of human bullshitters that exhibit the same air of authority you talk about and they're mostly employed as politicians.
PicassoCTs 4y ago
Its actually a positive as it will kill platforms that rely on having clearly human signals to be processed by a machine.
herbturbo 4y ago
Last week I needed to write a bash script that (among other things) parsed the text inside two square brackets that may or may not be in a given string. I rarely write bash or use regex, so it would probably have taken me 1/2 hr to an hour of Google searches like "how to reference capture group in regex bash". ChatGPT did it for me in about 3 minutes. I was intrigued so I asked it to write Swift code to RSA256 encrypt and then decrypt a string. It did that in about 30s. I told my colleagues and someone joked "ask it to do my HealthKit integration haha". I did, and it did. Not perfectly, but instructively. Yeah there is a lot of noisy hype around this, but for me it's already shown itself capable of massively improving my productivity.
- safety1st 4y ago
  Interesting point here. ChatGPT may be especially useful in situations where the code that needs to be written is relatively simple but the user of ChatGPT has little or no experience with that language. For example - as part of a low code/no code product. The user of these typically doesn't know much about code, but some simple scripting might greatly enhance what they can accomplish with the product. Enter ChatGPT...
  - forgotusername6 4y ago
    To me chat GPT represents the same interaction you see on Star Trek when someone is talking to the computer. In particular when interacting with the holodeck. They ask it to modify the environment, incremental tweaks etc and the computer understands what you mean. They are programming, but in a no-code scenario.
  - danenania 4y ago
    I’ve also found it extremely useful for command line utilities with many commands and options. Things like kubectl, ffmpeg, imagemagick, aws cli etc. Tell it what you want and it usually gives you the correct command and flags in response. It’s a lot faster than the google/parsing docs/trial and error mix that I used to employ.
dotancohen 4y ago
Surely you recognize that there exist propaganda machines whose sole purpose is to drown out signal. For them, ChatGPT and other vaguely-plausible text generating algorithms are very powerful tools. Don't forget that in a democracy, the ignorant vote counts as much as the informed vote.
- danenania 4y ago
  I think it’s likely that within the next few years, for better or worse, everyone is going to learn to completely discount anything they see online that doesn’t come from an already known and trusted source. AI-generated content is soon going to account for >99.99% of the internet. A significant chunk of that will be propaganda or deliberate misinformation. We’re on the verge of some massive changes.
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    I agree 100%.
ulnarkressty 4y ago
An intern tried some stuff, the result was a very serious talk with stakeholders while budget planning whether we should fire our copywriters - ChatGPT's bullshit is that good.
- melagonster 4y ago
  yes, I sure everyone will lose work, I don't think they can survive from it...
nimbleal 4y ago
By adding noise to the world, perhaps we can all recalibrate our noise floor, so to speak, and lose some of the human-generated nonsense along with ChatGPTs? My hope is that these tools will end content farms and thus (eventually) improve my Google search experience. As the cost of creating low-effort SEO filler tends to zero, Google will have to radically rethink the way they rank sites. Though maybe I’m too optimistic; they should have done this a long time ago. I’m tired of searching for, for eg. “boiling point of X” and I get a poorly written 1500 word article —- clearly aimed at robots and not humans —- instead of my desired answer.
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
It’s a bullshit machine which can write a convincing text on a subject and in an adequate style or convincingly hold a conversation. That’s an extremely impressive leap from what we could do a decade ago. Sure, it lies. Sure, it needs improvement. Still if you can’t see why it’s significant and how it has tremendous potential, well, I fear there is not much we can do for you.

by bambax 4y ago

alexklarjr 4y ago

Hey, this bullshit machine will drive IT profits up - hardware, cloud, development. Imagine MSN news fully rewritten by ChatGPT with ChatGPT articles, chatGPT ads and ChatGPT support! Sll delivered on each Microsoft Windows installation all over the globe! Don’t you want join the train while it is not too late? You know, next .NET will heavy use ChatGPT and ChatGPT AI developers are hot now!

danielbln 4y ago
You may want to peruse the HN comment guidelines, especially the part about not sneering: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

danielbln 4y ago

Yet it's extremely useful in various usecases. "Mutate this code so it adheres to XYZ pattern" "Factor this code out into a React component and wire it up" "Tell me what this code does, what do I need to change to make it do XZY" "I need to programatically access AWS <service>, guide me through AWS console to set up the right IAM policies and generate those for me, then generate the correct boto3 code to call this service" "Take this email, write a friendly and brief response and ask for setting up an appointment next week" "Write me a bash script that uses imagemagick to perform a bunch of transformations on image files with the following filenames" "Take this curl command, turn it into a Python function, add type annotations and comments where necessary" And many, many more usecases. Does it bullshit? Absolutely, but that's just not always an issue. A lot of the bullshitting can be circumvented by prompting it in the right ways and having the right discourse with it. It's a room full of employees, and you are the manager. Will you hear plenty of bullshit? Absolutely, but you will also get heaps of useful output that can solve your problem, make you think outside the box etc. It's all about how you interact with it. It's a significantly more pleasant and productive interaction mode than using a search engine and sifting through the SEO spam. I still do that, if I need to verify something or validate if something I don't have enough domain knowledge of is bullshit or not, but more often than not I don't need to. and that's been incredibly liberating.

williamcotton 4y ago
> It's a room full of employees, and you are the manager. Will you hear plenty of bullshit? Absolutely, but you will also get heaps of useful output that can solve your problem, make you think outside the box etc. It's all about how you interact with it. I find GPT very useful as well! Strictly from a rhetorical position, I’ve noticed that the “GPT fails like people fail” argument has not been very convincing in these discussions for whatever reason.
- janalsncm 4y ago
  It’s the concept of thinking fast and slow. ChatGPT can write text that seems right at first glance but isn’t. That’s similar to the failure mode of a person. But if you ask it to reason slowly and show its work that’s where it falls apart. Most people are capable of slow cognition too.

xeyownt 4y ago

Do you complain that any Google search returns lot of bullshit as well? ChatGPT is only a tool, yet a powerful one. There are many uses that are quite reliable and producing no bullshit. If you don't see them, too bad for you. How should we call the rejection of AI? Intelligism? Artificialism?

bambax 4y ago
> Do you complain that any Google search returns lot of bullshit as well? No, I don't. Google Search has absolutely NOTHING in common with ChatGPT. The comparison arises often here and elsewhere, and it's absurd. I will keep repeating that as many times as necessary. I guess this is my plight now. Google Search produces no content at all. Zero. It returns page urls, and snippets of text extracted from those pages. It's always possible to verify where the information comes from, on which page. ChatGPT speaks in its own name and says "I", and asserts that it's right, even when it obviously has no clue what "right" even means. I don't reject AI; but ChatGPT isn't "intelligent". Yes, it's a tool. It's a hammer that randomly hits your thumb hard, and then claims it absolutely, positively was a nail.
- xeyownt 4y ago
  So here another way to see ChatGPT that maybe could help you understand its value better. I see ChatGPT as a student and you as the teacher. The student can be sometimes smart but oftentimes quite stupid. She/he's in a hurry and always try to pretend she/he knows because she/he wants the best graduation. You, as the teacher, you have to detect the bad and the good. Later, you hire the student. Because, although she/he produces sometimes silly responses, she/he's very quick at collecting information from all kind of sources, and at making nice summaries of it, and can perform many "directed" tasks almost perfectly. And maybe, someday, she/he'll learn and produce less bullshit.
  - bambax 4y ago
    This is an interesting analogy. But a teacher is supposed to know more than a student does. If that's the case then all's good. Yet in most examples the user of ChatGPT knows less and asks it for help in a domain they don't master, be it political/philosophical essay writing or writing code in a language they don't practice, and then publishing said texts or putting said programs in production. This cannot end well.

b800h 4y ago

> It's a bullshit machine So are most humans

bambax 4y ago
That may be true. But there's an air of authority that comes from "computers" that most human bullshitters lack. The other problem is the lowering of the cost of producing bullshit. The combination of the two make bullshitting machines, I think, much more dangerous than their human counterparts.
- mcv 4y ago
  Most humans are honest enough to admit they don't know something, or at least are very bad at lying. ChatGPT is an excellent liar. It can present complete gibberish with absolute confidence.
- craigtp 4y ago
  > But there's an air of authority that comes from "computers" that most human bullshitters lack. I'm not so sure. For many human bullshitters, perhaps. But there's plenty of human bullshitters that exhibit the same air of authority you talk about and they're mostly employed as politicians.

PicassoCTs 4y ago

Its actually a positive as it will kill platforms that rely on having clearly human signals to be processed by a machine.

herbturbo 4y ago

Last week I needed to write a bash script that (among other things) parsed the text inside two square brackets that may or may not be in a given string. I rarely write bash or use regex, so it would probably have taken me 1/2 hr to an hour of Google searches like "how to reference capture group in regex bash". ChatGPT did it for me in about 3 minutes. I was intrigued so I asked it to write Swift code to RSA256 encrypt and then decrypt a string. It did that in about 30s. I told my colleagues and someone joked "ask it to do my HealthKit integration haha". I did, and it did. Not perfectly, but instructively. Yeah there is a lot of noisy hype around this, but for me it's already shown itself capable of massively improving my productivity.

safety1st 4y ago
Interesting point here. ChatGPT may be especially useful in situations where the code that needs to be written is relatively simple but the user of ChatGPT has little or no experience with that language. For example - as part of a low code/no code product. The user of these typically doesn't know much about code, but some simple scripting might greatly enhance what they can accomplish with the product. Enter ChatGPT...
- forgotusername6 4y ago
  To me chat GPT represents the same interaction you see on Star Trek when someone is talking to the computer. In particular when interacting with the holodeck. They ask it to modify the environment, incremental tweaks etc and the computer understands what you mean. They are programming, but in a no-code scenario.
- danenania 4y ago
  I’ve also found it extremely useful for command line utilities with many commands and options. Things like kubectl, ffmpeg, imagemagick, aws cli etc. Tell it what you want and it usually gives you the correct command and flags in response. It’s a lot faster than the google/parsing docs/trial and error mix that I used to employ.

dotancohen 4y ago

Surely you recognize that there exist propaganda machines whose sole purpose is to drown out signal. For them, ChatGPT and other vaguely-plausible text generating algorithms are very powerful tools. Don't forget that in a democracy, the ignorant vote counts as much as the informed vote.

danenania 4y ago
I think it’s likely that within the next few years, for better or worse, everyone is going to learn to completely discount anything they see online that doesn’t come from an already known and trusted source. AI-generated content is soon going to account for >99.99% of the internet. A significant chunk of that will be propaganda or deliberate misinformation. We’re on the verge of some massive changes.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  I agree 100%.

ulnarkressty 4y ago

An intern tried some stuff, the result was a very serious talk with stakeholders while budget planning whether we should fire our copywriters - ChatGPT's bullshit is that good.

melagonster 4y ago
yes, I sure everyone will lose work, I don't think they can survive from it...

nimbleal 4y ago

By adding noise to the world, perhaps we can all recalibrate our noise floor, so to speak, and lose some of the human-generated nonsense along with ChatGPTs? My hope is that these tools will end content farms and thus (eventually) improve my Google search experience. As the cost of creating low-effort SEO filler tends to zero, Google will have to radically rethink the way they rank sites. Though maybe I’m too optimistic; they should have done this a long time ago. I’m tired of searching for, for eg. “boiling point of X” and I get a poorly written 1500 word article —- clearly aimed at robots and not humans —- instead of my desired answer.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

It’s a bullshit machine which can write a convincing text on a subject and in an adequate style or convincingly hold a conversation. That’s an extremely impressive leap from what we could do a decade ago. Sure, it lies. Sure, it needs improvement. Still if you can’t see why it’s significant and how it has tremendous potential, well, I fear there is not much we can do for you.