4 ms·

>Gross Ironic, when you are on a site that seems mainly dedicated to people who use specialized language to direct computers to do repetitive things at scale.

a4isms 4y ago
It's slightly different. Programming languages are for the most part deterministic tools that programmers generally understand and can debug. For this audience, the interpreter or compiler is not a "black box" that we only interact with by giving it inputs and seeing what it does. Although some prompt engineers may have detailed understanding of the AI model and its training corpus, to most people using this kind of AI today the model is a black box, and it's up to them to try things. Sure, that happens in programming too, but rarely at the level of a programming language, and much more likely at the level of a complex system of poorly documented and buggy interacting parts, such as a long-standing piece of computing infrastructure that has been iterated upon for decades, and now contains a mish-mash of components, many of which were added by people no longer around to explain how they work.
- dawsoneliasen 4y ago
  I am currently writing a blog post about this. Here’s an excerpt: “Consider, for instance, the simple existence of the term “prompt engineering,” which describes the practice of iteratively fine-tuning the prompts you submit to ChatGPT (or whatever) to get your desired output. Prompt engineering is a matter of some identification of what the model responds to, and a lot of guesswork. It’s a matter of treating the natural language of the prompt into a formal language, almost into a programming language, manipulating symbols which lose their human meaning and intuitive structure like some sort of abstract association game. You’re working with the worst programming language imaginable.” My angle is that using ChatGPT is like using a English as programming language, and it’s a terrible programming language. The reason “prompt engineering” is so irksome to me is that is supposed to be this new advanced mode of expertise, when in reality it’s just shitty programming. “The Python/C++/whatever-code isn’t some obstacle that we are trying to overcome. The code is the interface that we designed to be able to program the computer, it’s what we want and need. It’s objective, explicit, unambiguous, (relatively) static, internally consistent, and robust. English has none of these properties—it’s subjective, meaning is often implicit, and ambiguous, and it’s always changing, contradictions appear; its structure does not hold up to analysis.”
  - p0pcult 4y ago
    English may be a shitty programming language, but wouldn't that imply that wrangling it to get what you want is--in and of itself--a skill, and not "shitty programming" as you put it? It's definitely a form of authorship--and authorship (of a book) isn't shitty. Writing well is a craft that people hone--to induce wetware computers (i.e., brains) to "hallucinate" (using a term that seems popular with people who interface with these AI tools) what the author desires them too. Maybe that's the difference? Programming is when you use a very formally constructed language to induce a computer to execute a desired algorithm precisely. Authorship or artistry is when you use a formally loose language (painting, sculpture, writing) to induce a computer to "hallucinate" a desired meme (in the original sense of the word, "unit of meaning"). Both pursuits are somewhat similar, but the breakpoint is the rigor of the language used, maybe?
  - a4isms 4y ago
    There is a term-of-art for using English to write programs: "The English-Likeness Monster." The poster-boy for this terrible UX is--ironically--AppleScript, a programming language from a company that otherwise prides itself on good user experiences. https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-english-likeness-monster/ https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-english-likeness-monste...

a4isms 4y ago

It's slightly different. Programming languages are for the most part deterministic tools that programmers generally understand and can debug. For this audience, the interpreter or compiler is not a "black box" that we only interact with by giving it inputs and seeing what it does. Although some prompt engineers may have detailed understanding of the AI model and its training corpus, to most people using this kind of AI today the model is a black box, and it's up to them to try things. Sure, that happens in programming too, but rarely at the level of a programming language, and much more likely at the level of a complex system of poorly documented and buggy interacting parts, such as a long-standing piece of computing infrastructure that has been iterated upon for decades, and now contains a mish-mash of components, many of which were added by people no longer around to explain how they work.

dawsoneliasen 4y ago
I am currently writing a blog post about this. Here’s an excerpt: “Consider, for instance, the simple existence of the term “prompt engineering,” which describes the practice of iteratively fine-tuning the prompts you submit to ChatGPT (or whatever) to get your desired output. Prompt engineering is a matter of some identification of what the model responds to, and a lot of guesswork. It’s a matter of treating the natural language of the prompt into a formal language, almost into a programming language, manipulating symbols which lose their human meaning and intuitive structure like some sort of abstract association game. You’re working with the worst programming language imaginable.” My angle is that using ChatGPT is like using a English as programming language, and it’s a terrible programming language. The reason “prompt engineering” is so irksome to me is that is supposed to be this new advanced mode of expertise, when in reality it’s just shitty programming. “The Python/C++/whatever-code isn’t some obstacle that we are trying to overcome. The code is the interface that we designed to be able to program the computer, it’s what we want and need. It’s objective, explicit, unambiguous, (relatively) static, internally consistent, and robust. English has none of these properties—it’s subjective, meaning is often implicit, and ambiguous, and it’s always changing, contradictions appear; its structure does not hold up to analysis.”
- p0pcult 4y ago
  English may be a shitty programming language, but wouldn't that imply that wrangling it to get what you want is--in and of itself--a skill, and not "shitty programming" as you put it? It's definitely a form of authorship--and authorship (of a book) isn't shitty. Writing well is a craft that people hone--to induce wetware computers (i.e., brains) to "hallucinate" (using a term that seems popular with people who interface with these AI tools) what the author desires them too. Maybe that's the difference? Programming is when you use a very formally constructed language to induce a computer to execute a desired algorithm precisely. Authorship or artistry is when you use a formally loose language (painting, sculpture, writing) to induce a computer to "hallucinate" a desired meme (in the original sense of the word, "unit of meaning"). Both pursuits are somewhat similar, but the breakpoint is the rigor of the language used, maybe?
- a4isms 4y ago
  There is a term-of-art for using English to write programs: "The English-Likeness Monster." The poster-boy for this terrible UX is--ironically--AppleScript, a programming language from a company that otherwise prides itself on good user experiences. https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-english-likeness-monster/ https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-english-likeness-monste...