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Anytime you see the 'parrot' argument, you can instantly go 'opinion dismissed'. Anytime you seem some fancy argument, that bases its tests on chatgpt, instead

Anytime you see the 'parrot' argument, you can instantly go 'opinion dismissed'. Anytime you seem some fancy argument, that bases its tests on chatgpt, instead of the way stronger GPT-4 that usually invalidates half their criticisms, opinion dismissed. There's no need to debate about embeddings, compression = meaning etc. Simply put, many humans are parrots, much white collar work is just parroting. It doesn't matter what the underlying model of GPT-4 is like, if its useful, it will have a massive impact on the world.

cube2222 4y ago
I'd like to echo the GPT-4 sentiment. Having used the API a bunch, the ChatGPT API (GPT-3.5-Turbo) feels like it has a 10-second attention span in comparison to GPT-4. GPT-4 is waaaay more powerful for actually building stuff on top of, adheres to your prompt in a much more stable way, and its reasoning is way less unstable in general as well. Writing long blocks of code without making "stupid" mistakes works much much better, etc. The only downside is: it's so, so, soooooo slow in comparison to GPT-3.5-Turbo. You'll literally have to wait 2-3 minutes for the response with larger token amounts.
- throwuwu 4y ago
  Thinking fast, thinking slow
- sho_hn 4y ago
  I find both your statements confusing and I think they're factually wrong. There's no "ChatGPT API". ChatGPT is a webapp. It lets you select between 3.5-turbo and 4 models in its UI. There's an OpenAI API, which recently added chat interactions and suitable models. There, too, you can select 3.5-turbo and 4. AFAIK, the 4 served by the API is the same 4 used by the ChatGPT web app.
  - growthwtf 4y ago
    You may have missed the intro blog post for those APIs: https://openai.com/blog/introducing-chatgpt-and-whisper-apis https://openai.com/blog/introducing-chatgpt-and-whisper-apis The title is "Introducing ChatGPT and Whisper APIs" and features quotes like "Snap Inc., the creator of Snapchat, introduced My AI for Snapchat+ this week. The experimental feature is running on ChatGPT API". So, OpenAI refers to accessing the model powering ChatGPT as the ChatGPT API.
    - sho_hn 4y ago
      OK, gotcha. Still, IMHO the OP post is misleading folks into thinking there's a magical GPT-4 that is not the GPT-4 you can also select on ChatGPT, but they are the same models. There's no GPT-4 that's better than ChatGPT's 4. I'm just trying to clear up this confusion for others, and frankly pretty surprised at the harsh downvotes. There's also no separate ChatGPT API from the regular OpenAI API, I think the phrasing in the OpenAI page is just for convenience. But I'll grant their phrasing makes it canonical.
      - growthwtf 4y ago
        I see where you're coming from. I didn't personally get that from OP's comment, but I'm not a regular ChatGPT user and interact with GPT-4 mostly via playground or API.
      - saurik 4y ago
        Is that true? I was under the impression it was just like with the previous GPT models, where ChatGPT was an instruction tuned and pre-prompted setup designed for interactive conversations over the underlying GPT model you had access to via the API that was in its close-to-as-trained state of being a generative autocomplete.
        sho_hn 4y ago
        I think it's true. See e.g. https://openai.com/research/gpt-4 https://openai.com/research/gpt-4 making no distinctions. Altman has stated in interviews they are considering releasing the un-tuned "base model", but they haven't done this. For GPT-3, you can get models on the API via the "completion" end points (includes base models) and via the "chat" endpoints. For GPT-4, they've only released the latter. So my point is: You can absolutely use ChatGPT to build an opinion on what GPT-4 is capable of. Arguably even better than on the Playground, as the ChatGPT frontend supports a bigger token window than the Playground frontend (8k vs. 2k). Of course the actual API supports the full token window (and if you're off the separate waitlist for this, even the full 32k). But it's still the same model.
      - 4y ago
  - pmichaud 4y ago
    It's called the ChatGPT API by OpenAI, and free users (ie almost everyone using the system) can only use GPT-3.5. There is no option for them to use GPT-4, which is behind a paywall and a waitlist (maybe the waitlist is done now, I haven't checked).
- moonchrome 4y ago
  Is ChatGPT GPT4 equivalent to API version ?
chomp 4y ago
I wanted to write a comment like this but feared it would be too negative or dismissive. But I agree with the general thrust of your argument. The article is a little outdated because a lot of the examples of deficiencies in the article, work in GPT4 (I tested a couple). But maybe the author is sandbagging ChatGPT to bring the non-tech people back to Earth. When ChatGPT was released, a lot of people (even on this site) were trying to get it to think abstractly and were applying human qualities to the bot, when it's relatively clear that it's all just fancy statistics. Even today, when talking to non-tech people, there's still a lot of people who believe it's a magical thinker-in-a-box. Someone has to talk those people down, and it ain't gonna be me. It's not perfect, but it doesn't have to be to have applications IRL. Yeah, the web chat is meh whatever, but the API is where it actually shines. It's the integration with existing business processes and code that allow new, more human ways of interfacing with systems. Asking it for what it knows in its statistical blob, probably will lead to heartache. Giving it some context and asking it "what can you infer from this?" is where it's strongest.
- bulbosaur123 4y ago
  > when it's relatively clear that it's all just fancy statistics. So just like human brain then.
  - jfk13 4y ago
    > So just like human brain then. Do you have evidence to substantiate that claim, or are we supposed to just take it on faith?
    - Robotbeat 4y ago
      Quantum mechanics is “just” fancy statistics. Unless we believe in some non-physical/supernatural phenomenon going on in the human brain, this sort of reductive argument works as well for the human brain as it does for LLMs (in other words, not very well. Sufficiently complicated statistics is what underlines everything, as far as we can tell.)
  - chomp 4y ago
mdp2021 4y ago
> Simply put, many humans The fact that many are mentally incompetent cannot be a reason to produce something similar. When somebody does a job, we expect such job to be done properly, and "brains" are pretty much required, intelligence, if only for the occasional cases outside norm - otherwise, there is automation. > if its useful It is not easy to confine an affabulator to the contexts where it will be useful.
- ehsankia 4y ago
  I don't think the point being made here has anything to do with the current quality of the output. ChatGPT could be giving good or bad results, that's tangential. The debate here is about whether a system that is a parrot can be a good system. To parrot arguers claim that these system just regurgitate the training data set and give you the most plausible next word, and they claim that's bad/useless. The anti-parrot arguers claim that's basically how humans work too (even the smarter ones), and that just because ChatGPT is a "parrot" doesn't necessarily mean it cannot be as good or better than humans. It might not be entirely there yet, but it's just a matter of time it becomes a good enough parrot to be indistinguishable/better than humans.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    > whether a system that is a parrot can be a good system A parrot can be a good system if the problem is "Collect and sort the available data about X (and provide reference)". A parrot is a disaster if you ask it "What do you think of X": a parrot does not think - unless you make it reason, verify and criticize its ontology, and at that point it is useless that we call it a "parrot".
    - pmoriarty 4y ago
      "A parrot is a disaster if you ask it "What do you think of X"" Why need it be a disaster? If its answer is useful, why bother about whether the answer was the result of thought or some other process?
    - ehsankia 4y ago
capableweb 4y ago
It's not clear to me if the author is using GPT-3.5-turbo or GPT-4, both are available in ChatGPT and just saying "I'm using ChatGPT" doesn't indicate exactly what model they are using. Maybe I missed it, where does the author say they are using GPT-3/3.5, not GPT-4? I agree with your message in general, there is night-and-day difference between GPT 3.5-turbo and 4. But I'm still not able to see which one the author is using. Edit: seems the avatar in ChatGPT tells you which model you're using, never noticed that myself. Thanks everyone :)
- M4v3R 4y ago
  I've checked some of the failure mode he mentions using GPT-4 and it answered the questions/completed tasks correctly, so I can only assume the author used GPT-3.5.
- OmegaPoint 4y ago
  You can know the GPT version of ChatGPT based on the OpenAI logo color: GPT-3.5 is green and GPT-4 is black.
- lemoncookiechip 4y ago
  The screenshots are that of 3.5. GPT-4 has a black user icon vs 3.5's green.
ravenstine 4y ago
I think too many people have a grossly inaccurate impression of what it means to be intelligent. Firstly, we still don't truly have many good explanations for intelligence and consciousness that aren't self referential. Drawing hard conclusions on this subject about generative AI and human intelligence, even in 2023, is being hasty, in my opinion. Which brings me to a lot of the criticisms made about LLMs. The idea that an ideal AI could or even should be capable of constantly generating original output is just plain weird. Where do people get this idea? How often do you meet a human being who hasn't gotten most of their ideas from somewhere else? Even synthesized ideas are forged by other ideas. Ideas that seem original may appear just that, and we just don't see where the connection lies between it and its predecessors. It's silly to dismiss an AI because it "parrots" things, as if that's not a pretty remarkable achievement. It's also very reductive; anyone who has used ChatGPT and doesn't see that it can pretty reliably munge together different ideas is blind or is lying about their use of ChatGPT. Expecting perfect accuracy and knowledge is also not a reasonable expectation of an AI. An intelligence localized in spacetime is necessarily going to lack understanding of many things. To look to something like ChatGPT as a source of authoritative answers, and to dismiss it upon finding its answers to be specious, is to expect the AI to be God. Well I'm sorry, but we are nowhere near speaking directly to God. In regards to "true understanding", for all we know, language processing is the workhorse of what humans consider to be acts of intelligence, and individual humans aren't as intelligent as they believe themselves to be. Our ability to communicate with each other about a variety of topics in real time is not so much a matter about being hyperaware of every given fact that is relevant and weighing them in a Bayesian model; how well we can converse is primarily dictated by how rapidly we can construct language by parsing the input, making connections, and producing output. I know I'm not the only one who can speak on a subject only to realize, after having completed a sentence, that I hardly even thought about what I was saying.
- pjc50 4y ago
  This, to me, is the more terrifying prospect of the AI revolution: people arguing that humans aren't sentient either.
  - ben_w 4y ago
whateveracct 4y ago
It's a royal pain in the ass for me already. My PM is asking it questions about technical problems (like system design) preemptively and using it as a starting point as if its an engineer. So now instead of thinking through problems from a blank slate, I'm debating with ChatGPT. It's been just awful. And what's worse, his prompts always have certain biases or misunderstandings in them. For instance, he always wants to use third-party services for everything because he thinks it means we do less work (often not the case). So ChatGPT tells him what he wants to hear. He's using it as an extra engineer who always agrees with him.
- wankle 4y ago
  > So ChatGPT tells him what he wants to hear. He's using it as an extra engineer who always agrees with him. I chuckled, it sounds like the plot from a B Sci-Fi movie.
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  This is a whole new category of humor. I can totally see all kinds of management-y people using ChatGPT to provide “helpful” but completely useless information. Your example really cracks me up!
adventured 4y ago
> many humans are parrots Nearly all humans are parrots, aka mimics. One of the great demonstrations of it, which anyone can observe 24/7, is Reddit (and the Reddit knowledge spouted so commonly across the platform). There are mimics, amplifiers, and originators/creators. Mimics are ~95-99% of the population. Amplifiers are - broadly speaking - teachers, people with bullhorns that train the mimics off of something another person originated/innovated/created. It's why humanity has been so successful. The mimics are wired to try to copy what is shown to work, and they often do it quite well (keeping up with the Joneses is a wired behavior tied to plentifulness, survival and thriving).
croes 4y ago
Yeah, but these human parrots are one the low level of their abilities. GPT's parroting is it's upper level
zamalek 4y ago
> Anytime you see the 'parrot' argument, you can instantly go 'opinion dismissed'. I also seriously question whether anyone making the 'parrot argument' has actually used ChatGPT for anything meaningful. If it is nothing more than a parrot, then parrots are significantly more creative than I realized.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I don't know why you question this. I've used it for meaningful stuff, but I am not convinced that ChatGPT is more than a very sophisticated variety of Eliza. Just because one person is convinced by an experience doesn't mean people who aren't convinced by it haven't had the experience.
  - fauxpause_ 4y ago
    I agree. Coincidentally I don’t think you are more than a very sophisticated variety of Eliza.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      That wouldn't surprise me at all!
- andrepd 4y ago
  I have. Here is a list of things at which it failed: - Write a dead simple piece of code, which is however NOT found as an immediate answer to a stackoverflow question (I've tried this one upwards of 10 times, with no success) - Categorise a chord when I tell it the constituent pitches, and vice-versa - Solve a simple quadratic equation - Show a biography of this mildly obscure singer/politician/scholar - Write poetry in a given style - Give me references to read up on a certain technical topic ALL of these it fails, or rather, worse than fails: it spews plausible bullshit with the same confidence and tone it would spew correct answers. It can go up to manufacturing references and attributing to real people's names.
scotty79 4y ago
I think we might be vastly overestimating what gpt is going to be capable of. Just like we did with self-driving. Parrot might be harsh, but remeber this Star Wars quote: Ability to speak doesn't make you intelligent.
joe_the_user 4y ago
Anytime you see the 'parrot' argument, you can instantly go 'opinion dismissed' True or not, I find a tone of this sort of fortunate. Please don't come up with catchy ways to stop discussion of points.
aftergibson 4y ago
Yeah if anything all ChatGPT is doing is highlighting that a lot more noise-work can be automated. "Make my random thoughts sound business-y", "double check this code doesn't have anything completely stupid" etc.
archagon 4y ago
Similarly, anytime you see the “anytime you see ‘x’ you can dismiss the argument” argument, you can dismiss the argument.
intelVISA 4y ago
As you noted most, even in SWE, are parrots (including this parrot typing); we get kinda scared when the robot parrot generates bullshit better than web framework-de-jure.
reso 4y ago
> "Many humans are parrots" This is becoming common belief among people in the AI field. I'm convinced it is a case of a metaphor overtaking reality. With the LLM model in mind, we can see how Humans are "kind of like" LLMs, therefore we start to believe humans are just LLMs. Of course this forgets the enormous ways that humans are nothing like LLMs. For example: Humans don't have to read the entire internet to learn how to write complete sentences.
- bolyarche 4y ago
  [dead]
- biohax2015 4y ago
  > Humans don't have to read the entire internet to learn how to write complete sentences. Neither do LLMs? You can just train them on the same K-12 learning material and they’ll produce better sentences than 99% of people.
  - reso 4y ago
    I have not seen that result, can you link it for me?
amelius 4y ago
Why? Some people may be looking for "intelligent", while you are clearly setting the bar at "useful".
lionkor 4y ago
Its convenient that any valid criticism of ChatGPT or GPT3 or $CURRENT_TECH is dismissed by saying "just pay OpenAI money to use the new thing™, it doesnt have this issue". If it was not a ChatGPT Plus offering but instead freely available, there would be way fewer shills for it (im assuming) and there would be a lot more balanced reporting on it. By default, anyone speaking to the competence of GPT-4 is willing to give OpenAI money, which may already be sign of a bias. Im not willing to pay for a product the free tier of which is shit, even when told a hundred times "no but the paid one is MUCH better!". Of course it probably is, but its a little irrelevant.
jejeyyy77 4y ago
lol, most white collar workers can do basic reasoning and basic math.
andrepd 4y ago
[flagged]

cube2222 4y ago

I'd like to echo the GPT-4 sentiment. Having used the API a bunch, the ChatGPT API (GPT-3.5-Turbo) feels like it has a 10-second attention span in comparison to GPT-4. GPT-4 is waaaay more powerful for actually building stuff on top of, adheres to your prompt in a much more stable way, and its reasoning is way less unstable in general as well. Writing long blocks of code without making "stupid" mistakes works much much better, etc. The only downside is: it's so, so, soooooo slow in comparison to GPT-3.5-Turbo. You'll literally have to wait 2-3 minutes for the response with larger token amounts.

throwuwu 4y ago
Thinking fast, thinking slow
sho_hn 4y ago
I find both your statements confusing and I think they're factually wrong. There's no "ChatGPT API". ChatGPT is a webapp. It lets you select between 3.5-turbo and 4 models in its UI. There's an OpenAI API, which recently added chat interactions and suitable models. There, too, you can select 3.5-turbo and 4. AFAIK, the 4 served by the API is the same 4 used by the ChatGPT web app.
- growthwtf 4y ago
  You may have missed the intro blog post for those APIs: https://openai.com/blog/introducing-chatgpt-and-whisper-apis https://openai.com/blog/introducing-chatgpt-and-whisper-apis The title is "Introducing ChatGPT and Whisper APIs" and features quotes like "Snap Inc., the creator of Snapchat, introduced My AI for Snapchat+ this week. The experimental feature is running on ChatGPT API". So, OpenAI refers to accessing the model powering ChatGPT as the ChatGPT API.
  - sho_hn 4y ago
    OK, gotcha. Still, IMHO the OP post is misleading folks into thinking there's a magical GPT-4 that is not the GPT-4 you can also select on ChatGPT, but they are the same models. There's no GPT-4 that's better than ChatGPT's 4. I'm just trying to clear up this confusion for others, and frankly pretty surprised at the harsh downvotes. There's also no separate ChatGPT API from the regular OpenAI API, I think the phrasing in the OpenAI page is just for convenience. But I'll grant their phrasing makes it canonical.
    - growthwtf 4y ago
      I see where you're coming from. I didn't personally get that from OP's comment, but I'm not a regular ChatGPT user and interact with GPT-4 mostly via playground or API.
    - saurik 4y ago
      Is that true? I was under the impression it was just like with the previous GPT models, where ChatGPT was an instruction tuned and pre-prompted setup designed for interactive conversations over the underlying GPT model you had access to via the API that was in its close-to-as-trained state of being a generative autocomplete.
      - sho_hn 4y ago
        I think it's true. See e.g. https://openai.com/research/gpt-4 https://openai.com/research/gpt-4 making no distinctions. Altman has stated in interviews they are considering releasing the un-tuned "base model", but they haven't done this. For GPT-3, you can get models on the API via the "completion" end points (includes base models) and via the "chat" endpoints. For GPT-4, they've only released the latter. So my point is: You can absolutely use ChatGPT to build an opinion on what GPT-4 is capable of. Arguably even better than on the Playground, as the ChatGPT frontend supports a bigger token window than the Playground frontend (8k vs. 2k). Of course the actual API supports the full token window (and if you're off the separate waitlist for this, even the full 32k). But it's still the same model.
    - 4y ago
- pmichaud 4y ago
  It's called the ChatGPT API by OpenAI, and free users (ie almost everyone using the system) can only use GPT-3.5. There is no option for them to use GPT-4, which is behind a paywall and a waitlist (maybe the waitlist is done now, I haven't checked).
moonchrome 4y ago
Is ChatGPT GPT4 equivalent to API version ?

chomp 4y ago

I wanted to write a comment like this but feared it would be too negative or dismissive. But I agree with the general thrust of your argument. The article is a little outdated because a lot of the examples of deficiencies in the article, work in GPT4 (I tested a couple). But maybe the author is sandbagging ChatGPT to bring the non-tech people back to Earth. When ChatGPT was released, a lot of people (even on this site) were trying to get it to think abstractly and were applying human qualities to the bot, when it's relatively clear that it's all just fancy statistics. Even today, when talking to non-tech people, there's still a lot of people who believe it's a magical thinker-in-a-box. Someone has to talk those people down, and it ain't gonna be me. It's not perfect, but it doesn't have to be to have applications IRL. Yeah, the web chat is meh whatever, but the API is where it actually shines. It's the integration with existing business processes and code that allow new, more human ways of interfacing with systems. Asking it for what it knows in its statistical blob, probably will lead to heartache. Giving it some context and asking it "what can you infer from this?" is where it's strongest.

bulbosaur123 4y ago
> when it's relatively clear that it's all just fancy statistics. So just like human brain then.
- jfk13 4y ago
  > So just like human brain then. Do you have evidence to substantiate that claim, or are we supposed to just take it on faith?
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    Quantum mechanics is “just” fancy statistics. Unless we believe in some non-physical/supernatural phenomenon going on in the human brain, this sort of reductive argument works as well for the human brain as it does for LLMs (in other words, not very well. Sufficiently complicated statistics is what underlines everything, as far as we can tell.)
- chomp 4y ago

mdp2021 4y ago

> Simply put, many humans The fact that many are mentally incompetent cannot be a reason to produce something similar. When somebody does a job, we expect such job to be done properly, and "brains" are pretty much required, intelligence, if only for the occasional cases outside norm - otherwise, there is automation. > if its useful It is not easy to confine an affabulator to the contexts where it will be useful.

ehsankia 4y ago
I don't think the point being made here has anything to do with the current quality of the output. ChatGPT could be giving good or bad results, that's tangential. The debate here is about whether a system that is a parrot can be a good system. To parrot arguers claim that these system just regurgitate the training data set and give you the most plausible next word, and they claim that's bad/useless. The anti-parrot arguers claim that's basically how humans work too (even the smarter ones), and that just because ChatGPT is a "parrot" doesn't necessarily mean it cannot be as good or better than humans. It might not be entirely there yet, but it's just a matter of time it becomes a good enough parrot to be indistinguishable/better than humans.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > whether a system that is a parrot can be a good system A parrot can be a good system if the problem is "Collect and sort the available data about X (and provide reference)". A parrot is a disaster if you ask it "What do you think of X": a parrot does not think - unless you make it reason, verify and criticize its ontology, and at that point it is useless that we call it a "parrot".
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    "A parrot is a disaster if you ask it "What do you think of X"" Why need it be a disaster? If its answer is useful, why bother about whether the answer was the result of thought or some other process?
  - ehsankia 4y ago

capableweb 4y ago

It's not clear to me if the author is using GPT-3.5-turbo or GPT-4, both are available in ChatGPT and just saying "I'm using ChatGPT" doesn't indicate exactly what model they are using. Maybe I missed it, where does the author say they are using GPT-3/3.5, not GPT-4? I agree with your message in general, there is night-and-day difference between GPT 3.5-turbo and 4. But I'm still not able to see which one the author is using. Edit: seems the avatar in ChatGPT tells you which model you're using, never noticed that myself. Thanks everyone :)

M4v3R 4y ago
I've checked some of the failure mode he mentions using GPT-4 and it answered the questions/completed tasks correctly, so I can only assume the author used GPT-3.5.
OmegaPoint 4y ago
You can know the GPT version of ChatGPT based on the OpenAI logo color: GPT-3.5 is green and GPT-4 is black.
lemoncookiechip 4y ago
The screenshots are that of 3.5. GPT-4 has a black user icon vs 3.5's green.

ravenstine 4y ago

I think too many people have a grossly inaccurate impression of what it means to be intelligent. Firstly, we still don't truly have many good explanations for intelligence and consciousness that aren't self referential. Drawing hard conclusions on this subject about generative AI and human intelligence, even in 2023, is being hasty, in my opinion. Which brings me to a lot of the criticisms made about LLMs. The idea that an ideal AI could or even should be capable of constantly generating original output is just plain weird. Where do people get this idea? How often do you meet a human being who hasn't gotten most of their ideas from somewhere else? Even synthesized ideas are forged by other ideas. Ideas that seem original may appear just that, and we just don't see where the connection lies between it and its predecessors. It's silly to dismiss an AI because it "parrots" things, as if that's not a pretty remarkable achievement. It's also very reductive; anyone who has used ChatGPT and doesn't see that it can pretty reliably munge together different ideas is blind or is lying about their use of ChatGPT. Expecting perfect accuracy and knowledge is also not a reasonable expectation of an AI. An intelligence localized in spacetime is necessarily going to lack understanding of many things. To look to something like ChatGPT as a source of authoritative answers, and to dismiss it upon finding its answers to be specious, is to expect the AI to be God. Well I'm sorry, but we are nowhere near speaking directly to God. In regards to "true understanding", for all we know, language processing is the workhorse of what humans consider to be acts of intelligence, and individual humans aren't as intelligent as they believe themselves to be. Our ability to communicate with each other about a variety of topics in real time is not so much a matter about being hyperaware of every given fact that is relevant and weighing them in a Bayesian model; how well we can converse is primarily dictated by how rapidly we can construct language by parsing the input, making connections, and producing output. I know I'm not the only one who can speak on a subject only to realize, after having completed a sentence, that I hardly even thought about what I was saying.

pjc50 4y ago
This, to me, is the more terrifying prospect of the AI revolution: people arguing that humans aren't sentient either.
- ben_w 4y ago

whateveracct 4y ago

It's a royal pain in the ass for me already. My PM is asking it questions about technical problems (like system design) preemptively and using it as a starting point as if its an engineer. So now instead of thinking through problems from a blank slate, I'm debating with ChatGPT. It's been just awful. And what's worse, his prompts always have certain biases or misunderstandings in them. For instance, he always wants to use third-party services for everything because he thinks it means we do less work (often not the case). So ChatGPT tells him what he wants to hear. He's using it as an extra engineer who always agrees with him.

wankle 4y ago
> So ChatGPT tells him what he wants to hear. He's using it as an extra engineer who always agrees with him. I chuckled, it sounds like the plot from a B Sci-Fi movie.
spookthesunset 4y ago
This is a whole new category of humor. I can totally see all kinds of management-y people using ChatGPT to provide “helpful” but completely useless information. Your example really cracks me up!

adventured 4y ago

> many humans are parrots Nearly all humans are parrots, aka mimics. One of the great demonstrations of it, which anyone can observe 24/7, is Reddit (and the Reddit knowledge spouted so commonly across the platform). There are mimics, amplifiers, and originators/creators. Mimics are ~95-99% of the population. Amplifiers are - broadly speaking - teachers, people with bullhorns that train the mimics off of something another person originated/innovated/created. It's why humanity has been so successful. The mimics are wired to try to copy what is shown to work, and they often do it quite well (keeping up with the Joneses is a wired behavior tied to plentifulness, survival and thriving).

croes 4y ago

Yeah, but these human parrots are one the low level of their abilities. GPT's parroting is it's upper level

zamalek 4y ago

> Anytime you see the 'parrot' argument, you can instantly go 'opinion dismissed'. I also seriously question whether anyone making the 'parrot argument' has actually used ChatGPT for anything meaningful. If it is nothing more than a parrot, then parrots are significantly more creative than I realized.

JohnFen 4y ago
I don't know why you question this. I've used it for meaningful stuff, but I am not convinced that ChatGPT is more than a very sophisticated variety of Eliza. Just because one person is convinced by an experience doesn't mean people who aren't convinced by it haven't had the experience.
- fauxpause_ 4y ago
  I agree. Coincidentally I don’t think you are more than a very sophisticated variety of Eliza.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    That wouldn't surprise me at all!
andrepd 4y ago
I have. Here is a list of things at which it failed: - Write a dead simple piece of code, which is however NOT found as an immediate answer to a stackoverflow question (I've tried this one upwards of 10 times, with no success) - Categorise a chord when I tell it the constituent pitches, and vice-versa - Solve a simple quadratic equation - Show a biography of this mildly obscure singer/politician/scholar - Write poetry in a given style - Give me references to read up on a certain technical topic ALL of these it fails, or rather, worse than fails: it spews plausible bullshit with the same confidence and tone it would spew correct answers. It can go up to manufacturing references and attributing to real people's names.

scotty79 4y ago

I think we might be vastly overestimating what gpt is going to be capable of. Just like we did with self-driving. Parrot might be harsh, but remeber this Star Wars quote: Ability to speak doesn't make you intelligent.

joe_the_user 4y ago

Anytime you see the 'parrot' argument, you can instantly go 'opinion dismissed' True or not, I find a tone of this sort of fortunate. Please don't come up with catchy ways to stop discussion of points.

aftergibson 4y ago

Yeah if anything all ChatGPT is doing is highlighting that a lot more noise-work can be automated. "Make my random thoughts sound business-y", "double check this code doesn't have anything completely stupid" etc.

archagon 4y ago

Similarly, anytime you see the “anytime you see ‘x’ you can dismiss the argument” argument, you can dismiss the argument.

intelVISA 4y ago

As you noted most, even in SWE, are parrots (including this parrot typing); we get kinda scared when the robot parrot generates bullshit better than web framework-de-jure.

reso 4y ago

> "Many humans are parrots" This is becoming common belief among people in the AI field. I'm convinced it is a case of a metaphor overtaking reality. With the LLM model in mind, we can see how Humans are "kind of like" LLMs, therefore we start to believe humans are just LLMs. Of course this forgets the enormous ways that humans are nothing like LLMs. For example: Humans don't have to read the entire internet to learn how to write complete sentences.

bolyarche 4y ago
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biohax2015 4y ago
> Humans don't have to read the entire internet to learn how to write complete sentences. Neither do LLMs? You can just train them on the same K-12 learning material and they’ll produce better sentences than 99% of people.
- reso 4y ago
  I have not seen that result, can you link it for me?

amelius 4y ago

Why? Some people may be looking for "intelligent", while you are clearly setting the bar at "useful".

lionkor 4y ago

Its convenient that any valid criticism of ChatGPT or GPT3 or $CURRENT_TECH is dismissed by saying "just pay OpenAI money to use the new thing™, it doesnt have this issue". If it was not a ChatGPT Plus offering but instead freely available, there would be way fewer shills for it (im assuming) and there would be a lot more balanced reporting on it. By default, anyone speaking to the competence of GPT-4 is willing to give OpenAI money, which may already be sign of a bias. Im not willing to pay for a product the free tier of which is shit, even when told a hundred times "no but the paid one is MUCH better!". Of course it probably is, but its a little irrelevant.

jejeyyy77 4y ago

lol, most white collar workers can do basic reasoning and basic math.

andrepd 4y ago

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