7 ms·

The BS that ChatGPT generates is especially odious because it requires so much effort to detect if you're not a SME in whatever output it's giving. Plus, the o

• AussieWog93 4y ago
  >if you're not a SME Small and Medium-sized Enterprise? What's SME in this instance?
  • dclusin 4y ago
    Subject matter expert
  • kmote00 4y ago
    Subject Matter Expert
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • apinstein 4y ago
    Subject Matter Expert
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • kristianc 4y ago
    Subject matter expert
  • thallium205 4y ago
    Subject matter expert.
  • dcow 4y ago
    subject Matter expert
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • WaxProlix 4y ago
    subject matter Expert .
  • xarope 4y ago
    Subject Matter Expert
  • Gnatworth 4y ago
    Small and Medium-sized Enterprise
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • DrSAR 4y ago
    When I went to google SME, I also got "Small and Medium-sized Enterprise". When I asked ChatGPT "Someone used the following sentence 'The BS that ChatGPT generates is especially odious because it requires so much effort to detect if you're not a SME in whatever output it's giving.' What does SME stand for?" It told me: SME stands for "Subject Matter Expert". The irony...
  • est 4y ago
    This thread is weird. Are the comments made by bots unaware of each other? https://i.imgur.com/t6ilhR7.png https://i.imgur.com/t6ilhR7.png
    • Blackthorn 4y ago
      All but one of those accounts in the replies are > 5 years old though.
    • saurik 4y ago
      It is a question where people think they can get easy karma if they know the answer, and many people know the answer. That said, I also don't think even most people would know the answer. I further think it is a fair question as they provided the most common expansion and that's what you naively find on Google (so it isn't like the people who ask a question they could have already answered asking Google). The next problem is that the Hacker News user interface doesn't encourage people to not cause duplicate answers within a short window: you load the full thread and spend 10-15 minutes reading it. At the time you loaded the page there aren't all of these other replies, so you may as well leave the first one. You then click the reply button and start typing a reply--FWIW, for longer replies this step can matter even more than the previous one--and you are staring at the single now and are given just the empty box for your reply. When you are done you submit, and maybe you then notice it is a duplicate? You might not, based on where the page loads and how much you are paying attention. Even if you do, do you bother to delete it? I would, but I hate the duplication and also know how to delete my comments.
      • dcow 4y ago
        I happened to catch the 4 (four! I've seen 2 dupes before but four in less than 2 minutes have never I seen afore), original comments all at once posted 0 and 1 minutes ago, and because I am in some @"mood" tonight, and for all the reasons you've said, found it to be rather funny a HN tragedy. I thought it would be harmless to slip in a 5th, capitalizing only the M to show the careful reader that I am clearly out of my mind. I promise I wasn't karma farming I only got 1 upvote. Alas, HN isn't outfitted with the latest in web push socket hot page reload sex, yet.
  • didgetmaster 4y ago
    In this kind of forum, it doesn't bother me when terms (like SME) are not defined by the person using it in a comment (even when it might be relatively new and matches several possible definitions). I didn't immediately recognize it, so I Googled it and found what I was looking for (before noticing the other replies which defined it for me). What does bother me, is when someone writes a long paper and fails to identify what it means when it is first used. I will read along sometimes for several paragraphs hoping to get a definition (or at least a good clue) before finally having to break off to go Google the term on another tab. Common terms like CPU or SSD have been around long enough to be used as is, but newer ones like AGI, LLM, or RHLF need to be written out in long form (which the article did beautifully). Sometimes they also need a basic definition to go along with that.
  • stefap2 4y ago
    Subject Matter Expert
• makeitdouble 4y ago
  I think it comes in a situation that isn't great, but not so bad that it warranted drastic decisions: people are organically generating mountains of BS online everyday, including on blogs, official looking news sites etc. It's a pain, but as most of that is also generated by humans there's an opt out, saying "good guys" should band together to fight it and it would be fine. Now that we have ChatGPT and the like, manually dealing with all the BS is just out of the window. And I'm kinda hoping we try to deal with it in a systematic matter, and find a way to flag and bury the BS down to levels lower than when ChatGPT came to the public. Basically, I'm hoping the thing that happened for spam happens for bullshit as well, and we get optimized tools to fight to manageable levels (with the arms race adn all, probably)
  • hypothesis 4y ago
    > Basically, I'm hoping the thing that happened for spam happens for bullshit as well, and we get optimized tools to fight to manageable levels Who is going to do that? I’m genuinely asking, because I’m old enough to remember that BigCo was totally fine to “enshitificate” their search for years and still barely anyone got close to them…
    • makeitdouble 4y ago
      I really don’t know, but I also don’t see it coming from any of the behemoths we have now. The wildest scenario would for it to come from Mozilla or another web player like Cloudflare. More realistically it could come from players outside of the US seeing it as an opportunity to make a dent in the current quasi-monopolies, with some government backing as it would probably cost amounts no investor would pay otherwise.
  • kristianc 4y ago
    > I think it comes in a situation that isn't great, but not so bad that it warranted drastic decisions: people are organically generating mountains of BS online everyday, including on blogs, official looking news sites etc. Indeed, ChatGPT produces bullshit because that’s the bullshit it’s been trained on.
• georgemcbay 4y ago
  > The BS that ChatGPT generates is especially odious because it requires so much effort to detect if you're not a SME in whatever output it's giving. I've found a good way to demonstrate to oneself how badly ChatGPT can miss not only the nuance of a subject but just plain get basic facts wrong is to ask it about relatively simple things like movie or book plots and see how the results differ from, well, just actually watching or reading the subject, eg. https://imgur.com/a/0kv6S1g https://imgur.com/a/0kv6S1g -------- Prompt: Summarize the ending of the movie AI -------- /In the movie "AI", the protagonist, a highly advanced android boy named David, embarks on a journey to find the Blue Fairy from the story of Pinocchio in order to become a real boy and be reunited with his human mother. After many trials, David finally reaches the submerged city where the Blue Fairy is said to reside, but instead finds a statue of the fairy. He is then discovered by human survivors of a global flood, who have been in suspended animation for thousands of years. The humans react with fear and attempt to dismantle David, but he is rescued by a mermaid, who takes him to the underwater kingdom of the lost city of Rome. There, he finally meets the Blue Fairy, who reveals that she has no power to grant his wish, but assures him that his love for his mother will live on forever. In the end, David is shown as a frozen statue, in a future where the sun has burned out and the Earth is covered in ice, while the human race has long since vanished. The last shot is of the statue of the Blue Fairy, still underwater, suggesting that David's story and love will endure for eternity./ -------- Its close enough to be believable if you haven't seen the movie (or maybe even if you have seen it but it was 20 years ago) but there's a lot of obvious errors packed into a relatively short paragraph there. Got off to a good start in the first two sentences and then just goes right off the rails... but with such confidence.
  • efitz 4y ago
    I agree, but Gell-Mann amnesia…
• Existenceblinks 4y ago
  Plus 1) you can't write test for it. 2) have fun debugging natural language (debugging PL is hard enough)
• whydoyoucare 4y ago
  ChatGPT is a credible BS generator (something that I made up reading your post). :-)
  • worik 4y ago
    "credible BS generators, we are everywhere"
• osigurdson 4y ago
  ChatGPT helps a lot but it is necessary to take everything with a grain of salt - so what? It still can save a lot of time. Just Alt-tab ChatGPT/Google. Adjust your mental model from what you think it should be to what it actually is.
  • slowmovintarget 4y ago
    gem install hairball
    • slowmovintarget 4y ago
      No one gets the reference? Rich Hickey gave a talk where he speaks about how easy it is to import dependencies you didn't know you had. That means you were getting complications to your systems in an uncontrolled fashion because it's so easy to do. Now imagine that same ease with ideas. It's so easy to just let ChatGPT write that up, I'm going to do that. I'm not even going to edit, even where what it wrote doesn't exactly reflect my thinking on the matter. At that point, you're cluttering up your own thinking with output from ChatGPT because it's easy. gem install hairball
  • emodendroket 4y ago
    I hear this a lot but I don't find it convincing. If I know enough to know if the answer is good or bad, why would I be asking a chat bot? We could say this problem is somewhat analogous to sorting good StackOverflow answers from bad ones. But I feel that there are things like writing and presentation style (not to mention the votes and comments) that could tip me off to a bad answer that are absent when every answer is in the same voice.
    • worik 4y ago
      Early days but Iam finding OpenAI better than StackOverflow for reminding me of libraries and syntax of programming languages I have tried it with:rust, dart, and swift
      • 4y ago
• nradov 4y ago
  The funny thing is how many HN users have no real expertise in anything beyond software, and yet consider themselves SMEs on aviation, politics, climate, energy, medicine, warfare, and every other common topic here. The Dunning–Kruger effect is everywhere.
  • icelancer 4y ago
    Yeah, as if ChatGPT BSes more than your average internet commenter who fools a huge percentage of people he reaches. People really aren't considering the base rate.
• skinnyarms 4y ago
  You're not too far off from the arguments people made about the internet not too long ago. It's too easy to access information that could easily be incorrect...even maliciously so! You're better off sticking to published books and journals from respectable organizations that vet their authors and review their publications! Then again, who's in control of those printing presses? How can you trust the publishers to not push their own politics and agendas? You're probably better off finding a religious organization you can trust to help filter out the bad stuff. Help you see things through the proper perspective.
  • c3534l 4y ago
    The problem is people weren't wrong about the internet. In fact, they couldn't grasp the magnitude of the problem it would create, and the complete transformation it would have on media, politics, and culture.
    • candiodari 4y ago
      As someone who vaguely remembers the 90s I can tell you that there is no transformation in media, politics or culture. Well, there is. But the difference people describe, that politics used to be based on sound science and now, with the internet/facebook/fake news/tiktok changed to be based on total bullshit. Not true. Not because media and politics aren't currently almost exclusively bullshit. But because that wasn't any different in the 90s. Back then media was full of bullshit, and politics reacted 100 times to media bullshit for every time it reacted to actual science. Hell, there's positive evolution too, I think the BBC has actually improved their fact checking since back then, for example. And I actually know what is trustworthy. I didn't know in the 90s.
  • chrismcb 4y ago
    But... With books you know who is publishing them. You might know who is in charge of a website. At least with Wikipedia sources are cited. With gpt, nothing.
    • sixstringtheory 4y ago
• mhb 4y ago
  I'll risk the downvotes, but I'm genuinely curious why people feel that they need to note that they've made trivial edits, like deleting a duplicated word or fixing a typo. Is there a sense that the historical record of these meanderings should be perfectly memorialized?
  • jcampbell1 4y ago
    Full disclosure: I work for Google and am a member of the Illuminati. They aren’t necessary because we keep track. Sincerely, ChatGPT
  • nagonago 4y ago
    Just one guess, but in the "good old days" of the Internet, people would sometimes get suspicious and accuse you of trickery if you edited your posts without explanation, so a culture developed of always explaining even the most trivial edits. "Full transparency" taken to its absurd extreme, I suppose.
  • zhenyakovalyov 4y ago
    it’s a case of virtue signalling to other community members, same as using abbreviations in a corporate email or double space after a full stop. i guess, there is nothing wrong with that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• drpixie 4y ago
  So use ChatGPT by all means, but include a tag: #TL;GPT (text from ChatGPT, looked good, may be complete garbage)
  • frumper 4y ago
    Sounds like anything you read, aside from maybe it may not look good.
• digitailor 4y ago
  McQuillan’s central point here that ChatGPT is a “bullshit generator” and not “artifically intelligent” is really apt. What we’re often working on in the industry is emulating the worst uses of intelligence processes, that humans also use, like optimized BS generation. Seeing ChatGPT turn into the equivalent of a competent essay-spitting undergrad is distressing; the internet is now such a mass of human-generated BS, it's hard to believe people will be arguing and competing with machine optimized and generated BS speech. The really concerning thing is that in BS Wars, the party that's willing to BS most flagrantly and not be seen as truthful tends to win: https://post.news/article/2LGf4ziMatzJ3nCHuZv7e6pTKVA https://post.news/article/2LGf4ziMatzJ3nCHuZv7e6pTKVA The most powerful and effective and immediately available BS generators will probably rely on machine-generated, unhinged speech. I truly fear for the future of the few reputable internet forums left, because even intelligent people tend to engage with well-optimized BS generators, whether driven by human or machine.
• toss1 4y ago
  YES! And not only does the BS often need expertise to detect, but the tech cheerleaders are claiming that not only is this high-volume automated BS machine useful, but that it is somehow nearly an actual near-generalized AI. Nothing could be further from the truth. The generative models make sometimes-useful BS, and are sometimes surprising in the similarity of the output to human output (sure, human bullshitters often look good too, so what?), but there isn't even the slightest ability to understand any concept. The thing can't even get right puzzles that children laugh at. These things have no concept of truth vs fiction or ethics vs evil. Yet the "tech elite" try to feed us the BS us that it is nearly the singularity. What we have is a very amusing parlor game toy. What we need, whether for the world's sanity and/or to get close to AGI, is not an automated high-volume BS generator. What we need is an automated high volume BS detector. Then, you'll have something worth praising.