4 ms·

I don't disagree but it's such a shit advancement. It eschews making technology & understanding closer. It amplifies our capabilities yes, but in 99.99999% of c

I don't disagree but it's such a shit advancement. It eschews making technology & understanding closer. It amplifies our capabilities yes, but in 99.99999% of cases in deep violation of Engelbartian principles: it's not intellectual augmentation, it doesn't extend how we think, it thinks for us. It's revilesome & further unhinges & decouples us from the real world. It's an alien, a remote expert system, that 0.1% of the 0.1% of AI practioners have even the faintest real-ish understanding of. It is a fantastic expert, of deep experience, but it is an idiot savant, and no peer in lifting us up as well. I have never been sadder to see a technology. I lived through the seemingly incredibly short term of Personal Computing which seemingly is at it's final ends, first eroded by online-services & Service-as-a-Software-Substitute (SaaSS), and now fatalitied in a Mortal Kombat style by idiot machines fed on the immolent corpus of the internet of posts. A system which seems all too destined to radically outstrip the pop-culture-will-eat-itself idea with a new ultra-hyper-self-consuming internetworked online-content-will-be-begat-by-AIs-begat-by-online-content Oroborous. None of this shit informs. None of it makes clear. None of it raises human consciousness. It's the best monkey on a type-writer the universe-we-know has ever seen, but it's utterly without soul or character or purpose, is a refined regurgatory mimic devoid of purpose. This is the worst thing to happen to technology. And humanity will spend the rest of my life obsessing over it & fascinated with it. It's all bad magic. It's all against-the-cause. This is the worst shadow-puppet machine humankind has ever invented, and it's visage chains us to the wall. Do Not Want.

textninja 4y ago
[flagged]
jodrellblank 4y ago
> "None of this shit informs. None of it makes clear." Ask it to inform and make clear, ChatGPT can do explanations. Prompt: "I have heard people say "c'est ne pas un pipe" has deep meaning, can you explain simply to me?" Answer: "The phrase "c'est ne pas un pipe" is a French sentence that means "this is not a pipe." It is a famous statement by the Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte, who painted a picture of a pipe with the words "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe") written underneath. The meaning behind the phrase is often interpreted as a commentary on the nature of representation and reality. Magritte's painting is not actually a pipe, but a representation of a pipe. The painting can never be smoked, and therefore it is not a pipe in the literal sense. The phrase "C'est ne pas un pipe" challenges the viewer's assumptions about the relationship between words, images, and reality, and invites them to question the nature of representation. In other words, the phrase suggests that there is a difference between an object or idea and its representation, and that the representation is not the same thing as the real thing. This idea can be applied to many aspects of life, such as language, art, and even our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us." It connected my broken French with the correct sentence, translated it, put it in context of who said it and when, and expanded into a coherent and correct explanation of some deeper meaning. That's a better explanation than a monkey-on-type-writer or Markov chain simple token-predictor has any right to give, isn't it? > "it's not intellectual augmentation, it doesn't extend how we think, it thinks for us" Ever had the experience where you recognise a famous person's face on TV but can't think who they are, wait for a while, and then the answer 'comes to you'? That is "thinking for myself" but it's not me actively doing anything, it's magic information retrieval that happens to me. I'm not sure what the act of thinking consists of ("when I went to bed, I lay awake, doing something I call thinking but probably is not." - JOB, Robert Heinlein); what do you have in mind for a machine 'extending how we think'?
- rektide 4y ago
  > Prompt: "I have heard people say "c'est ne pas un pipe" has deep meaning, can you explain simply to me?" This is a topic that the academic & internet worlds have both tread a million times over. That the AIs can find some relevant selections in it's memory banks & regurgitate some synopsis does not impress me. And worse, none of this alien intelligence's conclusions are in any way original or distinct: they're all blank boring averages. A ranked selection of the variety of existing models that it's embedded within itself. I could not be less impressed. I could not be sadder to see such vacuous crap hyped. > That is "thinking for myself" but it's not me actively doing anything, it's magic information retrieval that happens to me. The case you describe is just recall. What is exceptional about humans & intellect isn't recall, but connection, & association. I too am not sure what the act of thinking consists of, but in almost all cases I respect there's at least some reminisce of the influences, some distillation of points of view where ideas came from. And machine learning is bereft of this point of view, is it's own weird expert universe, that does nothing to express itself usefully. It's all barren. It's stochastics. Without referent. Shame on us. Do you want a shitty lo-fi hyper-reality? This is how you get a shitty lo-fi hyper-reality. Where regurgitation of prominent symbols overtakes the real. By having idiot machines who have no conception of real fictate to us their idiot perspectives.
  - dieselgate 4y ago
    Yo rektide thanks for your honest words, this evening on HN I’ve read many critical comments about chat bots and am glad to see them.They’re inline with my own opinions but separately it’s refreshing to see people elaborate on these points from different angles. There was also a post titled “what’s your hottake on chatgpt” or something and everything (at time of writing) is relatively critical of the technology and the future impact. It’s just such a strange time right now. I’m certainly impressed with the technology-side of things but it just leaves me feeling flat. Meanwhile at work today a manager broke the beginning silence of a meeting with “so who’s gonna try out the new Google Bard?”; blink, table flip. But also HN audience is probably way oversaturated on this stuff by now. “This is not intelligence”
  - jodrellblank 4y ago
senectus1 4y ago
its early days... it will get better, and it will get better faster and faster. this is what terrifies most people the most. its limitation is mostly resources. If we hooked it up to a robot and funds... we'd have a Matrioshka brain / Dyson Sphere probably by the end of the century.
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  ...or we're witnessing the beginning of the end of the "Information" age. I can really foresee a situation coming in the not too distant future where scarce amounts of high quality, properly verified information are very highly regarded and shared amongst experts in fairly closed loops. Remember captcha ? Which is a huge source of training material for self driving cars ? Yeah that’s gone. Newspapers with verification chips built in so you know it’s from a trusted printing press.
  - senectus1 4y ago
    >Remember captcha ? Which is a huge source of training material for self driving cars ? really? I honestly don't believe this was ever a thing. it makes no sense at all.
sockaddr 4y ago
I’m sorry but it sounds like you’re failing to understand how to use a new tool. I’ve been using it for the past week to “inform” me how to do various tasks, transform my local data and generally combine new concepts in unique and sometimes funny ways. It has taught me, it has saved me time, and it has inspired me. You have to put at least a little effort into coaxing it. All that said, yes.. it is still basically autocomplete, but also useful sometimes.
- rektide 4y ago
  Who has made clear the new tools value? What clear portraits are there of it, not just being a code-generator but of assistant-ating use? I'm fine being wrong here. But just being a mean dispirited bastard rejecting my premise out of spite & providing zero helpful indicators is a barren shitty pathetic attempt to dismiss me. Say something real we can talk about, show some possibility. Of substantiate-able substance. There is literally nothing concrete I can reply to in your fluff. Maybe your experience really means something & is real. But there's no case made for or against that. You haven't made any case for yourself. There's no clear correlating examples. You've crowed up a belief, without support or cause. So far I'm not sure which if any of these systems even can look at your code. What have you seen that can?
  - rektide 4y ago
    Permit me to rephrase... Someone has to present a case. My only case so far is that there is no case, there is no value, this is un-creationist & regurgatory. We can both accept that my premise might not be right. Who has the obligation here to present evidence? Is having no good evidence but maybe no clear negatives an acceptable counter to my claims? Are there more forward stances I need to consider & deal with? Or is your whole premise about as it seems, a shade-throwing you-don't-know "trust-me"? What would possibly satisfy you, how far would I have to go trying stuff before you could say, OK, yeah, your right, it's indeed predominantly mostly bunk? Who do you think has the decision? Do you have evidence to contribute? Is lack of anti-evidence, the possibility of maybe all you want? How do we decide this?
  - jhanschoo 4y ago
Zandikar 4y ago
> I don't disagree but it's such a shit advancement. It eschews making technology & understanding closer. I'm pretty sure the EXACT Same argument was made after the invention and proliferation of the assembly line and industrial mass production. > It's an alien, a remote expert system, that 0.1% of the 0.1% of AI practioners have even the faintest real-ish understanding of Just because a novel new technology seems alien to you, and people are still figuring it out when its brand new doesn't mean it's ungrokkable or that we can't train and develop ways to better understand, design, use, diagnose, etc AI systems. > None of this shit informs ... it's utterly without soul or character or purpose, Outright false and demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of what Machine Learning is and can be used for. Again, just because you don't understand doesn't mean no one else does or can. A tool does not need a soul to find a purpose, and the purpose you find for it need not be the purpose that it was originally intended for it to still be of use and provide value. > And humanity will spend the rest of my life obsessing over it & fascinated with it. Yes, welcome to technology. This particular one is going to change society, in big ways, for better or worse, but is absolutely extremely useful, purposeful, and full of potential.
sickcodebruh 4y ago
I love the way this response is written and agree with a lot of it, but I wonder if you are conflating the effusive press reaction to the technology with the reality of how it is most practically used right now. The press reaction screams “IT’S ALMOST LIKE US!” The reality is that there is a powerful but subtle gap between stringing together words in context (even helpful words) and decision-making. Everyone who’s used the tools has seen this but the experience of using it is still powerfully evocative, making our brains go haywire as we mentally bridge the gap between where it is and where it could be. The companies building these tools lean into our imaginations — it’s hard to get multi-billion dollar valuations on “it’s like autocomplete but really really good at it” — and the press does for similar reasons. Your response strikes me as more of a critique of this than the tool itself. My experience with the modern tools is that they are capable of assisting with many tasks in relatively surface level ways. It’s still extremely impressive but it hasn’t done anything truly new or creative. GitHub Copilot helps with boilerplate, comments, and tests, but it hallucinates so much that I leave it disabled a good 50% of the time. ChatGPT will throw words at me when I’m blocked writing song lyrics, which never gives me anything usable but it does help me think from different perspectives. They can help rapidly spin up a prototype, using “understanding” of docs and prompts to write code. But none of it can be trusted because of its hallucinations, none of it makes me fear for my job. It’s a utility akin to autocomplete, or intellisense, a super advanced compiler. (Somewhat aside, it’s telling that we live in an age where the press and the industry are falling over themselves raving about ChatGPT while we’re still struggling with troll farms and spam bots manipulating discourse. We shouldn’t be surprised that many can’t differentiate between extremely capable word association coming from code and humans crafting ideas when we’re unable to recognize bad actors deliberately engaging in bad faith arguments online.) My downgraded interpretations and expectations aside, I honestly do think it’s exciting and brilliant, I reach for it all the time, and I can’t wait for a more capable Siri and better integration into productivity tools. But it’s not intelligence and I think we should be careful to separate hype from reality.

textninja 4y ago

[flagged]

jodrellblank 4y ago

> "None of this shit informs. None of it makes clear." Ask it to inform and make clear, ChatGPT can do explanations. Prompt: "I have heard people say "c'est ne pas un pipe" has deep meaning, can you explain simply to me?" Answer: "The phrase "c'est ne pas un pipe" is a French sentence that means "this is not a pipe." It is a famous statement by the Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte, who painted a picture of a pipe with the words "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe") written underneath. The meaning behind the phrase is often interpreted as a commentary on the nature of representation and reality. Magritte's painting is not actually a pipe, but a representation of a pipe. The painting can never be smoked, and therefore it is not a pipe in the literal sense. The phrase "C'est ne pas un pipe" challenges the viewer's assumptions about the relationship between words, images, and reality, and invites them to question the nature of representation. In other words, the phrase suggests that there is a difference between an object or idea and its representation, and that the representation is not the same thing as the real thing. This idea can be applied to many aspects of life, such as language, art, and even our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us." It connected my broken French with the correct sentence, translated it, put it in context of who said it and when, and expanded into a coherent and correct explanation of some deeper meaning. That's a better explanation than a monkey-on-type-writer or Markov chain simple token-predictor has any right to give, isn't it? > "it's not intellectual augmentation, it doesn't extend how we think, it thinks for us" Ever had the experience where you recognise a famous person's face on TV but can't think who they are, wait for a while, and then the answer 'comes to you'? That is "thinking for myself" but it's not me actively doing anything, it's magic information retrieval that happens to me. I'm not sure what the act of thinking consists of ("when I went to bed, I lay awake, doing something I call thinking but probably is not." - JOB, Robert Heinlein); what do you have in mind for a machine 'extending how we think'?

rektide 4y ago
> Prompt: "I have heard people say "c'est ne pas un pipe" has deep meaning, can you explain simply to me?" This is a topic that the academic & internet worlds have both tread a million times over. That the AIs can find some relevant selections in it's memory banks & regurgitate some synopsis does not impress me. And worse, none of this alien intelligence's conclusions are in any way original or distinct: they're all blank boring averages. A ranked selection of the variety of existing models that it's embedded within itself. I could not be less impressed. I could not be sadder to see such vacuous crap hyped. > That is "thinking for myself" but it's not me actively doing anything, it's magic information retrieval that happens to me. The case you describe is just recall. What is exceptional about humans & intellect isn't recall, but connection, & association. I too am not sure what the act of thinking consists of, but in almost all cases I respect there's at least some reminisce of the influences, some distillation of points of view where ideas came from. And machine learning is bereft of this point of view, is it's own weird expert universe, that does nothing to express itself usefully. It's all barren. It's stochastics. Without referent. Shame on us. Do you want a shitty lo-fi hyper-reality? This is how you get a shitty lo-fi hyper-reality. Where regurgitation of prominent symbols overtakes the real. By having idiot machines who have no conception of real fictate to us their idiot perspectives.
- dieselgate 4y ago
  Yo rektide thanks for your honest words, this evening on HN I’ve read many critical comments about chat bots and am glad to see them.They’re inline with my own opinions but separately it’s refreshing to see people elaborate on these points from different angles. There was also a post titled “what’s your hottake on chatgpt” or something and everything (at time of writing) is relatively critical of the technology and the future impact. It’s just such a strange time right now. I’m certainly impressed with the technology-side of things but it just leaves me feeling flat. Meanwhile at work today a manager broke the beginning silence of a meeting with “so who’s gonna try out the new Google Bard?”; blink, table flip. But also HN audience is probably way oversaturated on this stuff by now. “This is not intelligence”
- jodrellblank 4y ago

senectus1 4y ago

its early days... it will get better, and it will get better faster and faster. this is what terrifies most people the most. its limitation is mostly resources. If we hooked it up to a robot and funds... we'd have a Matrioshka brain / Dyson Sphere probably by the end of the century.

ChatGTP 4y ago
...or we're witnessing the beginning of the end of the "Information" age. I can really foresee a situation coming in the not too distant future where scarce amounts of high quality, properly verified information are very highly regarded and shared amongst experts in fairly closed loops. Remember captcha ? Which is a huge source of training material for self driving cars ? Yeah that’s gone. Newspapers with verification chips built in so you know it’s from a trusted printing press.
- senectus1 4y ago
  >Remember captcha ? Which is a huge source of training material for self driving cars ? really? I honestly don't believe this was ever a thing. it makes no sense at all.

sockaddr 4y ago

I’m sorry but it sounds like you’re failing to understand how to use a new tool. I’ve been using it for the past week to “inform” me how to do various tasks, transform my local data and generally combine new concepts in unique and sometimes funny ways. It has taught me, it has saved me time, and it has inspired me. You have to put at least a little effort into coaxing it. All that said, yes.. it is still basically autocomplete, but also useful sometimes.

rektide 4y ago
Who has made clear the new tools value? What clear portraits are there of it, not just being a code-generator but of assistant-ating use? I'm fine being wrong here. But just being a mean dispirited bastard rejecting my premise out of spite & providing zero helpful indicators is a barren shitty pathetic attempt to dismiss me. Say something real we can talk about, show some possibility. Of substantiate-able substance. There is literally nothing concrete I can reply to in your fluff. Maybe your experience really means something & is real. But there's no case made for or against that. You haven't made any case for yourself. There's no clear correlating examples. You've crowed up a belief, without support or cause. So far I'm not sure which if any of these systems even can look at your code. What have you seen that can?
- rektide 4y ago
  Permit me to rephrase... Someone has to present a case. My only case so far is that there is no case, there is no value, this is un-creationist & regurgatory. We can both accept that my premise might not be right. Who has the obligation here to present evidence? Is having no good evidence but maybe no clear negatives an acceptable counter to my claims? Are there more forward stances I need to consider & deal with? Or is your whole premise about as it seems, a shade-throwing you-don't-know "trust-me"? What would possibly satisfy you, how far would I have to go trying stuff before you could say, OK, yeah, your right, it's indeed predominantly mostly bunk? Who do you think has the decision? Do you have evidence to contribute? Is lack of anti-evidence, the possibility of maybe all you want? How do we decide this?
- jhanschoo 4y ago

Zandikar 4y ago

> I don't disagree but it's such a shit advancement. It eschews making technology & understanding closer. I'm pretty sure the EXACT Same argument was made after the invention and proliferation of the assembly line and industrial mass production. > It's an alien, a remote expert system, that 0.1% of the 0.1% of AI practioners have even the faintest real-ish understanding of Just because a novel new technology seems alien to you, and people are still figuring it out when its brand new doesn't mean it's ungrokkable or that we can't train and develop ways to better understand, design, use, diagnose, etc AI systems. > None of this shit informs ... it's utterly without soul or character or purpose, Outright false and demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of what Machine Learning is and can be used for. Again, just because you don't understand doesn't mean no one else does or can. A tool does not need a soul to find a purpose, and the purpose you find for it need not be the purpose that it was originally intended for it to still be of use and provide value. > And humanity will spend the rest of my life obsessing over it & fascinated with it. Yes, welcome to technology. This particular one is going to change society, in big ways, for better or worse, but is absolutely extremely useful, purposeful, and full of potential.

sickcodebruh 4y ago

I love the way this response is written and agree with a lot of it, but I wonder if you are conflating the effusive press reaction to the technology with the reality of how it is most practically used right now. The press reaction screams “IT’S ALMOST LIKE US!” The reality is that there is a powerful but subtle gap between stringing together words in context (even helpful words) and decision-making. Everyone who’s used the tools has seen this but the experience of using it is still powerfully evocative, making our brains go haywire as we mentally bridge the gap between where it is and where it could be. The companies building these tools lean into our imaginations — it’s hard to get multi-billion dollar valuations on “it’s like autocomplete but really really good at it” — and the press does for similar reasons. Your response strikes me as more of a critique of this than the tool itself. My experience with the modern tools is that they are capable of assisting with many tasks in relatively surface level ways. It’s still extremely impressive but it hasn’t done anything truly new or creative. GitHub Copilot helps with boilerplate, comments, and tests, but it hallucinates so much that I leave it disabled a good 50% of the time. ChatGPT will throw words at me when I’m blocked writing song lyrics, which never gives me anything usable but it does help me think from different perspectives. They can help rapidly spin up a prototype, using “understanding” of docs and prompts to write code. But none of it can be trusted because of its hallucinations, none of it makes me fear for my job. It’s a utility akin to autocomplete, or intellisense, a super advanced compiler. (Somewhat aside, it’s telling that we live in an age where the press and the industry are falling over themselves raving about ChatGPT while we’re still struggling with troll farms and spam bots manipulating discourse. We shouldn’t be surprised that many can’t differentiate between extremely capable word association coming from code and humans crafting ideas when we’re unable to recognize bad actors deliberately engaging in bad faith arguments online.) My downgraded interpretations and expectations aside, I honestly do think it’s exciting and brilliant, I reach for it all the time, and I can’t wait for a more capable Siri and better integration into productivity tools. But it’s not intelligence and I think we should be careful to separate hype from reality.