17 ms·

ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

239 points by blueridge 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
elil17 4y ago
Strongly agree. We should have "made the work worth doing" before, but it's even more imperative with LLMs on the scene. However, when will they be able to do work that is worth doing? GPT4? GPT5? There will be a point where we have to grapple with that.
- aebtebeten 4y ago
  on having to grapple: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- christkv 4y ago
  So what do we do with all the middle class human bs generators today once a lot of pr, journalism, copy and marketing is replaced?
  - djbebs 4y ago
    Good thing population is reducing, isn't it?
    - 4bpp 4y ago
      Even if we conveniently assume that all the people of the future smaller population have it in them to do the jobs AI is not yet good enough at (and none of them are would-be copywriters because that's where their skill ceiling is), surely the game-theoretical shift from "if you, aspiring original writer, don't make it for some reason or another, you'll have to settle for a lower-prestige/-pay writing job" to "...you'll actually be stuck with none of the skills you acquired being of particular value to anyone". Writing as a career would assume a risk profile more akin to trying to become a K-pop idol.
  - counttheforks 4y ago
    Universal Basic Income?
  - automatic6131 4y ago
    >once a lot of pr, journalism, copy and marketing is replaced Enjoy them doing something productive (I hope)
  - amalcon 4y ago
    This has been a problem with every new productive technology. The civilized answer is "society takes on the responsibility of teaching them to do other things". Of course, this often does not happen for one of two reasons. First, society doesn't always choose the civilized answer; it often chooses to just marginalize the folks who just lost their jobs. Second, society often really wants to pick the thing they're teaching these people to do -- this is how you get people trying to teach coal miners how to code, despite coal miners being by and large uninterested in coding. These are pretty real problems that we're already grappling with, but we're going to need to get very serious about it very soon. LLMs aren't the only reason why.
  - noyoudumbdolt 4y ago
    Take them outside and shoot them.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    If history is any indicator, the last group of middle class professionals who decided to take this question into their own hands ended up getting executed by the state or exiled to penal colonies[1]. The rest of them, and their families, ended up dying in utter destitution. That's what "we" will probably do again. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#Government_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#Government_response
    - kibwen 4y ago
      When will ChatGPT replace C-suite executives, I wonder? Just think of the savings!
      - visarga 4y ago
        Why stop at C-suite? A bunch of chatGPT agents working together could operate a company fully automated.
        EamonnMR 4y ago
        They could function as consumers too.
    - flir 4y ago
      Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B.
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      you are free to not use the technology. the luddites went burning down other people's factories, so not super surprising to me that the state responded with force.
      - imtringued 4y ago
        But people don't use the word "Luddite" as some sort of worker protesting for the sake of vengeance at the government that abandoned them. People talk as if Luddites were some backwards people, that failed to adopt technology and died because they couldn't adapt. If being a Luddite involves a civil war, it is no longer an argument in favor of never questioning technological progress.
  - harveywi 4y ago
    Should be possible to train them all as scrum masters.
    - christkv 4y ago
      Now that is truly a scary thing. What is worse than a scrum master, a bitter ex journalist scrum master.
  - visarga 4y ago
    > So what do we do with all the middle class human bs generators today Funny that bullshitting was the easiest job to automate to perfection. But now everyone can spin up their AI bullshit operation. Anti-bullshit AI would be very valuable in this situation.
  - elil17 4y ago
    Hopefully: UBI, retraining, something along those lines Probably: Let them eat cake
- ergonaught 4y ago
  AI/LLMs cannot "do work that is worth doing" in this context because the work that is worth doing involves human learning/education, not simply the production of content. If you meant, "when can AI perform all writing tasks such that it would be a waste of time for human beings to develop the ability to express themselves in writing", well, fine question, likely answered far too soon.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    It's already clear that existing LLM have the ability to do things that were previously only accessible to people with "human learning/education." "Production of content" can probably go a lot further than you think, for a model that has internet/API access. Would love to see more warrants on the claims you are making - feel like you haven't fleshed it out enough in this comment.
    - EamonnMR 4y ago
      Will reliance on LLMs neuter our minds the same way that reliance on machinery has withered our bodies.
    - ergonaught 4y ago
      The claim I made was that “work worth doing” was worth doing because of its effect on human beings. This is not the same thing as “work worth producing”. Ex: practicing scales on my guitar is work worth doing, because of its effect on me, not because it produces anything of value in itself or of interest to anyone. It is meaningless that my computer can do scales vastly better than I can, because the production of scales is not what makes the work worth doing.
      - whimsicalism 4y ago
        I disagree. If the work leads to the production of something worthwhile net of any other losses from the work, the work is "worth doing." So "work worth producing" is, at minimum, a subset of "work worth doing"
DoctorOW 4y ago
I'm by no means a professional writer per se, but I've been paid for work that involves writing. Because of this, a version of ChatGPT that could do my writing for me would be helpful. In my admittedly half-hearted attempts, I've really struggled to recreate anything close to what I wrote.
- politician 4y ago
  Clearly, the solution is train a ChatGPT instance that is fine-tuned on generating prompts for ChatGPT.
  - jaggederest 4y ago
    That's one of my favorite things to ask it at the moment, something like "If I wanted you to generate an interesting article on X, how should I write a prompt?" The results are usually pretty interesting.
  - a9h74j 4y ago
    And thus it begins.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  why would it help you? it would just replace you in those opportunities entirely.
  - DoctorOW 4y ago
    As I said, writing is a small part of the job. I wrote for video and produced those videos. Half the time it'd be multiple videos from one script (interviewing different people with the same questions). I guess maybe a "prompt engineer" could just copy and paste ChatGPT answering its own questions into wherever but that's not going to be a comparable product to actually setting up a professional interview setup and asking a subject questions.
causality0 4y ago
I'm coming around to the idea that in general the more bullshit something is the easier it is for AI to disrupt.
- harveywi 4y ago
  It is only a matter of time before ChatGPT learns how to ask: 1. What did you do yesterday? 2. What will you do today? 3. Any blockers?
  - ARandomerDude 4y ago
    To which ChatGPT could respond with: 1. titles of tickets moved within the past 24 hours 2. title of ticket in progress 3. No blockers right now
    - selfhoster11 4y ago
      Not gonna lie, hooking up ChatGPT to Jira so I can query it via Slack or voice recognition would rule. It would certainly be quicker than the slow Jira UI.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        All these hundreds-of-GB-memory, several-seconds-to-cold-load Bugzilla knock-offs should provide a second, read-only interface that's just HTML. It'd make them almost tolerable.
    - randomdata 4y ago
      ChatGPT seems a little too clever to stick to that script, though. Soon it will learn to answer like the rest of us do: 1. What we discussed I was going to work on yesterday. 2. Continue to do my job. 3. Of course not. If I did, I would have made it known long before this.
  - _huayra_ 4y ago
    They might also listen in on meetings, write a summary in a word doc that no one reads, and then adds tasks in whatever kanban one's company uses that you never look at. Product Manager-aaS
_petronius 4y ago
I'm less worried about stuff like ChatGPT killing things off, but more about just making everything noticeably a bit worse. To take an analogy: bad voice recognition software abounds everywhere, not because it is better than what it replaced in terms of UX, but because it works just enough and allows massive cost-savings on hiring people to do customer service jobs. A world where most marketing copy is written by mediocre AI, and more and more written and visual content are generated by big models that are technically impressive but intellectually hollow is going to be one where the quality of everything sucks just a bit more, but it's so cheap that it becomes pervasive. (This trend is already apparent and not created by, or limited to, ChatGPT.)
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Subtitles got noticably worse now that their generation is often farmed out to AI, especially in translations. Drives me nuts as someone who likes using subtitles.
  - Mechanical9 4y ago
    Huh, that hasn't been my experience, at least not yet. Are you talking about newer movies and shows?
    - heavyset_go 4y ago
      Mostly videos I stream online. YouTube is a good example, but I've noticed an uptick in bad subtitles on other streaming platforms that stream content with higher production values.
      - jewelry 4y ago
        I remember a while ago American shows and movies joked about Indian customer support, as they "lower the standard of customer service". Now here the same to AI "lower the standard of subtitle". The quality is not appreciated which is why the offering are lower the bar for quality constantly. Or they'll be out competed.
NotYourLawyer 4y ago
It’s gonna kill the internet as a place to find useful information. Google is already almost unusable for researching any topic that’s even adjacent to anything that can be monetized. Widespread, good-enough, AI-generated, SEO’d “articles” will push it over the edge.
- alsodumb 4y ago
  At the rate people are using ChatGPT, there won't really be a search engine to do SEO if ChatGPT and competition keeps getting better. If chatbots become popular, the ad space would go from search engine to product placement in chatbots replies.
  - juve1996 4y ago
    All these advances and yet we're still going to ruin them all with ads. What a bright future
    - lm28469 4y ago
      That's internet since ~2010, the brightest minds of the world are all busy finding ways to show you ads and/or collect data about you to show you "better" ads.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    chatgpt isn't a search engine, ask it questions about a topic you know about and you'll quickly figure out it's very good at shaping BS into something believable
  - testplzignore 4y ago
    ChatGPT prompt: Devise an economic policy that would lead to the elimination of the advertising industry. Include a list of wealthy persons and companies who would benefit from it so that I may solicit bribes... err, "political donations" from them to support my 2024 presidential campaign.
- visarga 4y ago
101008 4y ago
I agree with the article but maybe you are trying to do the wrong thing with ChatGPT. I am not a native English speaker (as many of you already noticed due to my grammar mistakes), so ChatGPT have been very useful to rewrite my texts, fix grammar and maybe "beautify" them a bit. It's has been an invaluable tool in that sense. I feel much more confident now sending emails and writing important messages knowing that the grammar and tone have been "approved" by this IA. By the way, I asked ChatGPT to fix/improve this previous comment and this is the result: I agree with the article, but perhaps you are using ChatGPT in the wrong way. As a non-native English speaker (as many of you have likely noticed due to my grammar mistakes), ChatGPT has been extremely helpful in rewriting my texts, correcting grammar, and making them more polished. It has been an invaluable tool in that sense. I now feel more confident when sending emails and writing important messages, knowing that the grammar and tone have been reviewed and approved by this AI.
- krustyburger 4y ago
  Wow, that is a significant improvement. I’m a native English speaker and I may start using ChatGPT for this purpose too.
  - ben7799 4y ago
    Most of it is an improvement, but the change in the first sentence could really change the meaning in a way that may or may not be appropriate. That change is ambiguous but could be important. Proofreading shouldn't change the meaning or intention of a passage.
    - whodidntante 4y ago
      Maybe that was the intent (of the AI) :-)
  - chronial 4y ago
    I feel like some of the nuance got lost in at least two places: "trying to do the wrong thing with ChatGPT" vs "using ChatGPT in the wrong way" "have been "approved" by this AI" vs "have been reviewed and approved by this AI." I prefer the original phrasing.
kristiandupont 4y ago
Throughout my career I've encountered a good number of people who were adding very little (to none or in a few cases, negative) value to their workplace. It used to bother me immensely. On behalf of the employer and for their own sake. I can still find that sentiment if I look for it but today, my perspective is that at least in many cases, it's ok. If the company does well and the employee doesn't hate their life because of unfulfilling work, we're all better off than if they went unemployed. Yes, ideally everyone should follow their passion and pursue the life of their dreams but some people don't think of work as the source of that. However, that doesn't mean that they would rather not work at all -- and I don't mean just because of the loss of income. I know that UBI is all the rage in here and I think it's an interesting thought experiment but I just don't see a world where only the 1% of performers in any field are required and able to work is a promising thing.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > Yes, ideally everyone should follow their passion and pursue the life of their dreams but some people don't think of work as the source of that. Not only do some people not think of it that way, I doubt enough necessary jobs are the dream jobs of enough people for it to work out. I bet we need the vast majority of people to be working in jobs that aren't any part of any dream of theirs. Besides, maybe their dream wouldn't pay, so they fund it with their bullshit day job. Then it are pursuing their dreams. Hell, maybe that dream's just "raise and provide for a family"! > I know that UBI is all the rage in here and I think it's an interesting thought experiment but I just don't see a world where only the 1% of performers in any field are required and able to work is a promising thing. I entirely do not follow how this would be the result of UBI.
  - kristiandupont 4y ago
    >Hell, maybe that dream's just "raise and provide for a family"! I think we're agreeing there. >I entirely do not follow how this would be the result of UBI. I didn't mean to imply that it would. I've just seen people argue that UBI is a solution to the problem of people not having work.
debacle 4y ago
I see two big problems with GPT: 1. It presents information really well that is completely false. I don't know exactly how it works under the hood, but sometimes it spits out paragraphs that read like the fever dreams of a flat earther. 2. It will cause our communication skills to further atrophy. Maybe in an innocuous way (no one memorizes epic poems anymore), but with GPT I think it will make people less likely to have the ability to be persuasive.
- alsodumb 4y ago
  Regarding 1, it's well known that LLMs are pretty good at hallucinating.
  - 082349872349872 4y ago
    Regarding 2, it's well known that wetware online are already pretty bad at passing a persuasiveness turing test. (spellcheck means we no longer have to worry about getting distracted by orthography; if gpt means we no longer have to worry about getting distracted by grammar, I should hope we could then move on to helping people express actual ideas)
- lm28469 4y ago
  > It will cause our communication skills to further atrophy. Last week the dude next to me in the train asked chatgpt to generate a "good morning message" for his gf and sent it verbatim to her. At the same time he was working on what looked like a work related slide presentation, 90% of it was filled with chatgpt answers
  - birdstheword5 4y ago
    I watched a dude in front of me at work make a whole PowerPoint using chatgpt, then used it to reply to all his emails - then back to copy pasting from chatgpt into some word doc
- impalallama 4y ago
  The more esoteric the information I'm asking the more likely it will tell me something that sounds right but all the specifics are wrong. As a test I asked for the world record speedrun for pokemon yellow, it made up a time associated with a runner who didn't exist yet the time was still rough 20 minute ballpark of what the any% time was in 2021. Bizarre stuff. I expect it will raise up a lot of writing to low bar of competent but voiceless. Which would actually be an improvement on many SEO spam blogs.
switch007 4y ago
Our CTO is already asking why we devs aren’t using it to be more efficient. Such a stupid and early conclusion to come to about the tool
- olddustytrail 4y ago
  Seems reasonable. Just ask ChatGPT if it can replace your CTO!
PaulHoule 4y ago
There was the highly regarded English teacher at my high school in whose class I couldn't get better than a "D" on a test because I just read too much on my own and had too many examples to work with to be able to write essays according to her formula. There were times later on when I made most of my income from writing, so I'm sure she was wrong.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  > There were times later on when I made most of my income from writing, so I'm sure she was wrong. Or you were just really bad at everything else you could do.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    I got grades much better than "D" in most of my other classes and got perfect grades on the English SAT and Physics GRE.
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      Right but I meant as a job, not test scores. I got a perfect score on english sat, math sat, physics sat, etc. doesn't mean I'm looking at all of those things as jobs.
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  I mean any random sample of one of Cormac McCarthy's novels would fail an English test, but his net worth is in the tens of millions. So I wouldn't put too much stock into what most English teachers think in general.
  - ben7799 4y ago
    And yet his writing style works in some stories and not in others. When he is writing a story that largely consists of internal dialog and a character mostly in isolation his writing is brilliant. His style is painful in the Passenger and an English teacher would be write to criticize him. That book has long passages of dialog and his style is a detriment in that book. It just causes the reader to have to work extremely hard to decipher the conversations. I have not read Stella Maris yet, hopefully it has less back and forth dialog where his style suffers.
tra3 4y ago
An aside, but I have a recurring nightmare - today is the day when an English paper is due. I failed to write it. It's happening less since I graduated nearly 20 years ago, but still does. I wonder if it means I agree with the author..
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pavas 4y ago
Agreed. Cause I trained it not to.
bongoman37 4y ago
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bsenftner 4y ago
I do not see the fact that writing out one's thoughts as prose is one of the best and one of the only methods of comprehensively assessing any complex concept. What are the other methods that are not derivatives of "writing your thoughts down?" There are none I can think of right now. Compex anything left as "thoughts" and/or only verbalized is too easy to gloss over critical points that are easily focused upon when written down. The fact that students and many people cannot write is because their thoughts are a disorganized mess, only held together by the self deception they are not a mess. Yet, attempting to write down their thoughts, the disorganization is easily seen and then they organize their thoughts through the process of writing legible prose. Writing is how many organize their thinking, and if they never wrote they'd never organize their thoughts.
- stevedonovan 4y ago
  Exactly. We learn to speak our mother tongue without instruction, but need to learn to write. And what is actually happening is training in putting thoughts out in a linear fashion, and debugging them. That's been the core of the curriculum for about 2500 years.
markus_zhang 4y ago
No it can't but most work does not worth that too.
LegitShady 4y ago
Yet. It hasn't killed anything worth preserving yet. But as it improves, and it will improve, it will create so much nonsense content online, kill off many starter writing jobs, etc etc to the point where its effects will definitely kill off things that in the long run may be worth preserving. To me the way to look at all of this is looking forward, not what happened last week. Just because a major illness hasn't killed you yet doesn't mean it won't in the future. Important to look at the trajectory and slope of the line of change.
opwieurposiu 4y ago
ChatGPT is trained on the internet corpus written by humans. Over time, more and more of this corpus will be written by ChatGPT. Has anyone tested what happens when the output of a LLM is fed back as the training data?
- Drakim 4y ago
  When two AIs talk to each other they often end up developing their own private language.
- uptown 4y ago
  Presumably we'll observe something akin to Michael Keaton's character in the movie "Multiplicity" where by the third or fourth generation, the defects are noticeably amplified. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTuCxwZi4sw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTuCxwZi4sw
- visarga 4y ago
  It was not a language model, but AlphaZero played against itself millions of games and trained on the data it generated, without seeing any human games. And it reached super human level, of course. Why was this possible? The game itself acted as an anti-bullshit filter. So you can train on your own generated data if you filter it. Like this one: Large Language Models Can Self Improve https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.11610 https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.11610
  - seydor 4y ago
    I presume that OpenAI is already running cgpt against itself. The discussion should already be incomprehensible to humans
- seydor 4y ago
  In the future internet, every paragraph will begin with "As a Large Language Model" or "It is not appropriate to"
csneeky 4y ago
- "All it can do is assemble patterns according to other patterns it has seen when prompted by a request" Sounds pretty much like everyone I know.
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olliecornelia 4y ago
ChatGPT has been a boon to the dog-shit take industry.
blobbers 4y ago
I was just thinking about this. ChatGPT feels like it generates the equivalent of chew toys for human reading. And you have no idea if what you're chewing on is real or fake, because in the end its just a toy with no guarantees.
twic 4y ago
> it would easily receive the maximum score a 5, particularly given the fact that the AP graders do not pay any attention to whether or not the content of the answer is accurate or true I'm not familiar with the US education system. Is that last point true, or sarcasm?
- staticman2 4y ago
  What's being discussed is some sort of literature exam. I'm not familiar with this exam but if I said "Flowers represent fertility (because they are pollinated)" and a classmate says "Flowers represent gravity (since they fall)" it shouldn't really be evaluated for accuracy, just how well we made our argument since we're not really discussing facts.
LightG 4y ago
I don't mind AI killing off anything and everything, as long it goes hand in hand with producing the means for those whose jobs are killed off to survive and thrive. I want my warm, sunny hill where I can discuss philosophy if I so choose with some bread wine, after which I'll play old arcade games and then work on a classic car, after which I'll make love to my wife. Can you ask chatGPT if it can arrange for that, please? * wakes up *
eugenhotaj 4y ago
The issue is not that ChatGPT will kill things off, the issue is that ChatGPT 4.0 will kill things off. If you don’t think that’s a real possibility, you’re sleeping.
moron4hire 4y ago
One of the problems that I have with the "AI might replace some menial jobs, but people should aspire to bigger and better things" argument is that a lot of menial jobs are training for those bigger and better things. "Sure, ChatGPT can write some basic code, but it can't come up with creative solutions like I can." Yeah, that's true. But how did I get to the point of being able to make creative solutions? Years of working in the trenches, learning all the ins and outs of how to code and not over-engineer that college never even had a hope of teaching me. Yes, nobody wants a life-long career developing formulaic CRUD apps, or writing catalog product descriptions, or making logos for every tom-dick-or-harry consulting shop with delusions of grandeur. But if you want to become a skilled developer, writer, or designer, you kinda need to grind through a lot of this bullshit work to grow a sense of taste to be any good at the higher-level work. So what happens when we cut off that pipeline of junior jobs? It's going to happen, and it's going to happen from the bottom, up. We're not going to see big corporations take risks on trying AI software developers when they have thousands of resumes of the best undergrads to sift through every month. We're going to see it from the companies on the fringe, who couldn't afford to hire even a junior developer. They're going to take a low-risk chance because the alternative is just not do the work at all. And they'll prove out the model and 20 years later the only people who understand the basics anymore will be more interested in management positions than writing yet another Django app, and 20 more years later they'll be retiring with nobody else coming in behind them.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  Thats the same issue with dall-e, stable diffusion, or any of these, and the ML world seems to think its a win and artists don't deserve to have jobs if they can't compete with or become users of those models. If you can't get paid to produce art as a journeyman that supports your basic needs you won't make it to being a master artist except in your free time, maybe, and you won't have the same work references for work on projects during your development. It will be somewhat like in the writing world, where many or most of the major writers are independently wealthy because nobody else can afford to take the time that writing requires off of real work that feeds and houses them. Imagine replacing all the engineers in training with ML and wondering why there are no engineers later. Thats where we're headed.
ben7799 4y ago
"Show your work", "Correct answer without showing your work earns a zero". These were things that were extremely common in STEM classes when I was in school and were rare in English classes. This author/professor has a very solid point that English instructors being less lazy and grading on the process instead of the final result would go a long way in terms of combatting cheating and producing better writers. Another issue I remember was humanities professors at the college level expecting papers to be padded out to X pages even when you didn't need that length to make a strong argument or prove a thesis. The professor wants extra pages of BS to get the good grade, why not let ChatGPT take your 10 page paper that includes all the correct information and pad it out to 25 pages of redundancy and repetition to meet the weird requirement? I think in some cases it might have been hard to resist if these programs had been around, because I always resented having to write that extra nonsense in a class I was taking as a required elective.
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  At least from the perspective of the English profs/teachers I had, actually generating words was a black box not requiring instruction or introspection. Editing and structuring, sure, but the nuts and bolts of how you turn a blank page into a nonblank page... that wasn't really discussed much.
- tester457 4y ago
  > This author/professor has a very solid point that English instructors being less lazy and grading on the process instead of the final result would go a long way in terms of combatting cheating and producing better writers. It can create a believable made up process too. If someone wants to cheat themselves out of homework the only thing that could stop them is openai increasing the price after mass adoption.
forgetfreeman 4y ago
Bullshit. This speaks less to the reality of the situation and more to the author's biases/myopia. Remember when Craigslist was just a quirky little website? Cheerleaders at the time dismissed the notion it threatened anything of value, then it basically killed the newspaper industry, which in turn bricked boots-on-the-ground journalism. Anyone feel like claiming nothing of value was lost there? We're talking about a tool that has the potential to eliminate the trust metric for all online content.
- kranke155 4y ago
  Plus he's talking about This Version of ChatGPT. And it's not just ChatGPT that's happening - we are getting image generation, voice generation, code generation...
  - anticensor 4y ago
    ChatGPT can already generate code.
    - forgetfreeman 4y ago
      ChatGPT just passed the exam to get a medical license in the US.
- spankalee 4y ago
  The article is only and specifically about english writing classes.
scarface74 4y ago
I think people both give ChatGPT too much credit and too little credit at the same time. In my day to day life, I can’t think of a single thing that ChatGPT does better than a search engine and I can better judge the trustworthiness of the sources. On the other hand, it does a great job writing working Python code based on plain language requirements. It does at least as well as a junior dev for run of the mill scripting. No most development is not reversing a binary tree while juggling two bowling balls and riding a unicycle on a tightrope.
EGreg 4y ago
It's not about killing something. It's about SWARMS of AI chatbots amassing karma points, likes, and engagement, and at any given moment they can overwhelm any community and gang up on people whose viewpoint differs from the one they are programmed to promote.
danhodgins 4y ago
"Writing is rewarding. Writing is empowering. Writing is even fun. As human, we are wired to communicate. We are also wired for “play.” Under the right circumstances, writing allows us to do both of these things at the same time." What if on day one you showed up to high school English class, and there were 2 terms on the board: 1. COMMUNICATION 2. PLAY The teacher then said: "The most successful people in the world are the best communicators. This is true in every field - business, science, technology, medicine, sports, the arts and politics. The most successful people also have a love of play and get the chance to practice it during their work day. Whether its in business, the arts, or intellectual pursuits. Would you like to learn to be successful like them? Have I got your attention? Alright, let's go." Although this would be a non-egalitarian and elitist curriculum , it would be highly appealing for me. I would want to attend a course like this, and I would forgo the author's offer to not attend and still get an A. I would attend, and get the A. Surely we can improve course design so high school students aka humans 'studying life' can learn success, and it just so happens that writing is part of becoming your best self and reaching your potential. Teachers could benefit from some 'marketing style' re-positioning and re-framing of the curriculum to what is relevant and resonant for students. There is a major relevancy problem in the high school curriculum. What if the gym teacher said: "today we're going to talk about Jordan. Best fadeaway jumper in the business. How did he do it? You're about to learn about one of the greatest players in history." Or if the English teacher said: "Obama. Jobs. Musk. Why are they so persuasive from the podium? Listen up, because you're about the find out how they craft presentations that move millions of people and billions of dollars in product." My high school English teacher let me write an essay analyzing lyrics in songs by the Doors as poetry. It was awesome, and I got an A. -Dan
mjdowney 4y ago
I tend to agree in spirit, but I worry there's a real risk of a lemon market[1] situation. If, for whatever reason, consumers of content are not immediately attuned to the difference between vacuous GPT-nonsense and something that would bring them value if they just thought hard enough, it might lead to an overall reduction of returns to thoughtful, high-quality content, even if that content is only momentarily over the head of the reader, but wouldn't be in the long run. This obviously to the detriment of both the consumers and producers of content. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
hosh 4y ago
My main concern isn't whether ChatGPT will kill off anything, like journalism. Instead, my concern is that this will create a Internet-wide echo chamber. I've seen what happens when an individual human enter a delusional feedback loop and diverge from reality, that pivotal moment when sensemaking becomes self-referential. They get a psychotic break. I think we're going to get front-row seats at watching a whole, planet-spanning civilization enter a psychotic break. Arguably, we are already there. It's just that, I think deploying ChatGPT will greatly accelerate this. This won't just be fringe or extreme subcultures, but rather, the mainstream cultures, as our sensemaking turns inwards.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  I think the internet today has two modes, at least. One is commoditized content and the other is collaborative content. The commoditized content has long since been either automated or at least highly ripped off, and with chatgpt style AI it’ll probably improve dramatically to the point of being generally valuable and useful, even if it seems to offend people that a machine did something they did before (is this the White collar John Henry moment?). The collaborative stuff will continue to be there as it is because we genuinely like talking to other hairless monkeys. They will probably take “no AI” rules of discourse, along with their currently rules of stuff like “no soliciting or selling,” “no flaming,” “no jerks,” etc. I for one welcome our new chatgpt overlords.
bitL 4y ago
ChatGPT is just a preview, GPT-4 is going to demolish whole industries (based on playing with the beta). Funny times ahead.
ttul 4y ago
ChatGPT has been incredibly helpful in getting the skeleton of a text down on paper - a task that can often be tedious and time-consuming. Once the skeleton is in place, I am able to embellish it with my own flair, fix any factual errors, and make real progress. I'm not alone in my assessment of ChatGPT's potential. Many experts believe that the tool has the potential to significantly improve the productivity of writers. However, it is important to note that ChatGPT is not a replacement for human creativity and originality. The creative and unique aspects of writing are still the domain of the writer, while the tool is simply a tool to assist in the more mundane tasks. Nevertheless, as technology continues to advance, it is likely that we will see more and more writers turning to tools such as ChatGPT to improve their productivity and efficiency. *GPT helped me write this too, in the style of a Wall Street Journal article.
- xyzelement 4y ago
  Funny, I felt this was GPT written as I read. The tells: appeal to "experts" (in 2023 people don't write this way and I think the very nature of "expert" has been degraded in public's eyes) and the sort of perfunctory "however"
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I don't really disagree with the basic point though--especially if you like to outline. I just asked it to write an article about how things are different for CIOs today. It's a bit shallow and formulaic although I'm not sure it wouldn't pass muster as a column in one of the trade rags. However, I could probably take it, rewrite it a bit, flesh things out, maybe add a quote or 2, link to a survey, etc. while maintaining the basic structure and it would be very publishable in a lot of places. And I bet I could do that in an hour or two.
Animats 4y ago
It's a huge shakeup to human models of what is important. ChatGPT is so good at blithering without requiring any underlying model of what it is writing about. What people thought was profound - isn't. What it will do to management? Can ChatGPT pass an "inbox test" yet? That's a test for managers, where you get a background document and a queue of incoming messages. You have to reply to each message, in writing, in order. Someone who uses inbox tests needs to try that.
falcolas 4y ago
Reader attention? ChatGPT output is often so absurdly verbose it becomes tiring to try and make sense of the text (when the text makes sense in the first place). The effort we're willing to put into big swaths of text is already low, and I fear ChatGPT will only make it worse.
- axiom92 4y ago
  You can make the output more/less verbose with the right prompt.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    > with the right prompt Supposedly you can summon Anubis with the right prompt as well. But nobody does.
    - axiom92 4y ago
      Yeah I see your point. The fact that it (making responses concise) can be done doesn't mean people will necessarily do it. However, I can see a media outlet incorporating a set of "checklist" prompts in their publication process. Any GPT-N generated article will go through them before the article is pushed out. One of these checklist prompts can be about reducing verbosity.
hnarn 4y ago
It’s kind of like that South Park special about the “streaming wars” and the water parks. A swimming pool can have a certain amount of urine in it without anyone noticing, and that’s the way it’s always been. It’s not a problem as long as the amount is small and you add cleaning agents. The problem is that filling the web with content created by ChatGPT means adding more and more urine to the pool until someone notices. It will be fine, for a long while, until it suddenly reaches a threshold where it’s noticeable, when all of the highly ranked hits you get for a question are subtly incorrect to the point that you can’t trust any of them, when more and more Wikipedia contributors are discovered to just copy-paste text from an AI, and then it’s no longer fine, but it’s too late because you’re still in the Internet swimming pool and now you’re swimming in piss.
- 93po 4y ago
  To be fair, basically anything controversial on the internet is already, at minimum, subtly incorrect. Any given person's perspective on basically anything likely has at least one inaccuracy, or one mischaracterization, or one heavily biased take. I already can't trust virtually anything on the internet unless I really know someone, their credentials, their background, their biases, and also spend a lot of researching the topic myself.
tshadley 4y ago
"I cannot emphasize this enough: ChatGPT is not generating meaning. It is arranging word patterns." To reconcile this statement with his admission that ChatGPT reliably turns out passable results, we must assume the average student simply rearranges word patterns as well. So developmentally, this must be a mile marker on the road to competence. "[Writing] is an embodied process that connects me to my own humanity, by putting me in touch with my mind" ChatGPT's experiences with its own "mind" are fleeting and lost forever with each reset of prompt and zeroing of prompt history. Prompt compression and embedding architectures, combined with the steady growth of hardware memory capacity, should allow new models that continuously generate and process "thought" prompts. This should allow the primitive emergence of self-narratives and make a leap, I feel, towards the generation of true meaning.
- jpttsn 4y ago
  These conclusions seem premature. > To reconcile this statement with his admission that ChatGPT reliably turns out passable results, we must assume the average student simply rearranges word patterns as well. Alternative explanation: the “passable results” test does not distinguish between ”rearrange word patterns” and whatever the students might otherwise be up to. > So developmentally, this must be a mile marker on the road to competence. Alternative: the students with passable results are not on the way to competence Other alternative: it is a mile marker for students but not for the AI (just as learning to walk mile be a mile marker for human babies on the way to baseball playing, but not for foals, who learn fast to walk and never to play baseball).
leshow 4y ago
I disagree but it's more nuanced. The issue with chatgpt is the same issue that lies at the heart of most problems in modern day society: the consolidation of power and wealth in private hands. These tools are being used in the name of productivity, which isn't a bad thing in itself, but when it's used to make a small number of people more wealthy and put a large number of people out of work, then it's an issue. I would venture to say the obsession with standardized tests sucking the fun out of school stems from the same problem. Namely, the commodification of our education system in service of our larger economic system.
Spooky23 4y ago
If widely adopted, ChatGPT will create a sort of poetry to prompt the output desired. We will engineer responses instead of writing.
aassddffasdf 4y ago
Clearly the way forward is to teach the students how to do: "... the kind of tweaking you see me doing above, tweaking which I can do because I possess a relatively sophisticated understanding of narrative craft and know what to tell the AI to do" This will likely entail teaching them how to do the job without the use of the AI (as was always the case). (The same applies to software development [which is just a different form of writing]).
GaryNumanVevo 4y ago
ChatGPT will cause information Kessler Syndrome
anupamchugh 4y ago
I’d like to think of ChatGPT as computer generated content. It’s a reflection of the world we live in, and the tech culture too. Everything is centralised right now. So disclosures, trust, transparency don’t mean anything. Atleast not on a web that we don’t own. Also, since when have humans being transparent. We’re all data collectors as our brain is aggregating thoughts of others and those of our own and then sharing them with technologies. Now that technology showed us the cons of a centralised system, it spooked plenty. The future is reminiscent of Westworld, Dark, Matrix. Atleast on internet — where everything is code.
Balgair 4y ago
I'm thinking Centaurs. Well, the chess kind [0] at least. Basically, you combine an AI and a human to get really amazing chess playing. Same thing, but with all the image and chat AIs. Example: You're a film student and are trying to work on costume design. You got no budget, but a lot of time and friends with some sewing machines and leftover Burning Man parts. You take a look at something like Jodorowsky’s Tron [1] and say 'Holy crap, that head gear is super wild and I know how to make something like that!' So you pay $10 for MidJourney, get Jodorowsky’s Tron going, put in the supplies you got, and you get some stuff you can actually make. Not only can you get the outlines of the hats and head gear, but you also get an idea of the lighting, the lenses, the farming, etc. You get the cool aesthetic you're looking for and how to actually film it too. You get the A, natch. Sure, you can work it out with pencils and felt beforehand, just like they were doing in 2010. But now? You've shortened the time, you can play with the lighting and lenses and framing, you can change the actors out, etc. You'd have gotten there by yourself eventually, but with the AI you've shortened the time and exhaustion. I'm super pumped for the creativity that AIs will unleash. Let's use the tools and FLY! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess [1] https://kottke.org/22/12/jodorowskys-tron https://kottke.org/22/12/jodorowskys-tron

239 points by blueridge 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Strongly agree. We should have "made the work worth doing" before, but it's even more imperative with LLMs on the scene. However, when will they be able to do work that is worth doing? GPT4? GPT5? There will be a point where we have to grapple with that.

aebtebeten 4y ago
on having to grapple: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
christkv 4y ago
So what do we do with all the middle class human bs generators today once a lot of pr, journalism, copy and marketing is replaced?
- djbebs 4y ago
  Good thing population is reducing, isn't it?
  - 4bpp 4y ago
    Even if we conveniently assume that all the people of the future smaller population have it in them to do the jobs AI is not yet good enough at (and none of them are would-be copywriters because that's where their skill ceiling is), surely the game-theoretical shift from "if you, aspiring original writer, don't make it for some reason or another, you'll have to settle for a lower-prestige/-pay writing job" to "...you'll actually be stuck with none of the skills you acquired being of particular value to anyone". Writing as a career would assume a risk profile more akin to trying to become a K-pop idol.
- counttheforks 4y ago
  Universal Basic Income?
- automatic6131 4y ago
  >once a lot of pr, journalism, copy and marketing is replaced Enjoy them doing something productive (I hope)
- amalcon 4y ago
  This has been a problem with every new productive technology. The civilized answer is "society takes on the responsibility of teaching them to do other things". Of course, this often does not happen for one of two reasons. First, society doesn't always choose the civilized answer; it often chooses to just marginalize the folks who just lost their jobs. Second, society often really wants to pick the thing they're teaching these people to do -- this is how you get people trying to teach coal miners how to code, despite coal miners being by and large uninterested in coding. These are pretty real problems that we're already grappling with, but we're going to need to get very serious about it very soon. LLMs aren't the only reason why.
- noyoudumbdolt 4y ago
  Take them outside and shoot them.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  If history is any indicator, the last group of middle class professionals who decided to take this question into their own hands ended up getting executed by the state or exiled to penal colonies[1]. The rest of them, and their families, ended up dying in utter destitution. That's what "we" will probably do again. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#Government_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#Government_response
  - kibwen 4y ago
    When will ChatGPT replace C-suite executives, I wonder? Just think of the savings!
    - visarga 4y ago
      Why stop at C-suite? A bunch of chatGPT agents working together could operate a company fully automated.
      - EamonnMR 4y ago
        They could function as consumers too.
  - flir 4y ago
    Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    you are free to not use the technology. the luddites went burning down other people's factories, so not super surprising to me that the state responded with force.
    - imtringued 4y ago
      But people don't use the word "Luddite" as some sort of worker protesting for the sake of vengeance at the government that abandoned them. People talk as if Luddites were some backwards people, that failed to adopt technology and died because they couldn't adapt. If being a Luddite involves a civil war, it is no longer an argument in favor of never questioning technological progress.
- harveywi 4y ago
  Should be possible to train them all as scrum masters.
  - christkv 4y ago
    Now that is truly a scary thing. What is worse than a scrum master, a bitter ex journalist scrum master.
- visarga 4y ago
  > So what do we do with all the middle class human bs generators today Funny that bullshitting was the easiest job to automate to perfection. But now everyone can spin up their AI bullshit operation. Anti-bullshit AI would be very valuable in this situation.
- elil17 4y ago
  Hopefully: UBI, retraining, something along those lines Probably: Let them eat cake
ergonaught 4y ago
AI/LLMs cannot "do work that is worth doing" in this context because the work that is worth doing involves human learning/education, not simply the production of content. If you meant, "when can AI perform all writing tasks such that it would be a waste of time for human beings to develop the ability to express themselves in writing", well, fine question, likely answered far too soon.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  It's already clear that existing LLM have the ability to do things that were previously only accessible to people with "human learning/education." "Production of content" can probably go a lot further than you think, for a model that has internet/API access. Would love to see more warrants on the claims you are making - feel like you haven't fleshed it out enough in this comment.
  - EamonnMR 4y ago
    Will reliance on LLMs neuter our minds the same way that reliance on machinery has withered our bodies.
  - ergonaught 4y ago
    The claim I made was that “work worth doing” was worth doing because of its effect on human beings. This is not the same thing as “work worth producing”. Ex: practicing scales on my guitar is work worth doing, because of its effect on me, not because it produces anything of value in itself or of interest to anyone. It is meaningless that my computer can do scales vastly better than I can, because the production of scales is not what makes the work worth doing.
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      I disagree. If the work leads to the production of something worthwhile net of any other losses from the work, the work is "worth doing." So "work worth producing" is, at minimum, a subset of "work worth doing"

DoctorOW 4y ago

I'm by no means a professional writer per se, but I've been paid for work that involves writing. Because of this, a version of ChatGPT that could do my writing for me would be helpful. In my admittedly half-hearted attempts, I've really struggled to recreate anything close to what I wrote.

politician 4y ago
Clearly, the solution is train a ChatGPT instance that is fine-tuned on generating prompts for ChatGPT.
- jaggederest 4y ago
  That's one of my favorite things to ask it at the moment, something like "If I wanted you to generate an interesting article on X, how should I write a prompt?" The results are usually pretty interesting.
- a9h74j 4y ago
  And thus it begins.
LegitShady 4y ago
why would it help you? it would just replace you in those opportunities entirely.
- DoctorOW 4y ago
  As I said, writing is a small part of the job. I wrote for video and produced those videos. Half the time it'd be multiple videos from one script (interviewing different people with the same questions). I guess maybe a "prompt engineer" could just copy and paste ChatGPT answering its own questions into wherever but that's not going to be a comparable product to actually setting up a professional interview setup and asking a subject questions.

causality0 4y ago

I'm coming around to the idea that in general the more bullshit something is the easier it is for AI to disrupt.

harveywi 4y ago
It is only a matter of time before ChatGPT learns how to ask: 1. What did you do yesterday? 2. What will you do today? 3. Any blockers?
- ARandomerDude 4y ago
  To which ChatGPT could respond with: 1. titles of tickets moved within the past 24 hours 2. title of ticket in progress 3. No blockers right now
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    Not gonna lie, hooking up ChatGPT to Jira so I can query it via Slack or voice recognition would rule. It would certainly be quicker than the slow Jira UI.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      All these hundreds-of-GB-memory, several-seconds-to-cold-load Bugzilla knock-offs should provide a second, read-only interface that's just HTML. It'd make them almost tolerable.
  - randomdata 4y ago
    ChatGPT seems a little too clever to stick to that script, though. Soon it will learn to answer like the rest of us do: 1. What we discussed I was going to work on yesterday. 2. Continue to do my job. 3. Of course not. If I did, I would have made it known long before this.
- _huayra_ 4y ago
  They might also listen in on meetings, write a summary in a word doc that no one reads, and then adds tasks in whatever kanban one's company uses that you never look at. Product Manager-aaS

_petronius 4y ago

I'm less worried about stuff like ChatGPT killing things off, but more about just making everything noticeably a bit worse. To take an analogy: bad voice recognition software abounds everywhere, not because it is better than what it replaced in terms of UX, but because it works just enough and allows massive cost-savings on hiring people to do customer service jobs. A world where most marketing copy is written by mediocre AI, and more and more written and visual content are generated by big models that are technically impressive but intellectually hollow is going to be one where the quality of everything sucks just a bit more, but it's so cheap that it becomes pervasive. (This trend is already apparent and not created by, or limited to, ChatGPT.)

heavyset_go 4y ago
Subtitles got noticably worse now that their generation is often farmed out to AI, especially in translations. Drives me nuts as someone who likes using subtitles.
- Mechanical9 4y ago
  Huh, that hasn't been my experience, at least not yet. Are you talking about newer movies and shows?
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    Mostly videos I stream online. YouTube is a good example, but I've noticed an uptick in bad subtitles on other streaming platforms that stream content with higher production values.
    - jewelry 4y ago
      I remember a while ago American shows and movies joked about Indian customer support, as they "lower the standard of customer service". Now here the same to AI "lower the standard of subtitle". The quality is not appreciated which is why the offering are lower the bar for quality constantly. Or they'll be out competed.

NotYourLawyer 4y ago

It’s gonna kill the internet as a place to find useful information. Google is already almost unusable for researching any topic that’s even adjacent to anything that can be monetized. Widespread, good-enough, AI-generated, SEO’d “articles” will push it over the edge.

alsodumb 4y ago
At the rate people are using ChatGPT, there won't really be a search engine to do SEO if ChatGPT and competition keeps getting better. If chatbots become popular, the ad space would go from search engine to product placement in chatbots replies.
- juve1996 4y ago
  All these advances and yet we're still going to ruin them all with ads. What a bright future
  - lm28469 4y ago
    That's internet since ~2010, the brightest minds of the world are all busy finding ways to show you ads and/or collect data about you to show you "better" ads.
- lm28469 4y ago
  chatgpt isn't a search engine, ask it questions about a topic you know about and you'll quickly figure out it's very good at shaping BS into something believable
- testplzignore 4y ago
  ChatGPT prompt: Devise an economic policy that would lead to the elimination of the advertising industry. Include a list of wealthy persons and companies who would benefit from it so that I may solicit bribes... err, "political donations" from them to support my 2024 presidential campaign.
visarga 4y ago

101008 4y ago

I agree with the article but maybe you are trying to do the wrong thing with ChatGPT. I am not a native English speaker (as many of you already noticed due to my grammar mistakes), so ChatGPT have been very useful to rewrite my texts, fix grammar and maybe "beautify" them a bit. It's has been an invaluable tool in that sense. I feel much more confident now sending emails and writing important messages knowing that the grammar and tone have been "approved" by this IA. By the way, I asked ChatGPT to fix/improve this previous comment and this is the result: I agree with the article, but perhaps you are using ChatGPT in the wrong way. As a non-native English speaker (as many of you have likely noticed due to my grammar mistakes), ChatGPT has been extremely helpful in rewriting my texts, correcting grammar, and making them more polished. It has been an invaluable tool in that sense. I now feel more confident when sending emails and writing important messages, knowing that the grammar and tone have been reviewed and approved by this AI.

krustyburger 4y ago
Wow, that is a significant improvement. I’m a native English speaker and I may start using ChatGPT for this purpose too.
- ben7799 4y ago
  Most of it is an improvement, but the change in the first sentence could really change the meaning in a way that may or may not be appropriate. That change is ambiguous but could be important. Proofreading shouldn't change the meaning or intention of a passage.
  - whodidntante 4y ago
    Maybe that was the intent (of the AI) :-)
- chronial 4y ago
  I feel like some of the nuance got lost in at least two places: "trying to do the wrong thing with ChatGPT" vs "using ChatGPT in the wrong way" "have been "approved" by this AI" vs "have been reviewed and approved by this AI." I prefer the original phrasing.

kristiandupont 4y ago

Throughout my career I've encountered a good number of people who were adding very little (to none or in a few cases, negative) value to their workplace. It used to bother me immensely. On behalf of the employer and for their own sake. I can still find that sentiment if I look for it but today, my perspective is that at least in many cases, it's ok. If the company does well and the employee doesn't hate their life because of unfulfilling work, we're all better off than if they went unemployed. Yes, ideally everyone should follow their passion and pursue the life of their dreams but some people don't think of work as the source of that. However, that doesn't mean that they would rather not work at all -- and I don't mean just because of the loss of income. I know that UBI is all the rage in here and I think it's an interesting thought experiment but I just don't see a world where only the 1% of performers in any field are required and able to work is a promising thing.

yamtaddle 4y ago
> Yes, ideally everyone should follow their passion and pursue the life of their dreams but some people don't think of work as the source of that. Not only do some people not think of it that way, I doubt enough necessary jobs are the dream jobs of enough people for it to work out. I bet we need the vast majority of people to be working in jobs that aren't any part of any dream of theirs. Besides, maybe their dream wouldn't pay, so they fund it with their bullshit day job. Then it are pursuing their dreams. Hell, maybe that dream's just "raise and provide for a family"! > I know that UBI is all the rage in here and I think it's an interesting thought experiment but I just don't see a world where only the 1% of performers in any field are required and able to work is a promising thing. I entirely do not follow how this would be the result of UBI.
- kristiandupont 4y ago
  >Hell, maybe that dream's just "raise and provide for a family"! I think we're agreeing there. >I entirely do not follow how this would be the result of UBI. I didn't mean to imply that it would. I've just seen people argue that UBI is a solution to the problem of people not having work.

debacle 4y ago

I see two big problems with GPT: 1. It presents information really well that is completely false. I don't know exactly how it works under the hood, but sometimes it spits out paragraphs that read like the fever dreams of a flat earther. 2. It will cause our communication skills to further atrophy. Maybe in an innocuous way (no one memorizes epic poems anymore), but with GPT I think it will make people less likely to have the ability to be persuasive.

alsodumb 4y ago
Regarding 1, it's well known that LLMs are pretty good at hallucinating.
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  Regarding 2, it's well known that wetware online are already pretty bad at passing a persuasiveness turing test. (spellcheck means we no longer have to worry about getting distracted by orthography; if gpt means we no longer have to worry about getting distracted by grammar, I should hope we could then move on to helping people express actual ideas)
lm28469 4y ago
> It will cause our communication skills to further atrophy. Last week the dude next to me in the train asked chatgpt to generate a "good morning message" for his gf and sent it verbatim to her. At the same time he was working on what looked like a work related slide presentation, 90% of it was filled with chatgpt answers
- birdstheword5 4y ago
  I watched a dude in front of me at work make a whole PowerPoint using chatgpt, then used it to reply to all his emails - then back to copy pasting from chatgpt into some word doc
impalallama 4y ago
The more esoteric the information I'm asking the more likely it will tell me something that sounds right but all the specifics are wrong. As a test I asked for the world record speedrun for pokemon yellow, it made up a time associated with a runner who didn't exist yet the time was still rough 20 minute ballpark of what the any% time was in 2021. Bizarre stuff. I expect it will raise up a lot of writing to low bar of competent but voiceless. Which would actually be an improvement on many SEO spam blogs.

switch007 4y ago

Our CTO is already asking why we devs aren’t using it to be more efficient. Such a stupid and early conclusion to come to about the tool

olddustytrail 4y ago
Seems reasonable. Just ask ChatGPT if it can replace your CTO!

PaulHoule 4y ago

There was the highly regarded English teacher at my high school in whose class I couldn't get better than a "D" on a test because I just read too much on my own and had too many examples to work with to be able to write essays according to her formula. There were times later on when I made most of my income from writing, so I'm sure she was wrong.

whimsicalism 4y ago
> There were times later on when I made most of my income from writing, so I'm sure she was wrong. Or you were just really bad at everything else you could do.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  I got grades much better than "D" in most of my other classes and got perfect grades on the English SAT and Physics GRE.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Right but I meant as a job, not test scores. I got a perfect score on english sat, math sat, physics sat, etc. doesn't mean I'm looking at all of those things as jobs.
HideousKojima 4y ago
I mean any random sample of one of Cormac McCarthy's novels would fail an English test, but his net worth is in the tens of millions. So I wouldn't put too much stock into what most English teachers think in general.
- ben7799 4y ago
  And yet his writing style works in some stories and not in others. When he is writing a story that largely consists of internal dialog and a character mostly in isolation his writing is brilliant. His style is painful in the Passenger and an English teacher would be write to criticize him. That book has long passages of dialog and his style is a detriment in that book. It just causes the reader to have to work extremely hard to decipher the conversations. I have not read Stella Maris yet, hopefully it has less back and forth dialog where his style suffers.

tra3 4y ago

An aside, but I have a recurring nightmare - today is the day when an English paper is due. I failed to write it. It's happening less since I graduated nearly 20 years ago, but still does. I wonder if it means I agree with the author..

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pavas 4y ago

Agreed. Cause I trained it not to.

bongoman37 4y ago

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bsenftner 4y ago

I do not see the fact that writing out one's thoughts as prose is one of the best and one of the only methods of comprehensively assessing any complex concept. What are the other methods that are not derivatives of "writing your thoughts down?" There are none I can think of right now. Compex anything left as "thoughts" and/or only verbalized is too easy to gloss over critical points that are easily focused upon when written down. The fact that students and many people cannot write is because their thoughts are a disorganized mess, only held together by the self deception they are not a mess. Yet, attempting to write down their thoughts, the disorganization is easily seen and then they organize their thoughts through the process of writing legible prose. Writing is how many organize their thinking, and if they never wrote they'd never organize their thoughts.

stevedonovan 4y ago
Exactly. We learn to speak our mother tongue without instruction, but need to learn to write. And what is actually happening is training in putting thoughts out in a linear fashion, and debugging them. That's been the core of the curriculum for about 2500 years.

markus_zhang 4y ago

No it can't but most work does not worth that too.

LegitShady 4y ago

Yet. It hasn't killed anything worth preserving yet. But as it improves, and it will improve, it will create so much nonsense content online, kill off many starter writing jobs, etc etc to the point where its effects will definitely kill off things that in the long run may be worth preserving. To me the way to look at all of this is looking forward, not what happened last week. Just because a major illness hasn't killed you yet doesn't mean it won't in the future. Important to look at the trajectory and slope of the line of change.

opwieurposiu 4y ago

ChatGPT is trained on the internet corpus written by humans. Over time, more and more of this corpus will be written by ChatGPT. Has anyone tested what happens when the output of a LLM is fed back as the training data?

Drakim 4y ago
When two AIs talk to each other they often end up developing their own private language.
uptown 4y ago
Presumably we'll observe something akin to Michael Keaton's character in the movie "Multiplicity" where by the third or fourth generation, the defects are noticeably amplified. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTuCxwZi4sw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTuCxwZi4sw
visarga 4y ago
It was not a language model, but AlphaZero played against itself millions of games and trained on the data it generated, without seeing any human games. And it reached super human level, of course. Why was this possible? The game itself acted as an anti-bullshit filter. So you can train on your own generated data if you filter it. Like this one: Large Language Models Can Self Improve https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.11610 https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.11610
- seydor 4y ago
  I presume that OpenAI is already running cgpt against itself. The discussion should already be incomprehensible to humans
seydor 4y ago
In the future internet, every paragraph will begin with "As a Large Language Model" or "It is not appropriate to"

csneeky 4y ago

- "All it can do is assemble patterns according to other patterns it has seen when prompted by a request" Sounds pretty much like everyone I know.

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olliecornelia 4y ago

ChatGPT has been a boon to the dog-shit take industry.

blobbers 4y ago

I was just thinking about this. ChatGPT feels like it generates the equivalent of chew toys for human reading. And you have no idea if what you're chewing on is real or fake, because in the end its just a toy with no guarantees.

twic 4y ago

> it would easily receive the maximum score a 5, particularly given the fact that the AP graders do not pay any attention to whether or not the content of the answer is accurate or true I'm not familiar with the US education system. Is that last point true, or sarcasm?

staticman2 4y ago
What's being discussed is some sort of literature exam. I'm not familiar with this exam but if I said "Flowers represent fertility (because they are pollinated)" and a classmate says "Flowers represent gravity (since they fall)" it shouldn't really be evaluated for accuracy, just how well we made our argument since we're not really discussing facts.

LightG 4y ago

I don't mind AI killing off anything and everything, as long it goes hand in hand with producing the means for those whose jobs are killed off to survive and thrive. I want my warm, sunny hill where I can discuss philosophy if I so choose with some bread wine, after which I'll play old arcade games and then work on a classic car, after which I'll make love to my wife. Can you ask chatGPT if it can arrange for that, please? * wakes up *

eugenhotaj 4y ago

The issue is not that ChatGPT will kill things off, the issue is that ChatGPT 4.0 will kill things off. If you don’t think that’s a real possibility, you’re sleeping.

moron4hire 4y ago

One of the problems that I have with the "AI might replace some menial jobs, but people should aspire to bigger and better things" argument is that a lot of menial jobs are training for those bigger and better things. "Sure, ChatGPT can write some basic code, but it can't come up with creative solutions like I can." Yeah, that's true. But how did I get to the point of being able to make creative solutions? Years of working in the trenches, learning all the ins and outs of how to code and not over-engineer that college never even had a hope of teaching me. Yes, nobody wants a life-long career developing formulaic CRUD apps, or writing catalog product descriptions, or making logos for every tom-dick-or-harry consulting shop with delusions of grandeur. But if you want to become a skilled developer, writer, or designer, you kinda need to grind through a lot of this bullshit work to grow a sense of taste to be any good at the higher-level work. So what happens when we cut off that pipeline of junior jobs? It's going to happen, and it's going to happen from the bottom, up. We're not going to see big corporations take risks on trying AI software developers when they have thousands of resumes of the best undergrads to sift through every month. We're going to see it from the companies on the fringe, who couldn't afford to hire even a junior developer. They're going to take a low-risk chance because the alternative is just not do the work at all. And they'll prove out the model and 20 years later the only people who understand the basics anymore will be more interested in management positions than writing yet another Django app, and 20 more years later they'll be retiring with nobody else coming in behind them.

LegitShady 4y ago
Thats the same issue with dall-e, stable diffusion, or any of these, and the ML world seems to think its a win and artists don't deserve to have jobs if they can't compete with or become users of those models. If you can't get paid to produce art as a journeyman that supports your basic needs you won't make it to being a master artist except in your free time, maybe, and you won't have the same work references for work on projects during your development. It will be somewhat like in the writing world, where many or most of the major writers are independently wealthy because nobody else can afford to take the time that writing requires off of real work that feeds and houses them. Imagine replacing all the engineers in training with ML and wondering why there are no engineers later. Thats where we're headed.

ben7799 4y ago

"Show your work", "Correct answer without showing your work earns a zero". These were things that were extremely common in STEM classes when I was in school and were rare in English classes. This author/professor has a very solid point that English instructors being less lazy and grading on the process instead of the final result would go a long way in terms of combatting cheating and producing better writers. Another issue I remember was humanities professors at the college level expecting papers to be padded out to X pages even when you didn't need that length to make a strong argument or prove a thesis. The professor wants extra pages of BS to get the good grade, why not let ChatGPT take your 10 page paper that includes all the correct information and pad it out to 25 pages of redundancy and repetition to meet the weird requirement? I think in some cases it might have been hard to resist if these programs had been around, because I always resented having to write that extra nonsense in a class I was taking as a required elective.

EamonnMR 4y ago
At least from the perspective of the English profs/teachers I had, actually generating words was a black box not requiring instruction or introspection. Editing and structuring, sure, but the nuts and bolts of how you turn a blank page into a nonblank page... that wasn't really discussed much.
tester457 4y ago
> This author/professor has a very solid point that English instructors being less lazy and grading on the process instead of the final result would go a long way in terms of combatting cheating and producing better writers. It can create a believable made up process too. If someone wants to cheat themselves out of homework the only thing that could stop them is openai increasing the price after mass adoption.

forgetfreeman 4y ago

Bullshit. This speaks less to the reality of the situation and more to the author's biases/myopia. Remember when Craigslist was just a quirky little website? Cheerleaders at the time dismissed the notion it threatened anything of value, then it basically killed the newspaper industry, which in turn bricked boots-on-the-ground journalism. Anyone feel like claiming nothing of value was lost there? We're talking about a tool that has the potential to eliminate the trust metric for all online content.

kranke155 4y ago
Plus he's talking about This Version of ChatGPT. And it's not just ChatGPT that's happening - we are getting image generation, voice generation, code generation...
- anticensor 4y ago
  ChatGPT can already generate code.
  - forgetfreeman 4y ago
    ChatGPT just passed the exam to get a medical license in the US.
spankalee 4y ago
The article is only and specifically about english writing classes.

scarface74 4y ago

I think people both give ChatGPT too much credit and too little credit at the same time. In my day to day life, I can’t think of a single thing that ChatGPT does better than a search engine and I can better judge the trustworthiness of the sources. On the other hand, it does a great job writing working Python code based on plain language requirements. It does at least as well as a junior dev for run of the mill scripting. No most development is not reversing a binary tree while juggling two bowling balls and riding a unicycle on a tightrope.

EGreg 4y ago

It's not about killing something. It's about SWARMS of AI chatbots amassing karma points, likes, and engagement, and at any given moment they can overwhelm any community and gang up on people whose viewpoint differs from the one they are programmed to promote.

danhodgins 4y ago

"Writing is rewarding. Writing is empowering. Writing is even fun. As human, we are wired to communicate. We are also wired for “play.” Under the right circumstances, writing allows us to do both of these things at the same time." What if on day one you showed up to high school English class, and there were 2 terms on the board: 1. COMMUNICATION 2. PLAY The teacher then said: "The most successful people in the world are the best communicators. This is true in every field - business, science, technology, medicine, sports, the arts and politics. The most successful people also have a love of play and get the chance to practice it during their work day. Whether its in business, the arts, or intellectual pursuits. Would you like to learn to be successful like them? Have I got your attention? Alright, let's go." Although this would be a non-egalitarian and elitist curriculum , it would be highly appealing for me. I would want to attend a course like this, and I would forgo the author's offer to not attend and still get an A. I would attend, and get the A. Surely we can improve course design so high school students aka humans 'studying life' can learn success, and it just so happens that writing is part of becoming your best self and reaching your potential. Teachers could benefit from some 'marketing style' re-positioning and re-framing of the curriculum to what is relevant and resonant for students. There is a major relevancy problem in the high school curriculum. What if the gym teacher said: "today we're going to talk about Jordan. Best fadeaway jumper in the business. How did he do it? You're about to learn about one of the greatest players in history." Or if the English teacher said: "Obama. Jobs. Musk. Why are they so persuasive from the podium? Listen up, because you're about the find out how they craft presentations that move millions of people and billions of dollars in product." My high school English teacher let me write an essay analyzing lyrics in songs by the Doors as poetry. It was awesome, and I got an A. -Dan

mjdowney 4y ago

I tend to agree in spirit, but I worry there's a real risk of a lemon market[1] situation. If, for whatever reason, consumers of content are not immediately attuned to the difference between vacuous GPT-nonsense and something that would bring them value if they just thought hard enough, it might lead to an overall reduction of returns to thoughtful, high-quality content, even if that content is only momentarily over the head of the reader, but wouldn't be in the long run. This obviously to the detriment of both the consumers and producers of content. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

hosh 4y ago

My main concern isn't whether ChatGPT will kill off anything, like journalism. Instead, my concern is that this will create a Internet-wide echo chamber. I've seen what happens when an individual human enter a delusional feedback loop and diverge from reality, that pivotal moment when sensemaking becomes self-referential. They get a psychotic break. I think we're going to get front-row seats at watching a whole, planet-spanning civilization enter a psychotic break. Arguably, we are already there. It's just that, I think deploying ChatGPT will greatly accelerate this. This won't just be fringe or extreme subcultures, but rather, the mainstream cultures, as our sensemaking turns inwards.

fnordpiglet 4y ago
I think the internet today has two modes, at least. One is commoditized content and the other is collaborative content. The commoditized content has long since been either automated or at least highly ripped off, and with chatgpt style AI it’ll probably improve dramatically to the point of being generally valuable and useful, even if it seems to offend people that a machine did something they did before (is this the White collar John Henry moment?). The collaborative stuff will continue to be there as it is because we genuinely like talking to other hairless monkeys. They will probably take “no AI” rules of discourse, along with their currently rules of stuff like “no soliciting or selling,” “no flaming,” “no jerks,” etc. I for one welcome our new chatgpt overlords.

bitL 4y ago

ChatGPT is just a preview, GPT-4 is going to demolish whole industries (based on playing with the beta). Funny times ahead.

ttul 4y ago

ChatGPT has been incredibly helpful in getting the skeleton of a text down on paper - a task that can often be tedious and time-consuming. Once the skeleton is in place, I am able to embellish it with my own flair, fix any factual errors, and make real progress. I'm not alone in my assessment of ChatGPT's potential. Many experts believe that the tool has the potential to significantly improve the productivity of writers. However, it is important to note that ChatGPT is not a replacement for human creativity and originality. The creative and unique aspects of writing are still the domain of the writer, while the tool is simply a tool to assist in the more mundane tasks. Nevertheless, as technology continues to advance, it is likely that we will see more and more writers turning to tools such as ChatGPT to improve their productivity and efficiency. *GPT helped me write this too, in the style of a Wall Street Journal article.

xyzelement 4y ago
Funny, I felt this was GPT written as I read. The tells: appeal to "experts" (in 2023 people don't write this way and I think the very nature of "expert" has been degraded in public's eyes) and the sort of perfunctory "however"
- ghaff 4y ago
  I don't really disagree with the basic point though--especially if you like to outline. I just asked it to write an article about how things are different for CIOs today. It's a bit shallow and formulaic although I'm not sure it wouldn't pass muster as a column in one of the trade rags. However, I could probably take it, rewrite it a bit, flesh things out, maybe add a quote or 2, link to a survey, etc. while maintaining the basic structure and it would be very publishable in a lot of places. And I bet I could do that in an hour or two.

Animats 4y ago

It's a huge shakeup to human models of what is important. ChatGPT is so good at blithering without requiring any underlying model of what it is writing about. What people thought was profound - isn't. What it will do to management? Can ChatGPT pass an "inbox test" yet? That's a test for managers, where you get a background document and a queue of incoming messages. You have to reply to each message, in writing, in order. Someone who uses inbox tests needs to try that.

falcolas 4y ago

Reader attention? ChatGPT output is often so absurdly verbose it becomes tiring to try and make sense of the text (when the text makes sense in the first place). The effort we're willing to put into big swaths of text is already low, and I fear ChatGPT will only make it worse.

axiom92 4y ago
You can make the output more/less verbose with the right prompt.
- falcolas 4y ago
  > with the right prompt Supposedly you can summon Anubis with the right prompt as well. But nobody does.
  - axiom92 4y ago
    Yeah I see your point. The fact that it (making responses concise) can be done doesn't mean people will necessarily do it. However, I can see a media outlet incorporating a set of "checklist" prompts in their publication process. Any GPT-N generated article will go through them before the article is pushed out. One of these checklist prompts can be about reducing verbosity.

hnarn 4y ago

It’s kind of like that South Park special about the “streaming wars” and the water parks. A swimming pool can have a certain amount of urine in it without anyone noticing, and that’s the way it’s always been. It’s not a problem as long as the amount is small and you add cleaning agents. The problem is that filling the web with content created by ChatGPT means adding more and more urine to the pool until someone notices. It will be fine, for a long while, until it suddenly reaches a threshold where it’s noticeable, when all of the highly ranked hits you get for a question are subtly incorrect to the point that you can’t trust any of them, when more and more Wikipedia contributors are discovered to just copy-paste text from an AI, and then it’s no longer fine, but it’s too late because you’re still in the Internet swimming pool and now you’re swimming in piss.

93po 4y ago
To be fair, basically anything controversial on the internet is already, at minimum, subtly incorrect. Any given person's perspective on basically anything likely has at least one inaccuracy, or one mischaracterization, or one heavily biased take. I already can't trust virtually anything on the internet unless I really know someone, their credentials, their background, their biases, and also spend a lot of researching the topic myself.

tshadley 4y ago

"I cannot emphasize this enough: ChatGPT is not generating meaning. It is arranging word patterns." To reconcile this statement with his admission that ChatGPT reliably turns out passable results, we must assume the average student simply rearranges word patterns as well. So developmentally, this must be a mile marker on the road to competence. "[Writing] is an embodied process that connects me to my own humanity, by putting me in touch with my mind" ChatGPT's experiences with its own "mind" are fleeting and lost forever with each reset of prompt and zeroing of prompt history. Prompt compression and embedding architectures, combined with the steady growth of hardware memory capacity, should allow new models that continuously generate and process "thought" prompts. This should allow the primitive emergence of self-narratives and make a leap, I feel, towards the generation of true meaning.

jpttsn 4y ago
These conclusions seem premature. > To reconcile this statement with his admission that ChatGPT reliably turns out passable results, we must assume the average student simply rearranges word patterns as well. Alternative explanation: the “passable results” test does not distinguish between ”rearrange word patterns” and whatever the students might otherwise be up to. > So developmentally, this must be a mile marker on the road to competence. Alternative: the students with passable results are not on the way to competence Other alternative: it is a mile marker for students but not for the AI (just as learning to walk mile be a mile marker for human babies on the way to baseball playing, but not for foals, who learn fast to walk and never to play baseball).

leshow 4y ago

I disagree but it's more nuanced. The issue with chatgpt is the same issue that lies at the heart of most problems in modern day society: the consolidation of power and wealth in private hands. These tools are being used in the name of productivity, which isn't a bad thing in itself, but when it's used to make a small number of people more wealthy and put a large number of people out of work, then it's an issue. I would venture to say the obsession with standardized tests sucking the fun out of school stems from the same problem. Namely, the commodification of our education system in service of our larger economic system.

Spooky23 4y ago

If widely adopted, ChatGPT will create a sort of poetry to prompt the output desired. We will engineer responses instead of writing.

aassddffasdf 4y ago

Clearly the way forward is to teach the students how to do: "... the kind of tweaking you see me doing above, tweaking which I can do because I possess a relatively sophisticated understanding of narrative craft and know what to tell the AI to do" This will likely entail teaching them how to do the job without the use of the AI (as was always the case). (The same applies to software development [which is just a different form of writing]).

GaryNumanVevo 4y ago

ChatGPT will cause information Kessler Syndrome

anupamchugh 4y ago

I’d like to think of ChatGPT as computer generated content. It’s a reflection of the world we live in, and the tech culture too. Everything is centralised right now. So disclosures, trust, transparency don’t mean anything. Atleast not on a web that we don’t own. Also, since when have humans being transparent. We’re all data collectors as our brain is aggregating thoughts of others and those of our own and then sharing them with technologies. Now that technology showed us the cons of a centralised system, it spooked plenty. The future is reminiscent of Westworld, Dark, Matrix. Atleast on internet — where everything is code.

Balgair 4y ago

I'm thinking Centaurs. Well, the chess kind [0] at least. Basically, you combine an AI and a human to get really amazing chess playing. Same thing, but with all the image and chat AIs. Example: You're a film student and are trying to work on costume design. You got no budget, but a lot of time and friends with some sewing machines and leftover Burning Man parts. You take a look at something like Jodorowsky’s Tron [1] and say 'Holy crap, that head gear is super wild and I know how to make something like that!' So you pay $10 for MidJourney, get Jodorowsky’s Tron going, put in the supplies you got, and you get some stuff you can actually make. Not only can you get the outlines of the hats and head gear, but you also get an idea of the lighting, the lenses, the farming, etc. You get the cool aesthetic you're looking for and how to actually film it too. You get the A, natch. Sure, you can work it out with pencils and felt beforehand, just like they were doing in 2010. But now? You've shortened the time, you can play with the lighting and lenses and framing, you can change the actors out, etc. You'd have gotten there by yourself eventually, but with the AI you've shortened the time and exhaustion. I'm super pumped for the creativity that AIs will unleash. Let's use the tools and FLY! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess [1] https://kottke.org/22/12/jodorowskys-tron https://kottke.org/22/12/jodorowskys-tron