9 ms·

Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning

57 points by brianmcgee 4y ago

graderjs 4y ago
Well I'm teaching myself a lot from ChatGPT so I take issue with your view, Gnoam.
- sim7c00 4y ago
  generalizations dont apply to individuals, but its correct people , in general, like to jump on any opportunity not to learn but just to use something. that being said id expect most ppl lurking around NH not to feel that generalization applies to them... but they do use intellisense, ides, stack overflow, good etc. rather than taking the long road. up to a certain point that is ok, aslong as u are aware which corners you are cutting and what that means to ur personal development.
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    I think the issue with ChatGPT specifically is the output is an untraceable soup that may or may not be true in any way whatsoever.
  - JamesBarney 4y ago
    It's not just ok it's great. an enormous amount of progress in civilization is due to down skilling. Technology allows someone with 4 hrs of training to accomplish what it took a master with 20 years in close to the same time.
    - User23 4y ago
      > Technology allows someone with 4 hrs of training to accomplish what it took a master with 20 years in close to the same time. Is this rhetorical hyperbole or do you have a real example of an endeavor where a four hour novice is now the equal of a 20 year master thanks to technology?
      - JamesBarney 4y ago
        Assembly line work replacing artisans and craftsman. The skills required to build a desk 300 years ago are very different than the skill inputs. Many construction jobs have seen a replacement of carpenters and masons with lower skilled workers due to pre-fabrication. Fast food workers replacing chefs and cooks. Taxi drivers being replaced with Uber drivers.
        User23 4y ago
        I don’t see the fry cook at McDonalds as doing the same thing as Julia Child. Uber drivers are on average considerably less familiar with their cities than taxi drivers, at least in cities like London that still have meaningful standards. Likewise hauling a double-wide to a plot isn’t the same activity as building a house. It appears to me that your argument either fails or is rhetorical hyperbole when comparing like for like. For example, I have no doubt that a cabinet maker today using advanced power tools could make a cabinet of at least equal quality as a master using hand tools in considerably less time and even with a lower skill level. But that power tool using cabinet maker still wouldn’t be remotely close to a four hour novice.
        graderjs 4y ago
        Yeah, but a power tool is not exactly the same at ChatGPT (in this instance it's your metaphors that are out of whack! :)). You could jump on an assembly line and do it tho. You're just not seeing the whole metaphor here!
    - rvz 4y ago
      > Technology allows someone with 4 hrs of training to accomplish what it took a master with 20 years in close to the same time. I see, so that must mean that one can become a fully qualified lawyer, medical doctor, surgeon or a financial advisor in just 4 hours by using AI's like ChatGPT? Wow! /s Sounds just like the infinite 'Learn X in 24 hours' scam courses. But this time with the AI snake oil label.
      - graderjs 4y ago
        Well, consider it. I can: 1 - Pay my 20-year-experience lawyer 1000 USD an hour to draft me a customized EULA that respect GDPR, works in UK and US, and contains specific provisions about no-no use-cases, IP of content created and what happens when you don't pay your license fees. Lawyer takes 4 hours to produce mediocre output that will require another 8 hours to revise (because he's smart like that), and I pay him 10K and call it a day. or; 2 - Consult with ChatGPT (Law version ~~ coming soon!) to draft the same. I have zero legal training but will probably be done in 4 hours. I pay my fancy-arse lawyer 1K to review the contract (that I lie I have left over from a previous product~~before I knew him of course!), he spends 20 minutes glancing at it, while picking his toe-nails, then bills the rest to his paralegal who spends 30 minutes checking layouts and margins in Word, and I get swindled for 10 minutes) and I'm done. If you are saying you couldn't do that with ChatGPT (law version~~coming soon!) then I'd say in fact it is _you_ sir who is out of touch with reality, and clearly have not used ChatGPT in any serious capacity whatsoever. Good day to you sir!
        rvz 4y ago
        > If you are saying you couldn't do that with ChatGPT (law version~~coming soon!) then I'd say in fact it is _you_ sir who is out of touch with reality, and clearly have not used ChatGPT in any serious capacity whatsoever. Good day to you sir! The fact that either way a human lawyer is still getting involved in reviewing the output already tells me that not even you can fully trust ChatGPT or any other so-called AI to not hallucinate its answers. Also it is highly likely would output drafts that may be potentially legally unsafe and when it does, it can't explain its own output transparently which that is my point. This hype of LLMs clearly hasn't aged well with the reality of people being unable to trust the output or use it for anything serious other than for a sophistry generator.
    - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
      Sounds like Idiocracy and The Machine Stops had a lovechild.
      - graderjs 4y ago
        Yeah, outsourcing if people become stupid...but why's everyone afraid of that? You don't get dumber by using better tools, you get to operate at a higher level. I don't understand it or know how to describe it right now but there's a distinction between: machine knows how, human is dumb terminal, and machine knows how, human know other how. And the whole thing is not a binary dichotomy between: machine knows how / human is dumb terminal versus machine is dumb terminal human knows how. I think this error that you have is mostly some error of thinking...but to be forgiven as the specifics are not clear!
        CatWChainsaw 4y ago
        Did you not read The Machine Stops? Engineers created a system that worked so perfectly it fixed itself, and people lived in "perfect luxury", if sitting in a room alone your whole life counts. And then errors inevitably piled up, and enough time had passed that nobody knew how to maintain their precious Machine. Everybody died. Pretty easy moral of the story. Yet this is exactly what we are trying to build today. The Machine.
        graderjs 4y ago
        Nah I haven't read it. . . Should I ? Sounds like you think I should. But I did read the summary on Wikipedia...or something. Seems like that tells me all I need to know, pretty simple premise. But that's not the thing I'm struggling with.... What I'm struggling with particularly these days because I'm so into the chatGPT -- I'm using it every day for work. I'm learning a lot from it. And maybe just cause I'm busy but I don't have the time but I really want to be able to articulate how like ChatGPT is useful and it's helping me, and yet also it's not a panacea and I can see how maybe you know it leads to like a lack of skill or something somehow negative--but for me I've been learning from it and that's a positive and good thing. And I don't think you can just dismiss that because that's real. But yeah I'm struggling with how to express this distinction right now I just haven't had the time to really clarify my thoughts maybe I'll come back and do it later... or maybe you have more to say. Also to your point: are we really trying to build this tho? And if we are (I mean that's terrible)-- what are you doing about that? Are you going to save us all? I'm kind of serious because I mean that's an existential threat right?--so if you realize that you should be doing something. edit: Hey BTW -- I think you should check out "When the Machine Starts" song by Missy Higgins. Hearing you talk about that book I"m sure it has to be a reference! It's good anyway, I really like her.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    Stack Overflow maybe (but I expect most experienced developers to use it like they would use good documentation if it was available: to see how something is intended to be used, or to troubleshoot errors), but IDEs and intellisense don't really help you with "avoiding learning". They take out a lot of the typing and make things easier that are easy to think but require focus and accuracy to execute, e.g. renaming a class and updating all the places where it's used. You're not really learning anything by doing that manually (besides trying to avoid all refactoring that include renaming things in the future), it's more like using a fixed-blade paper cutter to accurately cut stacks of paper vs using scissors on each sheet individually.
ugjka 4y ago
The next generation of GPT should be one that can cite all its sources. Then it is basically google search on steroids
- nestorD 4y ago
  It is exactly what www.perplexity.ai does (and yes, it has replaced google for some of my usecases).
- peteradio 4y ago
  Even better would be one that generates its sources and backfills to an arbitrary depth.
- mden 4y ago
  For certain things I think so. For me the fascinating and really useful utility of LLMs is their ability to synthesize answers to questions. This is something search generally speaking can't do. I find myself using ChatGPT to answer question like: > Explain tar -xzvf > Answer: The command tar -xzvf is used to extract a tar archive. Here is what each option does: -x: This option tells tar to extract the contents of the archive. -z: This option tells tar to decompress the archive using gzip compression. -v: This option tells tar to run in verbose mode, which means it will display the names of the files being extracted as they are extracted. -f: This option specifies the file name of the archive that you want to extract. So, the full command tar -xzvf is used to extract a tar archive that has been compressed with gzip and display the names of the files being extracted as they are extracted. However for other types of information I much more care about being taken to a trustworthy source of information rather seeing a summarized view or worse, a synthesized view of various sources that might not agree with each other. References are useful, but it's risky to rely on what a bot says without validating the references at which point the utility of the bot for that type of query is questionable.
  - yodsanklai 4y ago
    I've tried to use ChatGPT for such things. The huge issue is that it does makes mistake, quite often. You never really know if its answer is correct or not. When you already knows what tar xzvf does, it is impressive to read the correct answer. But when you don't know and want to actually make use the result, you need to double check with Google and you'll lose time compared to just asking Google. It's quite frustrating.
grammers 4y ago
In its current state, yes, but ChatGPT is only just he beginning and we can't even fathom what's next in the area of AI.
- rvz 4y ago
  We have been waiting for AIs and neural networks to explain themselves transparently for decades. Given that they still cannot do this, then it means you cannot trust its output and its decisions. They have a long way to go, but ChatGPT's and LLMs use-cases are limited outside of anything serious or trustworthy. There is nothing revolutionary about a AI SaaS. What is 'revolutionary' or game changing is an open source equivalent of ChatGPT; like what Stable Diffusion did to DALLE-2.
User23 4y ago
Even the most well sourced papers include plenty of unattributed common knowledge. Where do we draw the line between that and plagiarism? ChatGPT is interesting because it pushes that line pretty far in the direction of reducing impediments to information sharing, but it doesn’t appear to be a difference in kind.
dyno12345 4y ago
this is a somewhat clickbaitified headline > That students instinctively employ high technology to avoid learning is "a sign that the educational system is failing." If it "has no appeal to students, doesn’t interest them, doesn’t challenge them, doesn’t make them want to learn, they’ll find ways out," just as he himself did when he borrowed a friend’s notes to pass a dull college chemistry class without attending it back in 1945.
- armchairhacker 4y ago
  > "For years there have been programs that have helped professors detect plagiarized essays,” Chomsky says. “Now it’s going to be more difficult, because it’s easier to plagiarize. But that’s about the only contribution to education that I can think of.” He does admit that ChatGPT-style systems “may have some value for something,” but “it’s not obvious what.” The headline makes it seem like Chomsky hates ChatGPT when he really just seems indecisive.
  - sitkack 4y ago
    And enumerates the ways in which it could be disused. It is a nothing burger. It doesn't put Chomsky in a bad light at all.
lampshades 4y ago
If a dumb robot can write your college essay for you, maybe we shouldn't be wasting time writing essays.
- jvm___ 4y ago
  It's like having wood sawing as a woodworking exam, when power saws have just been invented.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    Sounds like you’re missing the point. A saw is a tool. A power saw is a faster tool. It doesn’t change the skill of the wielder, but may make certain actions more or less cost effective. An essay is a demonstration of your ability to understand and analyze. Lowering the cost of cheating like this is ultimately worse for everyone. Forget about school, there’s someone with a real job typing random bullshit into of ChatGPT and using it having no idea wtf he is talking about.
- fooker 4y ago
  This is easy to say once you already understand how to write essays.
  - lampshades 4y ago
    If someone wants to learn how to write an essay they can more easily look it up on the most vast interconnected knowledge base that has ever existed. I don’t understand the continued need for knowledge/educational gatekeepers.
    - fooker 4y ago
      You can look up anything on the internet. The issue is figuring out what you want to look up. You are not going to suddenly realize that writing essays might teach you about presenting an argument in an organized manner if you have never had to write an essay.
    - 4y ago
0xbadc0de5 4y ago
Funny thing for Noam Chomsky to say when he himself hasn't had an original idea in decades.
specialist 4y ago
ChatGPT's ability to mass produce content just demonstrates the banality of most content. Ditto DALL-E et al. It reminds me of Dadaism. With the algorithms are the critics, vs the artists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada -- I also agree with other critical hot takes, like Ted Chiang's analogy "ChatGPT is jpeg style compression for text". A less accusatory framing than Chomsky's plagiarism thesis, more or less. -- I'm still chewing on the learning angle. Did adoption of calculators lead to less learning of arithmetic. Certainly. Was that a bad thing? I honestly don't know.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  > Did adoption of calculators lead to less learning of arithmetic. Certainly. Was that a bad thing? I honestly don't know. IMO it was bad for individuals, good for society. People are innumerate and that is exploited by people selling products and services.
  - Version467 4y ago
    I don't understand how you get from here: > People are innumerate and that is exploited by people selling products and services. to here: > good for society Did I misunderstand your argument?
    - Spooky23 4y ago
      Maybe economy is a better word? In the short term, any ding dong punching into a calculator or Excel can do something productive cheaper than someone who knows what they are doing. An elderly relative was manager in a cash room at a regional bank. In the 70s… they had a huge cash room, that would accommodate 25’ trucks. When she started they were still doing manual counts, and eventually moved to tabulating machines. Each generation of tech eliminates a chunk of workforce. Instead of 5,000 clerks, that bank has 50 software engineers performing the same functions with a couple of dozen clerical staff.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
lordnacho 4y ago
You learn a lot from ChatGPT though. If you want to know the ordinary answer to some essay question, cgpt will give you that. If you leave it at that and hand it in, maybe Chomsky is right. But it's also a essay writing productivity tool. You sketch out what you want mentioned and cgpt will fill in the gaps, like those apprentices that helped the renaissance masters. I keep coming back to the phrase "small intentions" when I discuss cgpt: both in essays and code, it is already quite good at filling in details. With less time spent on details, students can spend more time on the architecture. Ultimately, we'll have more people able to practice higher level creativity. This is already a thing that you do in math class; after your primary school years, you get a calculator to work out the arithmetic.
- smt88 4y ago
  The problem with using ChatGPT for "filling in details" is how often it is confidently, utterly wrong. My friend tried to use it to write a legal letter and it completely invented a state law and cited it very specifically. For him, it was annoying and amusing. For other people, mistakes like that could be very serious.
- mrfox321 4y ago
  Is the high level structure of writing any more important than the low level structure? Maybe it will tend towards everyone sounding the same. Which then gets amplified as LLMs train on writing that is essentially mutations of itself. Me no like.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    > Is the high level structure of writing any more important than the low level structure? Well you can make a point about the fall of Rome with badly cited sources or spelling mistakes. But if your essay says Rome fell due to conquest by the Han dynasty it can't be saved by any number of correctly spelled, beautifully cited details. ChatGPT will let you write an essay making any point while filling in little things.
- thundergolfer 4y ago
  It sounds like you're advocating a system of education, thinking, and work that is exemplified by 'Software Architecture Astronauts', people who have not recently or ever contended with the details, the nuts and bolts, of actual software development and maintenance. To be honest, the idea that you can produce valuable intellectual work by outsourcing the details is absurd. This would have seen me absolutely fail my challenging philosophy and engineering coursework, and end up a fundamentally incompetent dilettante in work and life.
LeanderK 4y ago
I don't think the view that just because we can automate the creation of a simple essay makes writing essays for students obsolete. It's not what Chomsky said but I've heard the argument a lot in the context. We are not requiring it because everyone is writing essays all the time but because it's an important, basic skill. We can automate many math exercises, but it's still important to let students do it on their own. One absolutely need to learn to communicating their thoughts in a coherent way. To argument and to develop thoughts. If plagiarism is a overwhelming problem we will just see students having to write an essay with pen and paper just like you do our math exam. Then ChatGPT won't help you.
- BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
  So you don’t need it in life because you don’t do it, but it’s an important basic skill. Explain this belief.
  - LeanderK 4y ago
    because it's not about the essay but the skills you need to write an essay. Many topics in school are not strictly needed, but important, either for your intellectual maturity or because they are used in other contexts.
    - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
      What skills.
- bitwize 4y ago
  > I don't think the view that just because we can automate the creation of a simple essay makes writing essays for students obsolete. It's not what Chomsky said but I've heard the argument a lot in the context. We are not requiring it because everyone is writing essays all the time but because it's an important, basic skill. I think there's something to be said for the view that ChatGPT makes the sort of simplistic, tedious essays typically assigned to K-12 students obsolete. Essay writing is fun, but school essays take the fun out of it, much as is the case with school math. School is corrosive to enjoyment of intellectual activity. This is by design: the primary purpose of school in the USA is to break the students' individuality so they learn to obey commands and submit to authority. Vital skills in every industry from construction and manufacturing to high tech. ChatGPT puts the lie to the idea that essays in standard formats on standard topics with standard argument structure should be how we teach kids to write, much like TI-83s put the lie to the idea that school-age math is mostly rote memorization and application with little conceptual thought. We will have to show them how to find their own personal voice and have it come through in their work. The ChatGPT era will require adjustment from educators. Again, remember Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, a 1950s kids' novel whose McGuffin was a supercomputer that functioned much like GPT: you asked it natural-language questions and it would type out answers. The computer was sabotaged such that it would answer in a way that was coherent and authoritative sounding, but wrong, challenging the young heroes to actually study to understand when and how the machine was wrong. ChatGPT poses similar challenges to today's kids, and if we want to teach them we will have to acknowledge and accommodate those challenges in the curriculum.
blululu 4y ago
This has a very old man yells at cloud vibr. We could debate whether Chomsky is really an authority on this topic given the course of history, but such a glib dismissal just lacks imagination. A very hard problem is now effectively solved the next steps hold a lot of promise.
- _3u10 4y ago
  One might say his colorless green ideas are no longer hegemonic in academia
molten_roll 4y ago
Joseph Stalin on chatGPT: this is heresy, exterminate computers
- jlwarter 4y ago
  [flagged]
niemandhier 4y ago
I predict the rise of what I call "mental obesity". Once the need to perform physical work vanished, those who did not consciously decide to train had a much higher chance of becoming obese. I expect that the mental capacities of some people will become less by the same effect. What we will see is a separation between those who are taught why they write and decide to comply and those who just take the easy way out.
- Version467 4y ago
  I like this term. It even extends to concepts like hyper-palatable foods, with the equivalent being hyper-palatable entertainment (like TikTok, or Youtube Shorts) that similarly short-circuits the brains reward loop.
- thenoblesunfish 4y ago
  On the other hand you might also see an increased interest in doing things with your brain (e.g. writing poetry or jokes) because it's rewarding, much as you see now with interest in endurance sports, climbing, etc. Or the interest in hand making things now that we produce most things with highly scaled abd automated processes.
- flangola7 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - tarboreus 4y ago
    Sure, and do you see people memorizing Oddyssey-length works and reciting them anymore? Just because you live in the world of the lost does not mean there was no loss. For (much) more on this, look at Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong
- thundergolfer 4y ago
  Look at long term stats on mathematics ability and literacy in the rich western countries. It does not paint a good picture. Two things I know off the top of my head is that literacy scores in the SATs have trended slightly down over the past 40 years, for both low-achievers and high-achievers.[1] Australia, one of the richest countries in the world, is experiencing a multi-decade decline in mathematical standing[2]. Australia is fabulously rich, but is doing a worse and worse job of producing citizens that are numerate and understand mathematics. I haven't looked at literacy performance in the country, but I'd guess it's declining like it is in the USA, as Australia is subject to broadly the same pressures of political-economy and technology. 1. Cultural Literacy by E.D Hirsch Jr 2. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220517094842.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220517094842.h...
hallqv 4y ago
When will that old fart stop complaining...
RobotToaster 4y ago
I prefer Zizek's take on it: " that AI will be the death of learning & so on; to this, I say NO! My student brings me their essay, which has been written by AI, & I plug it into my grading AI, & we are free! While the 'learning' happens, our superego satisfied, we are free now to learn whatever we want"
- thundergolfer 4y ago
  Chomsky kind of hints at this in the interview. He says he doesn't have a problem at MIT with not having engaged students, and though he doesn't say it I think it's obvious that his MIT students are not subjected to typical economics-driven educational pressures. While other students are treating school as a means to a good salary and just want the highest marks for the least effort, Chomsky's graduate MIT students will be ignoring all that stuff and just having classic educational debate in essays and in conversation. With Zizek it's the same. He doesn't have to bother with disengaged students, students who are desperate for college attendance to grant them a ticket into the comfortable upper middle classes and care not for the substance of learning. You take Zizek classes because you actually like philosophy and want to engage with it.
thundergolfer 4y ago
This thread is already full of people throwing in their cheap takes by reading the headline or not even that. Listen to his answers. He's not making controversial claims, excepting the one that LLMs teach us nothing about language. He says: - ChatGPT makes it easier to cheat. This is obviously true. - ChatGPT is a method of avoiding learning. In the context of the interview he's referring to its use not as an information retreival tool but as an actual essay writing tool. If we consider the latter, this is again obviously true. Not writing your essays teaches you nothing about essay writing, the topic at hand, and the process of thinking. - LLMs teach us basically nothing about language. Seems controversial, but I'm not an expert at all. - Education is in trouble because students are not engaged in education. We need education systems that are actually interesting and engaging. Again, this is obviously true. - It's not obvious what value ChatGPT has. Kind of controversial, but I think it's not actually obvious that ChatGPT is currently most used for funny Tweets, SEO optimization, and marketing tools. So I think he's not really saying much to get angry about here.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  That ChatGPT is good at truthfully answering one kind of prompt (analytic, where the facts are contained in the prompt, so the task is translation) and bad at truthfully answering another kind of prompt (synthetic, where the facts are not contained in the prompt, so the task is synthesis), tells me something about the nature of language. It turns out that setting up solutions to math problems is mainly a language translation task, followed by computation task as long as you have a way to eval() the resulting thunk: Do not perform calculations. Do not compute the answer. Use Javascript Math and Date to perform calculations. Wait for further questions. Show your work in the DESCRIPTION. The number of steps in the %%%THUNK%%% should match the number of steps in the %%%DESCRIPTION%%%. Always answer with Javascript compatible code in the %%%THUNK%%%, including numerical form without commas (eg, 238572348723). Always answer with this JSON compatible object form, eg, {"key":%%%VALUE%%%}: { "question": "4 days a week, Laura practices martial arts for 1.5 hours. Considering a week is 7 days, what is her average practice time per day each week?", "description":["Multiplying 1.5 and 4", "Dividing the step 1 answer by 7"], "thunk": "(function() { const step1 = 1.5 * 4; const answer = step1 / 7; return answer; })()" } Analytic augmentation is the procedure by which a question is augmented in a manner that promotes translation over synthesis. That this can be tested empirically is definitely something novel with regards to the philosophy of language!
koolala 4y ago
I want to know how he views it's abilities and universal grammer :( It seems like he never talks about grammer concepts anymore. I'd love to see any recent ideas hes had on it.
RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
This exactly the kind of handwringing I would expect from Chomsky. His theories of intelligence are quickly being made irrelevant.
lvl102 4y ago
My counter would be that AI is going to allow us to move forward with creativity. It’s going to effectively rewire our brains. In the past, we put a lot of emphasis on “random access memory” and memorization was actually a valued skill. Fast forward to today, and I think memorization is not all that useful. So what does AI chat do for us? Answering that is quite literally the next trillion dollar market in development right now.
jlwarter 4y ago
People appear to be angry with Chomsky, but I do not understand the reason. If you want to learn anything about a topic, even a Wikipedia article is superior to ChatGPT. The whole allure of ChatGPT is that people develop a parasocial relationship and feel that they learn by communicating. That is of course an illusion.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  > but I do not understand the reason. Some people get mad if you talk down on their favorite new toy.

57 points by brianmcgee 4y ago

graderjs 4y ago

Well I'm teaching myself a lot from ChatGPT so I take issue with your view, Gnoam.

sim7c00 4y ago
generalizations dont apply to individuals, but its correct people , in general, like to jump on any opportunity not to learn but just to use something. that being said id expect most ppl lurking around NH not to feel that generalization applies to them... but they do use intellisense, ides, stack overflow, good etc. rather than taking the long road. up to a certain point that is ok, aslong as u are aware which corners you are cutting and what that means to ur personal development.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  I think the issue with ChatGPT specifically is the output is an untraceable soup that may or may not be true in any way whatsoever.
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  It's not just ok it's great. an enormous amount of progress in civilization is due to down skilling. Technology allows someone with 4 hrs of training to accomplish what it took a master with 20 years in close to the same time.
  - User23 4y ago
    > Technology allows someone with 4 hrs of training to accomplish what it took a master with 20 years in close to the same time. Is this rhetorical hyperbole or do you have a real example of an endeavor where a four hour novice is now the equal of a 20 year master thanks to technology?
    - JamesBarney 4y ago
      Assembly line work replacing artisans and craftsman. The skills required to build a desk 300 years ago are very different than the skill inputs. Many construction jobs have seen a replacement of carpenters and masons with lower skilled workers due to pre-fabrication. Fast food workers replacing chefs and cooks. Taxi drivers being replaced with Uber drivers.
      - User23 4y ago
        I don’t see the fry cook at McDonalds as doing the same thing as Julia Child. Uber drivers are on average considerably less familiar with their cities than taxi drivers, at least in cities like London that still have meaningful standards. Likewise hauling a double-wide to a plot isn’t the same activity as building a house. It appears to me that your argument either fails or is rhetorical hyperbole when comparing like for like. For example, I have no doubt that a cabinet maker today using advanced power tools could make a cabinet of at least equal quality as a master using hand tools in considerably less time and even with a lower skill level. But that power tool using cabinet maker still wouldn’t be remotely close to a four hour novice.
        graderjs 4y ago
        Yeah, but a power tool is not exactly the same at ChatGPT (in this instance it's your metaphors that are out of whack! :)). You could jump on an assembly line and do it tho. You're just not seeing the whole metaphor here!
  - rvz 4y ago
    > Technology allows someone with 4 hrs of training to accomplish what it took a master with 20 years in close to the same time. I see, so that must mean that one can become a fully qualified lawyer, medical doctor, surgeon or a financial advisor in just 4 hours by using AI's like ChatGPT? Wow! /s Sounds just like the infinite 'Learn X in 24 hours' scam courses. But this time with the AI snake oil label.
    - graderjs 4y ago
      Well, consider it. I can: 1 - Pay my 20-year-experience lawyer 1000 USD an hour to draft me a customized EULA that respect GDPR, works in UK and US, and contains specific provisions about no-no use-cases, IP of content created and what happens when you don't pay your license fees. Lawyer takes 4 hours to produce mediocre output that will require another 8 hours to revise (because he's smart like that), and I pay him 10K and call it a day. or; 2 - Consult with ChatGPT (Law version ~~ coming soon!) to draft the same. I have zero legal training but will probably be done in 4 hours. I pay my fancy-arse lawyer 1K to review the contract (that I lie I have left over from a previous product~~before I knew him of course!), he spends 20 minutes glancing at it, while picking his toe-nails, then bills the rest to his paralegal who spends 30 minutes checking layouts and margins in Word, and I get swindled for 10 minutes) and I'm done. If you are saying you couldn't do that with ChatGPT (law version~~coming soon!) then I'd say in fact it is _you_ sir who is out of touch with reality, and clearly have not used ChatGPT in any serious capacity whatsoever. Good day to you sir!
      - rvz 4y ago
        > If you are saying you couldn't do that with ChatGPT (law version~~coming soon!) then I'd say in fact it is _you_ sir who is out of touch with reality, and clearly have not used ChatGPT in any serious capacity whatsoever. Good day to you sir! The fact that either way a human lawyer is still getting involved in reviewing the output already tells me that not even you can fully trust ChatGPT or any other so-called AI to not hallucinate its answers. Also it is highly likely would output drafts that may be potentially legally unsafe and when it does, it can't explain its own output transparently which that is my point. This hype of LLMs clearly hasn't aged well with the reality of people being unable to trust the output or use it for anything serious other than for a sophistry generator.
  - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    Sounds like Idiocracy and The Machine Stops had a lovechild.
    - graderjs 4y ago
      Yeah, outsourcing if people become stupid...but why's everyone afraid of that? You don't get dumber by using better tools, you get to operate at a higher level. I don't understand it or know how to describe it right now but there's a distinction between: machine knows how, human is dumb terminal, and machine knows how, human know other how. And the whole thing is not a binary dichotomy between: machine knows how / human is dumb terminal versus machine is dumb terminal human knows how. I think this error that you have is mostly some error of thinking...but to be forgiven as the specifics are not clear!
      - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
        Did you not read The Machine Stops? Engineers created a system that worked so perfectly it fixed itself, and people lived in "perfect luxury", if sitting in a room alone your whole life counts. And then errors inevitably piled up, and enough time had passed that nobody knew how to maintain their precious Machine. Everybody died. Pretty easy moral of the story. Yet this is exactly what we are trying to build today. The Machine.
        graderjs 4y ago
        Nah I haven't read it. . . Should I ? Sounds like you think I should. But I did read the summary on Wikipedia...or something. Seems like that tells me all I need to know, pretty simple premise. But that's not the thing I'm struggling with.... What I'm struggling with particularly these days because I'm so into the chatGPT -- I'm using it every day for work. I'm learning a lot from it. And maybe just cause I'm busy but I don't have the time but I really want to be able to articulate how like ChatGPT is useful and it's helping me, and yet also it's not a panacea and I can see how maybe you know it leads to like a lack of skill or something somehow negative--but for me I've been learning from it and that's a positive and good thing. And I don't think you can just dismiss that because that's real. But yeah I'm struggling with how to express this distinction right now I just haven't had the time to really clarify my thoughts maybe I'll come back and do it later... or maybe you have more to say. Also to your point: are we really trying to build this tho? And if we are (I mean that's terrible)-- what are you doing about that? Are you going to save us all? I'm kind of serious because I mean that's an existential threat right?--so if you realize that you should be doing something. edit: Hey BTW -- I think you should check out "When the Machine Starts" song by Missy Higgins. Hearing you talk about that book I"m sure it has to be a reference! It's good anyway, I really like her.
- luckylion 4y ago
  Stack Overflow maybe (but I expect most experienced developers to use it like they would use good documentation if it was available: to see how something is intended to be used, or to troubleshoot errors), but IDEs and intellisense don't really help you with "avoiding learning". They take out a lot of the typing and make things easier that are easy to think but require focus and accuracy to execute, e.g. renaming a class and updating all the places where it's used. You're not really learning anything by doing that manually (besides trying to avoid all refactoring that include renaming things in the future), it's more like using a fixed-blade paper cutter to accurately cut stacks of paper vs using scissors on each sheet individually.

ugjka 4y ago

The next generation of GPT should be one that can cite all its sources. Then it is basically google search on steroids

nestorD 4y ago
It is exactly what www.perplexity.ai does (and yes, it has replaced google for some of my usecases).
peteradio 4y ago
Even better would be one that generates its sources and backfills to an arbitrary depth.
mden 4y ago
For certain things I think so. For me the fascinating and really useful utility of LLMs is their ability to synthesize answers to questions. This is something search generally speaking can't do. I find myself using ChatGPT to answer question like: > Explain tar -xzvf > Answer: The command tar -xzvf is used to extract a tar archive. Here is what each option does: -x: This option tells tar to extract the contents of the archive. -z: This option tells tar to decompress the archive using gzip compression. -v: This option tells tar to run in verbose mode, which means it will display the names of the files being extracted as they are extracted. -f: This option specifies the file name of the archive that you want to extract. So, the full command tar -xzvf is used to extract a tar archive that has been compressed with gzip and display the names of the files being extracted as they are extracted. However for other types of information I much more care about being taken to a trustworthy source of information rather seeing a summarized view or worse, a synthesized view of various sources that might not agree with each other. References are useful, but it's risky to rely on what a bot says without validating the references at which point the utility of the bot for that type of query is questionable.
- yodsanklai 4y ago
  I've tried to use ChatGPT for such things. The huge issue is that it does makes mistake, quite often. You never really know if its answer is correct or not. When you already knows what tar xzvf does, it is impressive to read the correct answer. But when you don't know and want to actually make use the result, you need to double check with Google and you'll lose time compared to just asking Google. It's quite frustrating.

grammers 4y ago

In its current state, yes, but ChatGPT is only just he beginning and we can't even fathom what's next in the area of AI.

rvz 4y ago
We have been waiting for AIs and neural networks to explain themselves transparently for decades. Given that they still cannot do this, then it means you cannot trust its output and its decisions. They have a long way to go, but ChatGPT's and LLMs use-cases are limited outside of anything serious or trustworthy. There is nothing revolutionary about a AI SaaS. What is 'revolutionary' or game changing is an open source equivalent of ChatGPT; like what Stable Diffusion did to DALLE-2.

User23 4y ago

Even the most well sourced papers include plenty of unattributed common knowledge. Where do we draw the line between that and plagiarism? ChatGPT is interesting because it pushes that line pretty far in the direction of reducing impediments to information sharing, but it doesn’t appear to be a difference in kind.

dyno12345 4y ago

this is a somewhat clickbaitified headline > That students instinctively employ high technology to avoid learning is "a sign that the educational system is failing." If it "has no appeal to students, doesn’t interest them, doesn’t challenge them, doesn’t make them want to learn, they’ll find ways out," just as he himself did when he borrowed a friend’s notes to pass a dull college chemistry class without attending it back in 1945.

armchairhacker 4y ago
> "For years there have been programs that have helped professors detect plagiarized essays,” Chomsky says. “Now it’s going to be more difficult, because it’s easier to plagiarize. But that’s about the only contribution to education that I can think of.” He does admit that ChatGPT-style systems “may have some value for something,” but “it’s not obvious what.” The headline makes it seem like Chomsky hates ChatGPT when he really just seems indecisive.
- sitkack 4y ago
  And enumerates the ways in which it could be disused. It is a nothing burger. It doesn't put Chomsky in a bad light at all.

lampshades 4y ago

If a dumb robot can write your college essay for you, maybe we shouldn't be wasting time writing essays.

jvm___ 4y ago
It's like having wood sawing as a woodworking exam, when power saws have just been invented.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Sounds like you’re missing the point. A saw is a tool. A power saw is a faster tool. It doesn’t change the skill of the wielder, but may make certain actions more or less cost effective. An essay is a demonstration of your ability to understand and analyze. Lowering the cost of cheating like this is ultimately worse for everyone. Forget about school, there’s someone with a real job typing random bullshit into of ChatGPT and using it having no idea wtf he is talking about.
fooker 4y ago
This is easy to say once you already understand how to write essays.
- lampshades 4y ago
  If someone wants to learn how to write an essay they can more easily look it up on the most vast interconnected knowledge base that has ever existed. I don’t understand the continued need for knowledge/educational gatekeepers.
  - fooker 4y ago
    You can look up anything on the internet. The issue is figuring out what you want to look up. You are not going to suddenly realize that writing essays might teach you about presenting an argument in an organized manner if you have never had to write an essay.
  - 4y ago

0xbadc0de5 4y ago

Funny thing for Noam Chomsky to say when he himself hasn't had an original idea in decades.

specialist 4y ago

ChatGPT's ability to mass produce content just demonstrates the banality of most content. Ditto DALL-E et al. It reminds me of Dadaism. With the algorithms are the critics, vs the artists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada -- I also agree with other critical hot takes, like Ted Chiang's analogy "ChatGPT is jpeg style compression for text". A less accusatory framing than Chomsky's plagiarism thesis, more or less. -- I'm still chewing on the learning angle. Did adoption of calculators lead to less learning of arithmetic. Certainly. Was that a bad thing? I honestly don't know.

Spooky23 4y ago
> Did adoption of calculators lead to less learning of arithmetic. Certainly. Was that a bad thing? I honestly don't know. IMO it was bad for individuals, good for society. People are innumerate and that is exploited by people selling products and services.
- Version467 4y ago
  I don't understand how you get from here: > People are innumerate and that is exploited by people selling products and services. to here: > good for society Did I misunderstand your argument?
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    Maybe economy is a better word? In the short term, any ding dong punching into a calculator or Excel can do something productive cheaper than someone who knows what they are doing. An elderly relative was manager in a cash room at a regional bank. In the 70s… they had a huge cash room, that would accommodate 25’ trucks. When she started they were still doing manual counts, and eventually moved to tabulating machines. Each generation of tech eliminates a chunk of workforce. Instead of 5,000 clerks, that bank has 50 software engineers performing the same functions with a couple of dozen clerical staff.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

lordnacho 4y ago

You learn a lot from ChatGPT though. If you want to know the ordinary answer to some essay question, cgpt will give you that. If you leave it at that and hand it in, maybe Chomsky is right. But it's also a essay writing productivity tool. You sketch out what you want mentioned and cgpt will fill in the gaps, like those apprentices that helped the renaissance masters. I keep coming back to the phrase "small intentions" when I discuss cgpt: both in essays and code, it is already quite good at filling in details. With less time spent on details, students can spend more time on the architecture. Ultimately, we'll have more people able to practice higher level creativity. This is already a thing that you do in math class; after your primary school years, you get a calculator to work out the arithmetic.

smt88 4y ago
The problem with using ChatGPT for "filling in details" is how often it is confidently, utterly wrong. My friend tried to use it to write a legal letter and it completely invented a state law and cited it very specifically. For him, it was annoying and amusing. For other people, mistakes like that could be very serious.
mrfox321 4y ago
Is the high level structure of writing any more important than the low level structure? Maybe it will tend towards everyone sounding the same. Which then gets amplified as LLMs train on writing that is essentially mutations of itself. Me no like.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  > Is the high level structure of writing any more important than the low level structure? Well you can make a point about the fall of Rome with badly cited sources or spelling mistakes. But if your essay says Rome fell due to conquest by the Han dynasty it can't be saved by any number of correctly spelled, beautifully cited details. ChatGPT will let you write an essay making any point while filling in little things.
thundergolfer 4y ago
It sounds like you're advocating a system of education, thinking, and work that is exemplified by 'Software Architecture Astronauts', people who have not recently or ever contended with the details, the nuts and bolts, of actual software development and maintenance. To be honest, the idea that you can produce valuable intellectual work by outsourcing the details is absurd. This would have seen me absolutely fail my challenging philosophy and engineering coursework, and end up a fundamentally incompetent dilettante in work and life.

LeanderK 4y ago

I don't think the view that just because we can automate the creation of a simple essay makes writing essays for students obsolete. It's not what Chomsky said but I've heard the argument a lot in the context. We are not requiring it because everyone is writing essays all the time but because it's an important, basic skill. We can automate many math exercises, but it's still important to let students do it on their own. One absolutely need to learn to communicating their thoughts in a coherent way. To argument and to develop thoughts. If plagiarism is a overwhelming problem we will just see students having to write an essay with pen and paper just like you do our math exam. Then ChatGPT won't help you.

BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
So you don’t need it in life because you don’t do it, but it’s an important basic skill. Explain this belief.
- LeanderK 4y ago
  because it's not about the essay but the skills you need to write an essay. Many topics in school are not strictly needed, but important, either for your intellectual maturity or because they are used in other contexts.
  - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
    What skills.
bitwize 4y ago
> I don't think the view that just because we can automate the creation of a simple essay makes writing essays for students obsolete. It's not what Chomsky said but I've heard the argument a lot in the context. We are not requiring it because everyone is writing essays all the time but because it's an important, basic skill. I think there's something to be said for the view that ChatGPT makes the sort of simplistic, tedious essays typically assigned to K-12 students obsolete. Essay writing is fun, but school essays take the fun out of it, much as is the case with school math. School is corrosive to enjoyment of intellectual activity. This is by design: the primary purpose of school in the USA is to break the students' individuality so they learn to obey commands and submit to authority. Vital skills in every industry from construction and manufacturing to high tech. ChatGPT puts the lie to the idea that essays in standard formats on standard topics with standard argument structure should be how we teach kids to write, much like TI-83s put the lie to the idea that school-age math is mostly rote memorization and application with little conceptual thought. We will have to show them how to find their own personal voice and have it come through in their work. The ChatGPT era will require adjustment from educators. Again, remember Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, a 1950s kids' novel whose McGuffin was a supercomputer that functioned much like GPT: you asked it natural-language questions and it would type out answers. The computer was sabotaged such that it would answer in a way that was coherent and authoritative sounding, but wrong, challenging the young heroes to actually study to understand when and how the machine was wrong. ChatGPT poses similar challenges to today's kids, and if we want to teach them we will have to acknowledge and accommodate those challenges in the curriculum.

blululu 4y ago

This has a very old man yells at cloud vibr. We could debate whether Chomsky is really an authority on this topic given the course of history, but such a glib dismissal just lacks imagination. A very hard problem is now effectively solved the next steps hold a lot of promise.

_3u10 4y ago
One might say his colorless green ideas are no longer hegemonic in academia

molten_roll 4y ago

Joseph Stalin on chatGPT: this is heresy, exterminate computers

jlwarter 4y ago
[flagged]

niemandhier 4y ago

I predict the rise of what I call "mental obesity". Once the need to perform physical work vanished, those who did not consciously decide to train had a much higher chance of becoming obese. I expect that the mental capacities of some people will become less by the same effect. What we will see is a separation between those who are taught why they write and decide to comply and those who just take the easy way out.

Version467 4y ago
I like this term. It even extends to concepts like hyper-palatable foods, with the equivalent being hyper-palatable entertainment (like TikTok, or Youtube Shorts) that similarly short-circuits the brains reward loop.
thenoblesunfish 4y ago
On the other hand you might also see an increased interest in doing things with your brain (e.g. writing poetry or jokes) because it's rewarding, much as you see now with interest in endurance sports, climbing, etc. Or the interest in hand making things now that we produce most things with highly scaled abd automated processes.
flangola7 4y ago
[flagged]
- tarboreus 4y ago
  Sure, and do you see people memorizing Oddyssey-length works and reciting them anymore? Just because you live in the world of the lost does not mean there was no loss. For (much) more on this, look at Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong
thundergolfer 4y ago
Look at long term stats on mathematics ability and literacy in the rich western countries. It does not paint a good picture. Two things I know off the top of my head is that literacy scores in the SATs have trended slightly down over the past 40 years, for both low-achievers and high-achievers.[1] Australia, one of the richest countries in the world, is experiencing a multi-decade decline in mathematical standing[2]. Australia is fabulously rich, but is doing a worse and worse job of producing citizens that are numerate and understand mathematics. I haven't looked at literacy performance in the country, but I'd guess it's declining like it is in the USA, as Australia is subject to broadly the same pressures of political-economy and technology. 1. Cultural Literacy by E.D Hirsch Jr 2. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220517094842.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220517094842.h...

hallqv 4y ago

When will that old fart stop complaining...

RobotToaster 4y ago

I prefer Zizek's take on it: " that AI will be the death of learning & so on; to this, I say NO! My student brings me their essay, which has been written by AI, & I plug it into my grading AI, & we are free! While the 'learning' happens, our superego satisfied, we are free now to learn whatever we want"

thundergolfer 4y ago
Chomsky kind of hints at this in the interview. He says he doesn't have a problem at MIT with not having engaged students, and though he doesn't say it I think it's obvious that his MIT students are not subjected to typical economics-driven educational pressures. While other students are treating school as a means to a good salary and just want the highest marks for the least effort, Chomsky's graduate MIT students will be ignoring all that stuff and just having classic educational debate in essays and in conversation. With Zizek it's the same. He doesn't have to bother with disengaged students, students who are desperate for college attendance to grant them a ticket into the comfortable upper middle classes and care not for the substance of learning. You take Zizek classes because you actually like philosophy and want to engage with it.

thundergolfer 4y ago

This thread is already full of people throwing in their cheap takes by reading the headline or not even that. Listen to his answers. He's not making controversial claims, excepting the one that LLMs teach us nothing about language. He says: - ChatGPT makes it easier to cheat. This is obviously true. - ChatGPT is a method of avoiding learning. In the context of the interview he's referring to its use not as an information retreival tool but as an actual essay writing tool. If we consider the latter, this is again obviously true. Not writing your essays teaches you nothing about essay writing, the topic at hand, and the process of thinking. - LLMs teach us basically nothing about language. Seems controversial, but I'm not an expert at all. - Education is in trouble because students are not engaged in education. We need education systems that are actually interesting and engaging. Again, this is obviously true. - It's not obvious what value ChatGPT has. Kind of controversial, but I think it's not actually obvious that ChatGPT is currently most used for funny Tweets, SEO optimization, and marketing tools. So I think he's not really saying much to get angry about here.

williamcotton 4y ago
That ChatGPT is good at truthfully answering one kind of prompt (analytic, where the facts are contained in the prompt, so the task is translation) and bad at truthfully answering another kind of prompt (synthetic, where the facts are not contained in the prompt, so the task is synthesis), tells me something about the nature of language. It turns out that setting up solutions to math problems is mainly a language translation task, followed by computation task as long as you have a way to eval() the resulting thunk: Do not perform calculations. Do not compute the answer. Use Javascript Math and Date to perform calculations. Wait for further questions. Show your work in the DESCRIPTION. The number of steps in the %%%THUNK%%% should match the number of steps in the %%%DESCRIPTION%%%. Always answer with Javascript compatible code in the %%%THUNK%%%, including numerical form without commas (eg, 238572348723). Always answer with this JSON compatible object form, eg, {"key":%%%VALUE%%%}: { "question": "4 days a week, Laura practices martial arts for 1.5 hours. Considering a week is 7 days, what is her average practice time per day each week?", "description":["Multiplying 1.5 and 4", "Dividing the step 1 answer by 7"], "thunk": "(function() { const step1 = 1.5 * 4; const answer = step1 / 7; return answer; })()" } Analytic augmentation is the procedure by which a question is augmented in a manner that promotes translation over synthesis. That this can be tested empirically is definitely something novel with regards to the philosophy of language!

koolala 4y ago

I want to know how he views it's abilities and universal grammer :( It seems like he never talks about grammer concepts anymore. I'd love to see any recent ideas hes had on it.

RosanaAnaDana 4y ago

This exactly the kind of handwringing I would expect from Chomsky. His theories of intelligence are quickly being made irrelevant.

lvl102 4y ago

My counter would be that AI is going to allow us to move forward with creativity. It’s going to effectively rewire our brains. In the past, we put a lot of emphasis on “random access memory” and memorization was actually a valued skill. Fast forward to today, and I think memorization is not all that useful. So what does AI chat do for us? Answering that is quite literally the next trillion dollar market in development right now.

jlwarter 4y ago

People appear to be angry with Chomsky, but I do not understand the reason. If you want to learn anything about a topic, even a Wikipedia article is superior to ChatGPT. The whole allure of ChatGPT is that people develop a parasocial relationship and feel that they learn by communicating. That is of course an illusion.

the_only_law 4y ago
> but I do not understand the reason. Some people get mad if you talk down on their favorite new toy.