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I'm not an AI skeptic (this stuff will change the world), but I'm not as impressed as the author. The primary problem, which seems common to LLMs asked to do t

I'm not an AI skeptic (this stuff will change the world), but I'm not as impressed as the author. The primary problem, which seems common to LLMs asked to do this stuff, is "very high level output" - a content smoothie, with few features that are particularly specific to the prompt. The marketing campaign in the OP is so generic, you can `s/Saturn Parable/Any other educational product` and it's still "fine". Similarly the emails - there are 1 to 2 sentences that are product specific, and a bunch of fluff. If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very disappointed. The LLM isn't demonstrating much more than "Generic templating ability over a large range of templates" in this instance. Whilst that's probably 50% of the jobs in the world, such jobs were already at risk of someone searching for "Basic X template" and expanding the placeholders themselves. I think I could do a similar job in 30 minutes by doing exactly that. LLM's main wins seem to be providing a single unified entry point to all the templates in the universe. It's a "Universal UI", rather than a "Content creator". I guess I shouldn't discount the value of such a thing, once we get the "Sometimes it just lies" problem under control. The most interesting immediate thing here is the image generation - that's pretty good, and a big saving over scraping through stock images. I suspect the demise of stock image providers to be the first palpable win for generative AIs, if the copyright question doesn't bog this whole field down.

rybosworld 4y ago
"I suspect the demise of stock image providers to be the first palpable win for generative AIs, if the copyright question doesn't bog this whole field down" I'm surprised the copyright issues aren't given more attention. It's technically not legal (in the US) to modify copyrighted images without the authors permission. I don't see how it's possible that systems like DALL-E haven't already done that. There's a near 0% chance that they aren't trained on at least one copyrighted image.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  Getty's case is active in the court system in multiple jurisdictions, until we get there outcome of that weren't not going to have a resolution of this. Unless countries legislate/decide to allow training on publicly accessible documents, eg as Fair Use/Fair Dealing or whatever. In short, the copyright issues appear to be given a lot of attention? Legal precedent takes time.
- dist-epoch 4y ago
  Humans photographers are also trained on copyrighted images. They look at countless numbers of them and learn what is the correct "professional style", etc. This is why you can instantly recognize most stock photos, because they all follow the "stock photo template".
  - rybosworld 4y ago
    Copyright law doesn't work like that for photos. When you take a photo of something you become the owner of the image. In the context of AI, the issue is specifically with using a copyrighted image and creating something new based off of that. That is explicitly illegal for human artists.
    - dist-epoch 4y ago
      > something new based off of that But where do you draw the line? If AI imagines 3 people around a business table in front of a flip chart, is that copyright infringement on similar stock photos? Note that in the AI created image, the people are unique, they never existed, the business table is unique, the flip chart is unique, and in general you can't point to any existing photo it was trained over and say "it just copied this item here". If so, why isn't it also copyright infringement when a human photographer stages another similar shot?
      - rybosworld 4y ago
        "But where do you draw the line" Well that's sort of the whole thing with copyright law. It's fairly arbitrary. Copyright specifically forbids derivative works: "A derivative work is a work based on or derived from one or more already exist- ing works." It's vague on purpose because copyright infringements generally need to be handled on a case by case basis. Now there are AI's trained on images that are copyrighted. If the image is copyrighted, should the AI have been allowed to train on it? The reason human training/inspiration isn't specifically forbidden is because it can't be. We are impressioned by things whether we like it or not. Regardless, we can't prove where someone's inspiration came from. But the act of training an AI on copyrighted images is deliberate. I feel that's a key difference.
- Joeri 4y ago
  Isn’t it just fair use? Reading the four factor test for fair use it seems like these generative models should be able to pass the test, if each artwork contributes only a small part to a transformative model that generates novel output. The onus will be on demonstrating that the model does not reproduce works wholesale on demand, which currently they sometimes still do. Arguably also, the copy is achieved at generation time, not training time, so the copyright violation is not in making the model or distributing it, but in using it to create copies of artworks. The human artist is the same: in their brain is encoded the knowledge to create forbidden works, but it is only the act of creating the work which is illegal, not the ability. The model creators might still be liable for contributory infringement though. Anyway, I reject the notion that any use of unlicensed copyrighted works in training models is wrong. That to me seems like the homeopathic theory of copyright, it’s just silly. If copyright works that way we might as well put a cross over AGI ever being legal.
  - rybosworld 4y ago
    Should the model be allowed to train on the copyrighted image in the first place? I think, the answer is no. If I'm an artist, I don't volunteer my art for you to do what you please. Now consider that these systems are already being used for profit, before this matter has even been settled.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  This will take years for the courts to figure out. In the mean time, Adobe Firely has apparently not been trained on anything copyrighted, so people that are nervous about lawsuits will use that.
ozim 4y ago
I would like to follow up on "Universal UI" where with Microsoft including this stuff in Office 365 it will kill all kinds of apps/plugins. This is huge and as a software developer I am now not worried that GPT or AI will write code instead of me. Big change will be that big companies/small companies/average people won't need as many applications anymore. Software devs as I read various comments fixate on "AI writing code" too much, where real threat will be that lots of code will never be needed anymore.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  > real threat will be that lots of code will never be needed anymore. That's a very good point. Also, I am working in a very small team, developing a free app, for a nonprofit. I will be suggesting to our CEO, that he consider ways to use AI to multiply the various things we need to do, in order to polish and launch the app. We have a tiny, part-time team (except for Yours Truly), so there's a ton of "polishing the fenders" stuff that takes forever. I will suggest that he consider using ChatGPT (or some of the other engines) to do some of this work.
  - kfrzcode 4y ago
    Why not just... Use ChatGPT and get the work done
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      If you think so. It seems many people think this. Time will tell, if this PoV is valid. I can tell you that a flashy, sexy demo, is not the same thing as shipping code. A number of comments state that the quality of the output is fairly sparse, and amateurish, but this was also a very fast, thirty-minute demo of a marketing workflow, subjected to basic AI tools. This article was the equivalent of those "Write an app in two hours" seminar/bootcamps. Valid, but also constrained by the need to teach, and to get done within a certain amount of time. Very strict guardrails, and keep your hands inside the car at all times. I have taken many, many of these courses, and have given a few. I'm quite aware of the difference between what we produce in a class, and what I'd hand to a customer. What I think we'll be seeing, quite soon, is "one-person shops," acting as studios/agencies that will take on jobs normally done by large shops. Like bootcamp babes that go out, thinking that they can now deliver a full-fat app to customers, many will fail. But some will succeed. Lots of smart, hungry people, out there. We'll look at what can be done with these tools (which, I should add, are still very much in their infancy. You ain't seen nuthin', yet). I don't think they'll be able to write the deliverables, yet, but that's OK. I think we may be able to leverage them to make those deliverables much more polished and robust.
sweezyjeezy 4y ago
> The primary problem, which seems common to LLMs asked to do this stuff, is "very high level output" - a content smoothie, with few features that are particularly specific to the prompt. The marketing campaign in the OP is so generic, you can `s/Saturn Parable/Any other educational product` and it's still "fine". Similarly the emails - there are 1 to 2 sentences that are product specific, and a bunch of fluff. If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very disappointed. a) no-one's telling you to just throw the AI output up on to a website unedited, b) does it not give you at least a bit of pause how quickly this is advancing right now?
- archgrove 4y ago
  A fair sized pause, sure. But if the argument is “Don’t throw it up unedited”, and what it provides me is bare bones generic/junior stuff, I’m not sure of the huge win at this point in time. The world wasn’t short of “Generic low grade copy” templates before LLMs. It just saves a few steps in the copy/paste. Of course, GPT5…
  - barking_biscuit 4y ago
    >Of course, GPT5… I'm not sure GPT5 will feel appreciably different on this type of task necessarily. GPT-4 feels a lot like GPT-3 for a pretty wide variety of things, but it's when you get higher complexity tasks that you start to see differences.
- logifail 4y ago
  > no-one's telling you to just throw the AI output up on to a website unedited Is there a genuine problem that we're solving here? "Quickly and cheaply create a large volume of mediocre content" will definitely appeal to certain entrepreneurial types, but were we actually short of mediocre content? What genuine problem are we solving? Apart from a further lowering of the bar for certain entrepreneurial types to get rich(er) faster, that is.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    [flagged]
Alex3917 4y ago
This. Let me know when AI can write sales emails that convert better than emails written by the world's best copywriters.
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  But why? Most people don’t need the bar set that high. Most people just need B+ writing with half decent conversions. If you can get 80% of what you want with a cheap or free tool vs 100% with a full-time salaried employee/expensive freelancers, well, most people are going to pick the former. I do this as a video editor all the time. If I have a fast turnaround often times I will just drop a LUT or use auto color correction in my in NLE. Of course I will sand down the edges afterwards, but it’s not like I’m going to give every single video that crosses my desk the full color grading treatment. Not everything requires that.
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
I mean you say that but this is the kind of shit work that 99% of the population does. Look at the reddit UI, do you really think that it’s better than something GPT could toss out in 10 minutes?
- hawski 4y ago
  Isn't Reddit's UI hostile by design?
- msm_ 4y ago
  > Look at the reddit UI, do you really think that it’s better than something GPT could toss out in 10 minutes? Is this some kind of a joke? I'm pretty sure whole Reddit's UI team can't be replaced by GPT.
  - fooker 4y ago
    These are different statements.
  - olddustytrail 4y ago
    Whether or not they could, I'm pretty sure they should.
- dvngnt_ 4y ago
  yes! I doubt chatgpt in it's current form can run A/B tests to make a design that meets reddit's goals
  - pojzon 4y ago
    Looking at their downtime manifesto from few days ago - chatgpt would probably spit out a better infra design in like 5m…
vharuck 4y ago
>I guess I shouldn't discount the value of such a thing, once we get the "Sometimes it just lies" problem under control. Considering the model doesn't "think" or understand abstract concepts, could we ever expect this?
- rmahan 4y ago
  More training data and token lengths seem to help, given how GPT-4 scores better on a lot of standardized tests than 3 and 3.5 do. We don’t necessarily need to teach it not to lie, but just to improve accuracy through better training and training data. It (probably) won’t ever be 100% reliable, but what is? Google searches can be inaccurate, same with Wikipedia and other encyclopedias.
- dTal 4y ago
  I have yet to hear a definition of "think" or "understand" for which this is true.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  The model does think but only when you tell it to think out loud. This is less a weird quirk of the training data or a One Weird Trick That Makes Your Matricies Sentient, and more a limitation of the model architecture. Neural networks do not have the capability to implement 'for loops', the only looping construct is the process that runs the model repeatedly on each token. When you tell the model to "think out loud", you're telling it to use prior tokens as for loop state. Another limitation is that the model can't backtrack. That is, if it says something wrong, that lie is now set in stone and it can't jump back and correct it, so you get confidently wrong behavior. I have to wonder if you could just tell the model to pretend it has a backspace button, so that it could still see the wrong data and avoid the pitfalls it dropped into before.
cmiles74 4y ago
LinkedIn has started pushing generated content it would like me to edit, I think they said they use ChatGPT. All of the content is "okay" but there's no depth, out of the handful of articles I read they both had a section that repeated an earlier idea but with different buzzwords. I agree, it's impressive how it can generate readable text that provides an overview of an idea. But the overview misses key points, or highlights things that aren't really central. For a lot of things, doing something simple like reading a Wikipedia page is likely more productive.
- pavel_lishin 4y ago
  I'm looking forward to people being hired to edit ChatGPT output... and watching them prompt ChatGPT itself, or another AI model, to do their work for them.
- ghaff 4y ago
  That's pretty much what I've found when I'used it to try writing articles. They're mostly not wrong. But they lack nuance, examples, links, research references, quotes, depth, etc. They're generally shallow and formulaic. Might I consider using one as a stub to get me started? Sure. On the other hand, that means I need to deliberately break out from the formula. I'm not sure how much time it would save me at the end of the day but I may give it a try on something real one of these days.
sillysaurusx 4y ago
You note that this will change the world, but then talk about GPT-4 specifically. The leap from GPT-2 to 3 was enormous. 3 to 4 was enormous, and we’re not even using 32k context yet nor image input. 4 to 5 will likely be as disruptive if not more. This isn’t about 4. We’re in the iPhone 1 era of LLMs. This is about what the world will look like in one or two decades. And there’s a good chance this comment might age poorly. That’s a scary thought. I was skeptical of AI, and still am. But it seems undeniable that the world is in for a big awakening. This might be as big of a transformation to society as the introduction of microprocessors.
- alchemist1e9 4y ago
  > one or two decades More like one or two years at this rate.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Remember the crypto hype cycle?
    - alchemist1e9 4y ago
      And how is that going? Died down? It’s really amusing when I encounter tech savvy individuals who think crypto is hype, little do they realize it’s stronger than ever and central bankers are becoming increasingly concerned.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - UncleEntity 4y ago
        Concerned the scams and fraud might bleed over into the real economy.
        alchemist1e9 4y ago
        https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/03/24/federal-reserve-says-custodias-crypto-focused-business-model-is-inconsistent-with-approval/ https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/03/24/federal-reserve-s... I don’t think that’s what they are actually worried about. I would also like to point out that the biggest scams, FTX for example, are simply traditional Ponzi schemes with a crypto front, they have all been executed entirely using regular banking systems and due to the incompetence of those regulators. Bitcoin itself is rock solid and constantly gaining users and influence.
photochemsyn 4y ago
The most immediate practical result might be that online product reviews written by AI will be indistinguishable from those written by humans, essentially making online reviews useless to consumers as a source of reliably independent information about various products and services. On the other hand, perhaps AI could help with due diligence types of inquiries from an independent standpoint? A real-time online AI research assistant with web scraping capabilities would be interesting.
- theK 4y ago
  That's not completely correct. The review world is roughly splittable in two broad categories, the "expert person" variant (think fro-knows-photo) and marketplace reviews (the reviews you can find on amazon, etc). Marketplace reviews are well guardable in terms of that you need to have an account there that purchased the same sku.* Expert person reviews are based on trust. There is a destructive correlations between spaming Ai reviews and creating a valuable brand as an expert person. So you cannot really do a hard play on ai here, maybe a soft one but that would arguably be just "going with the times". * Some might ask "why does amazon still have issues with review spam?" Answer is that amazon actually has a pretty firm grip on it, nonetheless the marketplace's incentives seem to be such that some slippage is acceptable/helpful for them.
naasking 4y ago
> If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very disappointed. A marketing agency would have spent at least a few weeks gathering specific information about your company, the article allotted two minutes. How many more minutes would you need to devote to giving ChatGPT more specific information before it could match the marketing agency's output? Not weeks surely. What's the cost difference in both time and money? Multiple orders of magnitude.
Forgeties79 4y ago
One little wrinkle I will add to your point, which is a very good one just so we’re clear, is that with chat GPT it does away with needing to know how to ask your questions, where to find your answers, how to implement them, etc. I can literally tell it “write me basic code to do ‘x,’ now explain how to add it to my squarespace site.” In many cases it will just spit out exactly what to do. As we all know, part of knowing how to do your job well is knowing how to find answers. In some ways chat GPT makes that step even easier. At least in the use cases I have found so far.
coldtea 4y ago
>If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very disappointed. You'd be. Most people wouldn't even notice or care, whether it's the ones paying the marketing agency, or the ones being shown the content as potential customers.
bgroat 4y ago
This is where I landed too. GPT generated "ideas" strike as wanting to use a swipe file. Only instead of it being full of persuasive, high-performing marketing materials.. it's just fast and prolific
pmontra 4y ago
> If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very disappointed. But you didn't. You paid only a few cents. You're probably not using it for a million dollars ad campaign but many people could use it to make their communications look better in less time. Same thing as using a stock PowerPoint template instead of paying an agency to create one. Good enough for most of us.
SergeAx 4y ago
I am, for one, is preparing for an era of mediocre content in every field ML can be applied to.
gcanyon 4y ago
I don't think "templates" is a good descriptor to use here, since the number of required templates is beyond any reasonable number. Just taking 10,000 words, there are 10^40 possible ten-word sentences. A ridiculous percentage of those are nonsense, but even if that fraction is 0.000000000000000001%, that leaves 10^20 sentences to template for, which no modern computer can accommodate for. I'm not sure what a better metaphor is; each thing I consider ends up defaulting back to what a ML model actually is, without really "metaphoring" at all. But not templates.

rybosworld 4y ago

"I suspect the demise of stock image providers to be the first palpable win for generative AIs, if the copyright question doesn't bog this whole field down" I'm surprised the copyright issues aren't given more attention. It's technically not legal (in the US) to modify copyrighted images without the authors permission. I don't see how it's possible that systems like DALL-E haven't already done that. There's a near 0% chance that they aren't trained on at least one copyrighted image.

pbhjpbhj 4y ago
Getty's case is active in the court system in multiple jurisdictions, until we get there outcome of that weren't not going to have a resolution of this. Unless countries legislate/decide to allow training on publicly accessible documents, eg as Fair Use/Fair Dealing or whatever. In short, the copyright issues appear to be given a lot of attention? Legal precedent takes time.
dist-epoch 4y ago
Humans photographers are also trained on copyrighted images. They look at countless numbers of them and learn what is the correct "professional style", etc. This is why you can instantly recognize most stock photos, because they all follow the "stock photo template".
- rybosworld 4y ago
  Copyright law doesn't work like that for photos. When you take a photo of something you become the owner of the image. In the context of AI, the issue is specifically with using a copyrighted image and creating something new based off of that. That is explicitly illegal for human artists.
  - dist-epoch 4y ago
    > something new based off of that But where do you draw the line? If AI imagines 3 people around a business table in front of a flip chart, is that copyright infringement on similar stock photos? Note that in the AI created image, the people are unique, they never existed, the business table is unique, the flip chart is unique, and in general you can't point to any existing photo it was trained over and say "it just copied this item here". If so, why isn't it also copyright infringement when a human photographer stages another similar shot?
    - rybosworld 4y ago
      "But where do you draw the line" Well that's sort of the whole thing with copyright law. It's fairly arbitrary. Copyright specifically forbids derivative works: "A derivative work is a work based on or derived from one or more already exist- ing works." It's vague on purpose because copyright infringements generally need to be handled on a case by case basis. Now there are AI's trained on images that are copyrighted. If the image is copyrighted, should the AI have been allowed to train on it? The reason human training/inspiration isn't specifically forbidden is because it can't be. We are impressioned by things whether we like it or not. Regardless, we can't prove where someone's inspiration came from. But the act of training an AI on copyrighted images is deliberate. I feel that's a key difference.
Joeri 4y ago
Isn’t it just fair use? Reading the four factor test for fair use it seems like these generative models should be able to pass the test, if each artwork contributes only a small part to a transformative model that generates novel output. The onus will be on demonstrating that the model does not reproduce works wholesale on demand, which currently they sometimes still do. Arguably also, the copy is achieved at generation time, not training time, so the copyright violation is not in making the model or distributing it, but in using it to create copies of artworks. The human artist is the same: in their brain is encoded the knowledge to create forbidden works, but it is only the act of creating the work which is illegal, not the ability. The model creators might still be liable for contributory infringement though. Anyway, I reject the notion that any use of unlicensed copyrighted works in training models is wrong. That to me seems like the homeopathic theory of copyright, it’s just silly. If copyright works that way we might as well put a cross over AGI ever being legal.
- rybosworld 4y ago
  Should the model be allowed to train on the copyrighted image in the first place? I think, the answer is no. If I'm an artist, I don't volunteer my art for you to do what you please. Now consider that these systems are already being used for profit, before this matter has even been settled.
sebzim4500 4y ago
This will take years for the courts to figure out. In the mean time, Adobe Firely has apparently not been trained on anything copyrighted, so people that are nervous about lawsuits will use that.

ozim 4y ago

I would like to follow up on "Universal UI" where with Microsoft including this stuff in Office 365 it will kill all kinds of apps/plugins. This is huge and as a software developer I am now not worried that GPT or AI will write code instead of me. Big change will be that big companies/small companies/average people won't need as many applications anymore. Software devs as I read various comments fixate on "AI writing code" too much, where real threat will be that lots of code will never be needed anymore.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
> real threat will be that lots of code will never be needed anymore. That's a very good point. Also, I am working in a very small team, developing a free app, for a nonprofit. I will be suggesting to our CEO, that he consider ways to use AI to multiply the various things we need to do, in order to polish and launch the app. We have a tiny, part-time team (except for Yours Truly), so there's a ton of "polishing the fenders" stuff that takes forever. I will suggest that he consider using ChatGPT (or some of the other engines) to do some of this work.
- kfrzcode 4y ago
  Why not just... Use ChatGPT and get the work done
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    If you think so. It seems many people think this. Time will tell, if this PoV is valid. I can tell you that a flashy, sexy demo, is not the same thing as shipping code. A number of comments state that the quality of the output is fairly sparse, and amateurish, but this was also a very fast, thirty-minute demo of a marketing workflow, subjected to basic AI tools. This article was the equivalent of those "Write an app in two hours" seminar/bootcamps. Valid, but also constrained by the need to teach, and to get done within a certain amount of time. Very strict guardrails, and keep your hands inside the car at all times. I have taken many, many of these courses, and have given a few. I'm quite aware of the difference between what we produce in a class, and what I'd hand to a customer. What I think we'll be seeing, quite soon, is "one-person shops," acting as studios/agencies that will take on jobs normally done by large shops. Like bootcamp babes that go out, thinking that they can now deliver a full-fat app to customers, many will fail. But some will succeed. Lots of smart, hungry people, out there. We'll look at what can be done with these tools (which, I should add, are still very much in their infancy. You ain't seen nuthin', yet). I don't think they'll be able to write the deliverables, yet, but that's OK. I think we may be able to leverage them to make those deliverables much more polished and robust.

sweezyjeezy 4y ago

> The primary problem, which seems common to LLMs asked to do this stuff, is "very high level output" - a content smoothie, with few features that are particularly specific to the prompt. The marketing campaign in the OP is so generic, you can `s/Saturn Parable/Any other educational product` and it's still "fine". Similarly the emails - there are 1 to 2 sentences that are product specific, and a bunch of fluff. If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very disappointed. a) no-one's telling you to just throw the AI output up on to a website unedited, b) does it not give you at least a bit of pause how quickly this is advancing right now?

archgrove 4y ago
A fair sized pause, sure. But if the argument is “Don’t throw it up unedited”, and what it provides me is bare bones generic/junior stuff, I’m not sure of the huge win at this point in time. The world wasn’t short of “Generic low grade copy” templates before LLMs. It just saves a few steps in the copy/paste. Of course, GPT5…
- barking_biscuit 4y ago
  >Of course, GPT5… I'm not sure GPT5 will feel appreciably different on this type of task necessarily. GPT-4 feels a lot like GPT-3 for a pretty wide variety of things, but it's when you get higher complexity tasks that you start to see differences.
logifail 4y ago
> no-one's telling you to just throw the AI output up on to a website unedited Is there a genuine problem that we're solving here? "Quickly and cheaply create a large volume of mediocre content" will definitely appeal to certain entrepreneurial types, but were we actually short of mediocre content? What genuine problem are we solving? Apart from a further lowering of the bar for certain entrepreneurial types to get rich(er) faster, that is.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  [flagged]

Alex3917 4y ago

This. Let me know when AI can write sales emails that convert better than emails written by the world's best copywriters.

Forgeties79 4y ago
But why? Most people don’t need the bar set that high. Most people just need B+ writing with half decent conversions. If you can get 80% of what you want with a cheap or free tool vs 100% with a full-time salaried employee/expensive freelancers, well, most people are going to pick the former. I do this as a video editor all the time. If I have a fast turnaround often times I will just drop a LUT or use auto color correction in my in NLE. Of course I will sand down the edges afterwards, but it’s not like I’m going to give every single video that crosses my desk the full color grading treatment. Not everything requires that.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

I mean you say that but this is the kind of shit work that 99% of the population does. Look at the reddit UI, do you really think that it’s better than something GPT could toss out in 10 minutes?

hawski 4y ago
Isn't Reddit's UI hostile by design?
msm_ 4y ago
> Look at the reddit UI, do you really think that it’s better than something GPT could toss out in 10 minutes? Is this some kind of a joke? I'm pretty sure whole Reddit's UI team can't be replaced by GPT.
- fooker 4y ago
  These are different statements.
- olddustytrail 4y ago
  Whether or not they could, I'm pretty sure they should.
dvngnt_ 4y ago
yes! I doubt chatgpt in it's current form can run A/B tests to make a design that meets reddit's goals
- pojzon 4y ago
  Looking at their downtime manifesto from few days ago - chatgpt would probably spit out a better infra design in like 5m…

vharuck 4y ago

>I guess I shouldn't discount the value of such a thing, once we get the "Sometimes it just lies" problem under control. Considering the model doesn't "think" or understand abstract concepts, could we ever expect this?

rmahan 4y ago
More training data and token lengths seem to help, given how GPT-4 scores better on a lot of standardized tests than 3 and 3.5 do. We don’t necessarily need to teach it not to lie, but just to improve accuracy through better training and training data. It (probably) won’t ever be 100% reliable, but what is? Google searches can be inaccurate, same with Wikipedia and other encyclopedias.
dTal 4y ago
I have yet to hear a definition of "think" or "understand" for which this is true.
kmeisthax 4y ago
The model does think but only when you tell it to think out loud. This is less a weird quirk of the training data or a One Weird Trick That Makes Your Matricies Sentient, and more a limitation of the model architecture. Neural networks do not have the capability to implement 'for loops', the only looping construct is the process that runs the model repeatedly on each token. When you tell the model to "think out loud", you're telling it to use prior tokens as for loop state. Another limitation is that the model can't backtrack. That is, if it says something wrong, that lie is now set in stone and it can't jump back and correct it, so you get confidently wrong behavior. I have to wonder if you could just tell the model to pretend it has a backspace button, so that it could still see the wrong data and avoid the pitfalls it dropped into before.

cmiles74 4y ago

LinkedIn has started pushing generated content it would like me to edit, I think they said they use ChatGPT. All of the content is "okay" but there's no depth, out of the handful of articles I read they both had a section that repeated an earlier idea but with different buzzwords. I agree, it's impressive how it can generate readable text that provides an overview of an idea. But the overview misses key points, or highlights things that aren't really central. For a lot of things, doing something simple like reading a Wikipedia page is likely more productive.

pavel_lishin 4y ago
I'm looking forward to people being hired to edit ChatGPT output... and watching them prompt ChatGPT itself, or another AI model, to do their work for them.
ghaff 4y ago
That's pretty much what I've found when I'used it to try writing articles. They're mostly not wrong. But they lack nuance, examples, links, research references, quotes, depth, etc. They're generally shallow and formulaic. Might I consider using one as a stub to get me started? Sure. On the other hand, that means I need to deliberately break out from the formula. I'm not sure how much time it would save me at the end of the day but I may give it a try on something real one of these days.

sillysaurusx 4y ago

You note that this will change the world, but then talk about GPT-4 specifically. The leap from GPT-2 to 3 was enormous. 3 to 4 was enormous, and we’re not even using 32k context yet nor image input. 4 to 5 will likely be as disruptive if not more. This isn’t about 4. We’re in the iPhone 1 era of LLMs. This is about what the world will look like in one or two decades. And there’s a good chance this comment might age poorly. That’s a scary thought. I was skeptical of AI, and still am. But it seems undeniable that the world is in for a big awakening. This might be as big of a transformation to society as the introduction of microprocessors.

alchemist1e9 4y ago
> one or two decades More like one or two years at this rate.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Remember the crypto hype cycle?
  - alchemist1e9 4y ago
    And how is that going? Died down? It’s really amusing when I encounter tech savvy individuals who think crypto is hype, little do they realize it’s stronger than ever and central bankers are becoming increasingly concerned.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - UncleEntity 4y ago
      Concerned the scams and fraud might bleed over into the real economy.
      - alchemist1e9 4y ago
        https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/03/24/federal-reserve-says-custodias-crypto-focused-business-model-is-inconsistent-with-approval/ https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/03/24/federal-reserve-s... I don’t think that’s what they are actually worried about. I would also like to point out that the biggest scams, FTX for example, are simply traditional Ponzi schemes with a crypto front, they have all been executed entirely using regular banking systems and due to the incompetence of those regulators. Bitcoin itself is rock solid and constantly gaining users and influence.

photochemsyn 4y ago

The most immediate practical result might be that online product reviews written by AI will be indistinguishable from those written by humans, essentially making online reviews useless to consumers as a source of reliably independent information about various products and services. On the other hand, perhaps AI could help with due diligence types of inquiries from an independent standpoint? A real-time online AI research assistant with web scraping capabilities would be interesting.

theK 4y ago
That's not completely correct. The review world is roughly splittable in two broad categories, the "expert person" variant (think fro-knows-photo) and marketplace reviews (the reviews you can find on amazon, etc). Marketplace reviews are well guardable in terms of that you need to have an account there that purchased the same sku.* Expert person reviews are based on trust. There is a destructive correlations between spaming Ai reviews and creating a valuable brand as an expert person. So you cannot really do a hard play on ai here, maybe a soft one but that would arguably be just "going with the times". * Some might ask "why does amazon still have issues with review spam?" Answer is that amazon actually has a pretty firm grip on it, nonetheless the marketplace's incentives seem to be such that some slippage is acceptable/helpful for them.

naasking 4y ago

> If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very disappointed. A marketing agency would have spent at least a few weeks gathering specific information about your company, the article allotted two minutes. How many more minutes would you need to devote to giving ChatGPT more specific information before it could match the marketing agency's output? Not weeks surely. What's the cost difference in both time and money? Multiple orders of magnitude.

Forgeties79 4y ago

One little wrinkle I will add to your point, which is a very good one just so we’re clear, is that with chat GPT it does away with needing to know how to ask your questions, where to find your answers, how to implement them, etc. I can literally tell it “write me basic code to do ‘x,’ now explain how to add it to my squarespace site.” In many cases it will just spit out exactly what to do. As we all know, part of knowing how to do your job well is knowing how to find answers. In some ways chat GPT makes that step even easier. At least in the use cases I have found so far.

coldtea 4y ago

>If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very disappointed. You'd be. Most people wouldn't even notice or care, whether it's the ones paying the marketing agency, or the ones being shown the content as potential customers.

bgroat 4y ago

This is where I landed too. GPT generated "ideas" strike as wanting to use a swipe file. Only instead of it being full of persuasive, high-performing marketing materials.. it's just fast and prolific

pmontra 4y ago

> If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very disappointed. But you didn't. You paid only a few cents. You're probably not using it for a million dollars ad campaign but many people could use it to make their communications look better in less time. Same thing as using a stock PowerPoint template instead of paying an agency to create one. Good enough for most of us.

SergeAx 4y ago

I am, for one, is preparing for an era of mediocre content in every field ML can be applied to.

gcanyon 4y ago

I don't think "templates" is a good descriptor to use here, since the number of required templates is beyond any reasonable number. Just taking 10,000 words, there are 10^40 possible ten-word sentences. A ridiculous percentage of those are nonsense, but even if that fraction is 0.000000000000000001%, that leaves 10^20 sentences to template for, which no modern computer can accommodate for. I'm not sure what a better metaphor is; each thing I consider ends up defaulting back to what a ML model actually is, without really "metaphoring" at all. But not templates.