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The difference between spell checking and fact checking is in what you're checking against: the facts of grammar or the facts of the world. I don't see any qua

The difference between spell checking and fact checking is in what you're checking against: the facts of grammar or the facts of the world. I don't see any qualitative difference between them. The data is facts, the output is either "correct" or "wrong", and the function from one to the other is the model. What do we gain from calling one of them "truth function" and the other "grammar function"? What makes that relevant to reasoning?

Jensson 4y ago
> I don't see any qualitative difference between them. You don't see any qualitative difference between fact checking or spell checking a text? Well then you are a lost cause, we can't discuss this any longer. Basically every human understands that those two are qualitatively different, if you don't then you are so alien to most human thinking that we can't discuss this further, there will be no common ground.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  Well, it's a shame, because I thought you were really on to something. No, I don't see a qualitative difference. There is a huge quantitative difference because the facts that describe the world overwhelm the facts that make up language, but that doesn't obviously make a connection to reasoning clear.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    Extreme quantitative differences results in qualitative difference. Anyway, just realized that you side-tracked the whole conversation by moving it into comparing them to each other. That discussion isn't relevant here. We are talking about a truth model directly, not whether it resembles a truth model in some ways. A spellchecker and a truth checker are both evaluators, but that doesn't mean that a spellchecker is a truth checker or vice versa. Therefore it is wrong to say that ChatGPT has a truth model, since it doesn't evaluate what we call truth, it evaluates the structure of the text not the truth of the text. Evaluators returns a boolean or some number, but that "true" or "false" are just programmatic terms, that isn't want humans normally consider trueness of falseness. Otherwise you would call any evaluator a "truth checker", since they check if the result is a true boolean. You could do that, but that doesn't make sense for this discussion, since we care about truth and false in the world, not in programmatic terms. Edit: As for why this is relevant for ChatGPT smartness. It is because we know how to evaluate text structure now, that is the new thing with ChatGPT. But we still don't know how to evaluate the truth of a text, ChatGPT can evaluate the structure but we have no way of turning a structure evaluator into a truth evaluator. We need another kind of model to start evaluating the truth of statements, and until then AI's like ChatGPT will continue to make up facts, since they have no idea what a fact is.
    - rhn_mk1 4y ago
      This is why the difference between "truth" and "grammar" is relevant: because if they are instances of the same thing, then processing one is equivalent to processing the other. Thus, if we can find a way to move from "grammar" to "truth", then we can say that ChatGPT has a truth model. (Which I still don't really know why it's needed for reasoning.) The separation into "structure" and "truth" sounds likes it makes a difference. But when I think about it, I'm unable to clearly delineate them. When I proofread something, and I find wrong grammar structure, I correct it. When I find a wrong truth structure like contradiction (internal or against what I know), I can correct it, too. In the end, I use the same tools: the document under analysis, and the set of facts making up the template against which I'm checking. This makes me think that "grammar structure" and "truth structure", again, don't differ in quality. Thus, ChatGPT's knowledge about grammar can be treated as knowledge about its world.
      - Jensson 4y ago
        > Thus, if we can find a way to move from "grammar" to "truth", then we can say that ChatGPT has a truth model. (Which I still don't really know why it's needed for reasoning.) Yes, but you would need to find that first, we don't have that, until you find that we don't have a truth model. Maybe it is enough to train a model like ChatGPT on factful texts and run it as a fact checker, we don't know, it could be worth trying but until we have done it we don't have a truth checking model. Edit: > Which I still don't really know why it's needed for reasoning We don't know why anything is needed for reasoning. But it is pretty easy to guess that having a fact checking model instead of just a text structure evaluator would greatly improve reasoning skills in a model. Maybe a fact checker is all ChatGPT would need to replace most knowledge workers? That seems very probable to me, so at least I think that a fact checker layer is needed for higher level reasoning.
        rhn_mk1 4y ago
        > factful texts That might be the problem here. Humans can't agree on facts apart from some very basic ones, so I'd argue we don't have truly "factful texts" at all. We have our own definitions of truth, and they are all built on flawed data. If factful texts are needed to have a model of truth, then humans don't have one, either. Or at least then humans have imperfect models of truth informed by the training data, and, as far as I know, this fits ChatGPT as well. > pretty easy to guess that having a fact checking model instead of just a text structure evaluator would greatly improve reasoning I read this as "feeding the model better data will improve things" - after all, I just explained that I see fact checking and structure evaluation as effectively the same kind of a task. And with that in mind, I do agree with this guess :)
- coldtea 4y ago
  >You don't see any qualitative difference between fact checking or spell checking a text? Well then you are a lost cause, we can't discuss this any longer Yes, it's difficult to discuss if you take for a given what you're supposed to prove/argue about...
  - Jensson 4y ago
    That is exactly the point, by posting that I got you to admit you see it that way, ensuring that we know what we disagree about. That is the point of the argument, to figure out the parts that makes us disagree, so now we are done here, you think that everything is a truth model, I disagree, and everyone reading this can see our points clearly and no longer have to wonder what to think. So now we know that when you say "ChatGPT has a truth model", what you really mean is "ChatGPT is a function". Thanks, now I can agree with you, ChatGPT is a function, thanks for clarifying!

Jensson 4y ago

> I don't see any qualitative difference between them. You don't see any qualitative difference between fact checking or spell checking a text? Well then you are a lost cause, we can't discuss this any longer. Basically every human understands that those two are qualitatively different, if you don't then you are so alien to most human thinking that we can't discuss this further, there will be no common ground.

rhn_mk1 4y ago
Well, it's a shame, because I thought you were really on to something. No, I don't see a qualitative difference. There is a huge quantitative difference because the facts that describe the world overwhelm the facts that make up language, but that doesn't obviously make a connection to reasoning clear.
- Jensson 4y ago
  Extreme quantitative differences results in qualitative difference. Anyway, just realized that you side-tracked the whole conversation by moving it into comparing them to each other. That discussion isn't relevant here. We are talking about a truth model directly, not whether it resembles a truth model in some ways. A spellchecker and a truth checker are both evaluators, but that doesn't mean that a spellchecker is a truth checker or vice versa. Therefore it is wrong to say that ChatGPT has a truth model, since it doesn't evaluate what we call truth, it evaluates the structure of the text not the truth of the text. Evaluators returns a boolean or some number, but that "true" or "false" are just programmatic terms, that isn't want humans normally consider trueness of falseness. Otherwise you would call any evaluator a "truth checker", since they check if the result is a true boolean. You could do that, but that doesn't make sense for this discussion, since we care about truth and false in the world, not in programmatic terms. Edit: As for why this is relevant for ChatGPT smartness. It is because we know how to evaluate text structure now, that is the new thing with ChatGPT. But we still don't know how to evaluate the truth of a text, ChatGPT can evaluate the structure but we have no way of turning a structure evaluator into a truth evaluator. We need another kind of model to start evaluating the truth of statements, and until then AI's like ChatGPT will continue to make up facts, since they have no idea what a fact is.
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    This is why the difference between "truth" and "grammar" is relevant: because if they are instances of the same thing, then processing one is equivalent to processing the other. Thus, if we can find a way to move from "grammar" to "truth", then we can say that ChatGPT has a truth model. (Which I still don't really know why it's needed for reasoning.) The separation into "structure" and "truth" sounds likes it makes a difference. But when I think about it, I'm unable to clearly delineate them. When I proofread something, and I find wrong grammar structure, I correct it. When I find a wrong truth structure like contradiction (internal or against what I know), I can correct it, too. In the end, I use the same tools: the document under analysis, and the set of facts making up the template against which I'm checking. This makes me think that "grammar structure" and "truth structure", again, don't differ in quality. Thus, ChatGPT's knowledge about grammar can be treated as knowledge about its world.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      > Thus, if we can find a way to move from "grammar" to "truth", then we can say that ChatGPT has a truth model. (Which I still don't really know why it's needed for reasoning.) Yes, but you would need to find that first, we don't have that, until you find that we don't have a truth model. Maybe it is enough to train a model like ChatGPT on factful texts and run it as a fact checker, we don't know, it could be worth trying but until we have done it we don't have a truth checking model. Edit: > Which I still don't really know why it's needed for reasoning We don't know why anything is needed for reasoning. But it is pretty easy to guess that having a fact checking model instead of just a text structure evaluator would greatly improve reasoning skills in a model. Maybe a fact checker is all ChatGPT would need to replace most knowledge workers? That seems very probable to me, so at least I think that a fact checker layer is needed for higher level reasoning.
      - rhn_mk1 4y ago
        > factful texts That might be the problem here. Humans can't agree on facts apart from some very basic ones, so I'd argue we don't have truly "factful texts" at all. We have our own definitions of truth, and they are all built on flawed data. If factful texts are needed to have a model of truth, then humans don't have one, either. Or at least then humans have imperfect models of truth informed by the training data, and, as far as I know, this fits ChatGPT as well. > pretty easy to guess that having a fact checking model instead of just a text structure evaluator would greatly improve reasoning I read this as "feeding the model better data will improve things" - after all, I just explained that I see fact checking and structure evaluation as effectively the same kind of a task. And with that in mind, I do agree with this guess :)
coldtea 4y ago
>You don't see any qualitative difference between fact checking or spell checking a text? Well then you are a lost cause, we can't discuss this any longer Yes, it's difficult to discuss if you take for a given what you're supposed to prove/argue about...
- Jensson 4y ago
  That is exactly the point, by posting that I got you to admit you see it that way, ensuring that we know what we disagree about. That is the point of the argument, to figure out the parts that makes us disagree, so now we are done here, you think that everything is a truth model, I disagree, and everyone reading this can see our points clearly and no longer have to wonder what to think. So now we know that when you say "ChatGPT has a truth model", what you really mean is "ChatGPT is a function". Thanks, now I can agree with you, ChatGPT is a function, thanks for clarifying!