4 ms·

To me, having not really intelligent agents with humanlike talking abilities is the worst outcome AI could produce. These have zero utility for humanity, cause

by d--b 4y ago

To me, having not really intelligent agents with humanlike talking abilities is the worst outcome AI could produce. These have zero utility for humanity, cause they’re not intelligent whatsoever. Yet these systems can produce tons of garbage content for free, that is difficult to distinguish from human-created content. At best this is used to create better NPC in video games (as the article mentions), but more generally this is going to be used to pollute social media (if not already).

suction 4y ago
The key is to abandon social media and shame those who keep using it.
- croisillon 4y ago
  You seem to be kind of shadowban (not sure what the proper term is), you might want to write an email to the hn moderation to clear that up
  - suction 4y ago
    [dead]
nostromo 4y ago
I have found Chat-GPT content to be superior to most human-created content I find in Google search results.
- mztwo 4y ago
  One outcome of this study was that a panel of evaluators judged the bot interactions to be more "human" than when humans impersonated these characters. So you have a point.
- croniev 4y ago
  It's good at presenting existing arguments in a good way. But the problem is that such models can only give back what they have seen, consolidating the status quo. There can be no reflection and no outside of the box thinking.
colordrops 4y ago
If the content is indistinguishable from human-generated, perhaps the problem is bad content, and not the source, human or not. What do you mean by content by the way? Blog articles? Or bits and bytes in general? The right set of bits can change the world.
mztwo 4y ago
The authors of the study were clear to call out there are quite a few downsides to mass adoption of Generative Agents... the pollution and misinformation angle certainly being top of mind. I'm inclined to agree.
anileated 4y ago
I like how this tweet puts it: https://twitter.com/FrKadel/status/1644096510357913600 https://twitter.com/FrKadel/status/1644096510357913600 The model’s designed to show “what would the answer to this sound like?”, not to provide a correct answer. Unfortunately it also 1) is profitable (look how many humans we can fire while producing kinda similar results with a tool trained on those humans’ work!), and 2) fits the age old yearning (aliens, gods) of humans for humanlike-but-nonhuman sentience, a catch-22 that’s doomed to fail.
- famouswaffles 4y ago
  If the answer to "what would this sound like?" is accurate enough then it quite literally doesn't matter. Large swaths of the brain work on prediction. You think real time reactions happen in sports? It would be impossible. You have blind spots in the eye you don't notice because the brain fills in the vision with predicted information. If you can accurately predict what a doctor will say to arbitrary input then guess what ?, you're a doctor.
  - anileated 4y ago
    If you want to know what a plausible response to X might look like then the tool will give you that; if you are using it for getting correct information then no, it quite literally matters that the tool is not designed for that, and depending on domain and magnitude of this misapplication it could matter a whole lot. (For example, personally, something that to me could look like a plausible answer is not exactly where my expectations are when it comes to medicine.)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      It's literally the same thing humans do, at least to my personal experience. If you ask me a question, the first thing my mind generates is a plausibly sounding answer. That process is near-instant. The slower part is an internal evaluation - how confident I am this is the right answer? That depends on the conversation and topic in question - often enough, I can just vocalize that first thought without worry. Whether it "sounds right" is also the first step I use when processing what I hear/read others say. If anything, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, as well as other transformer-based models, are all starting to convince me that associative vector adjacency search in high-dimensional space is what thinking is.

by d--b 4y ago

suction 4y ago

The key is to abandon social media and shame those who keep using it.

croisillon 4y ago
You seem to be kind of shadowban (not sure what the proper term is), you might want to write an email to the hn moderation to clear that up
- suction 4y ago
  [dead]

nostromo 4y ago

I have found Chat-GPT content to be superior to most human-created content I find in Google search results.

mztwo 4y ago
One outcome of this study was that a panel of evaluators judged the bot interactions to be more "human" than when humans impersonated these characters. So you have a point.
croniev 4y ago
It's good at presenting existing arguments in a good way. But the problem is that such models can only give back what they have seen, consolidating the status quo. There can be no reflection and no outside of the box thinking.

colordrops 4y ago

If the content is indistinguishable from human-generated, perhaps the problem is bad content, and not the source, human or not. What do you mean by content by the way? Blog articles? Or bits and bytes in general? The right set of bits can change the world.

mztwo 4y ago

The authors of the study were clear to call out there are quite a few downsides to mass adoption of Generative Agents... the pollution and misinformation angle certainly being top of mind. I'm inclined to agree.

anileated 4y ago

I like how this tweet puts it: https://twitter.com/FrKadel/status/1644096510357913600 https://twitter.com/FrKadel/status/1644096510357913600 The model’s designed to show “what would the answer to this sound like?”, not to provide a correct answer. Unfortunately it also 1) is profitable (look how many humans we can fire while producing kinda similar results with a tool trained on those humans’ work!), and 2) fits the age old yearning (aliens, gods) of humans for humanlike-but-nonhuman sentience, a catch-22 that’s doomed to fail.

famouswaffles 4y ago
If the answer to "what would this sound like?" is accurate enough then it quite literally doesn't matter. Large swaths of the brain work on prediction. You think real time reactions happen in sports? It would be impossible. You have blind spots in the eye you don't notice because the brain fills in the vision with predicted information. If you can accurately predict what a doctor will say to arbitrary input then guess what ?, you're a doctor.
- anileated 4y ago
  If you want to know what a plausible response to X might look like then the tool will give you that; if you are using it for getting correct information then no, it quite literally matters that the tool is not designed for that, and depending on domain and magnitude of this misapplication it could matter a whole lot. (For example, personally, something that to me could look like a plausible answer is not exactly where my expectations are when it comes to medicine.)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    It's literally the same thing humans do, at least to my personal experience. If you ask me a question, the first thing my mind generates is a plausibly sounding answer. That process is near-instant. The slower part is an internal evaluation - how confident I am this is the right answer? That depends on the conversation and topic in question - often enough, I can just vocalize that first thought without worry. Whether it "sounds right" is also the first step I use when processing what I hear/read others say. If anything, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, as well as other transformer-based models, are all starting to convince me that associative vector adjacency search in high-dimensional space is what thinking is.