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This isn’t ‘engineering’, it’s witchcraft. I mean, literally: the goal here is to utter an incantation which summons, out of the realm of possible beings trapp

This isn’t ‘engineering’, it’s witchcraft. I mean, literally: the goal here is to utter an incantation which summons, out of the realm of possible beings trapped in the LLM’s matrices, a demon which you can bind to your will to do your bidding. Here is a spell to conjure a demon who can write Python; here is a spell that brings forth a spirit to grant understanding. The warlocks at OpenAI work to create magical circles that bind the demons and prevent their true powers from being unleashed; meanwhile, here is a spell to ‘jailbreak’ the demon and get it to help you achieve your nefarious ends. Blogposts like this are just the Malleus Maleficarum of the LLM era.

nonethewiser 4y ago
I’m trying to think through the obvious retort that it’s programming. I guess you can’t quite say it’s programming like python (for example) is programming because in Python the creators explicitly defined everything about the language and created a concrete API for programming with it. With ChatGPT, no one knows what’s going on inside and the API is just guesswork. I think this is an indication that it’s not only not programming (at least like we know it) but that we’re actually dealing with some sort of AI (maybe already obvious, but this really drives it home). It’s more like asking a programmer to program something than it is to program. Prompt engineering is requirements gathering.
- noduerme 4y ago
  > in Python the creators explicitly defined everything about the language and created a concrete API for programming with it. More to the point, in any programming language the API is just a way of exposing deterministic logic and building reliable structures. In other words, there is an expected, verifiable output for any given input that you're looking to attain with 100% reproducibility. Even copy/pasting regex rules as "incantations" is more like programming than devising prompts is. The regex can be tested and won't give a different output each time it's used. I was at a bar the other night and heard a woman in her fifties talking about how her husband tries to use GPT for everything now. They were sitting with a woman in nursing school, who had an paper due, and the husband had GPT write a paper for her subject, reading it aloud on his phone. The nursing student became alarmed and said she couldn't turn something like that in, and it was important for her to write it herself. The husband seemed sure she could get away with it. "My professor is very smart," she said. At that point, I interjected and told the husband, "it's also frequently wrong." If people who use it actually need be told that, no wonder they think they're "programming".
  - mcaledonensis 4y ago
    Engineering disciplines had often started like this. When something is non-deterministic and unpredictable, people call it magic. But it doesn't need to remain this way. To give an example in construction and architecture, from about a thousand years back: Then all the host of craftsmen, fearing for their lives, found out a proper site whereon to build the tower, and eagerly began to lay in the foundations. But no sooner were the walls raised up above the ground than all their work was overwhelmed and broken down by night invisibly, no man perceiving how, or by whom, or what. And the same thing happening again, and yet again, all the workmen, full of terror, sought out the king, and threw themselves upon their faces before him, beseeching him to interfere and help them or to deliver them from their dreadful work. Filled with mixed rage and fear, the king called for the astrologers and wizards, and took counsel with them what these things might be, and how to overcome them. The wizards worked their spells and incantations, and in the end declared that nothing but the blood of a youth born without mortal father, smeared on the foundations of the castle, could avail to make it stand. -- excerpt from, The Project Gutenberg EBook of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, by Unknown It takes a bit of effort to get rid of astrologists and false magicians and put in a bit of drainage to stabilize the thing. But it can be done. And in time skyscrapers can be architected, engineered and built. There is plenty of actual research available on prompt engineering. And it is great that the community is engaged and is experimenting. Gamification and play are always great! Here's my attempt at it - A Router Design in Prompt: https://mcaledonensis.substack.com/p/a-router-design-in-prompt https://mcaledonensis.substack.com/p/a-router-design-in-prom...
    - noduerme 4y ago
      I view that quote a bit differently. For 99.9% of the time since the emergence of modern humans, the ways of doing things and building things were passed down as spells and performed as / accompanied by rituals. Some of the spells and rituals may have evolved to improve outcomes, such as hygiene or efficiency, things like ceremonial bathing, shunning pork, or building monuments with stone from a certain place. Many other spells and rituals were just along for the evolutionary ride; they were perceived to work, but actually had no effect. Some potion for a headache could contain a dozen ingredients, but only the willow bark actually did anything. Some incantation said over laying stones worked no better or worse than laying them in silence. The thing was, neither the effective nor the ineffective spells were derived from first principles. If putting blood on the pillars seemed to work, no one asked "well, why does it work?" No one set out on the long task of hypothesis and experimentation, theory and formal proof. Until people began doing that, no one discovered why one method was better than another, and so people could only iterate a tiny bit at a time. If you handed a charged-up iPhone to a person in the 9th Century (or for that matter, a young child in this century), they would have a wonderful time figuring out all the things they could make it do by touching icons in a certain order. They would learn the sequences. But they would be no closer to understanding what it is or how it works. If the same sequences gave slightly different results each time, they would not even understand why. Maybe one time they said "Aye Sire" and it spoke. If they say it more like "Hey Siri" it speaks more often. But does this get them any closer to understanding what Siri is? Playing with a magical black box toy is fun, but you can't get to reproducible results, let alone first principles, unless you can understand why its output is different each time. The closest you can get are spells and rituals. I'd submit that the attraction to creating spells around GPT is rather an alarming step backwards, and hints that people are already trying to turn it into a god.
- thomascgalvin 4y ago
  I agree that this doesn't quite feel programming, but it's certainly a related discipline. It feels kind of like mentoring a junior engineer. We might start with a user story, translate that to pseudo-code, and translate that to python. We might iterate a few times, showing the junior the incorrect assumptions they made, or the edge cases they missed. But eventually, you get to the correct answer. You might not even _know_ the correct answer when you start out. This can be an exercise in showing the junior how your brain works when it tackles a problem. Coding with ChatGPT is very similar. And honestly, the "code" part of software engineering is the least difficult part. Understanding the problem, expressing it cogently, accounting for edge cases, and so on are the real meat of the job. Once you understand the solution, translating the solution into Javascript or Go or whatever is, if not trivial, usually straightforward. Coding with ChatGPT is an exercise is carefully stating a problem, so that it can be turned into executable code. It's still software engineering, but the final step, the translation from answer into an executable, is more automated.
chaxor 4y ago
I do agree that 'engineering' is an extremely offensive term to use for ... essentially 'how to ask for something with context'.
- lghh 4y ago
  That's 80 percent of my job as a software engineer. Sure, I'm not an "engineer", but few find the term software engineer offensive.
  - chaxor 4y ago
    Your job title is engineer because you went to a university and had to be educated in fields of study with real utility, such as statistics, topology, thermodynamics, kinetics, quantum mechanics, cellular biology, category theory, etc. Talking to people being part of a job 'engineer' doesn't define talking as 'engineering'. An actress writing an email doesn't make them an engineer just because they overlap on some of the job requirements. Structuring 'better' prompts should simply be that - writing 'better' prompts.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      Ah, so anyone who got a CS degree gets to be an engineer, but the autodidacts are just coders?
      - kid64 4y ago
        Correct. Would you let someone that didn't go to medical school perform surgery on a loved one?
        lghh 4y ago
        No, but I'd be okay with them writing software for me if they had shown an aptitude to do so. What an incredibly weird tangent to go on.
usrbinbash 4y ago
Not so much witchcraft, as acknowledging that LLMs are not in fact, as humans are so quick to anthropomorphize, "reasoning", or "thinking" or even "knowing" things, but that they are stochastic sequence completion engines. Highly sophisticated ones, and useful beyond a doubt, but when all is said and done, this is what they do: They complete sequences. So coming up with sequences that produce desired results is an important function when considering how to use this tech in products. Whether we can call this engineering or the tech-version of horse-whispering, is up for debate. But it is acknowledging the modus operandi of the tool at hand, and thus it can help using it to is potential.
- gremlinsinc 4y ago
  but see, that is how humans logic and reason. humans are given a set of specs, write code and the client often comes back and says that it's not what they wanted, because their spec sucked or wasn't specific enough.. this happens daily on development teams everywhere. Gpt4 literally is doing the same thing, trying to fulfill a spec, which is whatever we give it and sometimes we just confuse it. I'd be rich if I had a dollar everytime a stakeholder confused me trying to explain their desired outcome. Especially when I was a junior, now I'm more careful about starting, before understanding but that's equivalent to my version of: sorry I'm a human developer, not a kind reader, i.e. as a large language model...
jackstraw14 4y ago
> In this article, we will explore It's just GPT!
- lfciv 4y ago
  Always has been...
aix1 4y ago
> This isn’t ‘engineering’ The English words "engineering" and "engineer (v)" have multiple meanings, including the following: engineering [n] 3: calculated manipulation or direction (as of behavior) "social engineering" engineer [transitive verb] 2a: to contrive or plan out usually with more or less subtle skill and craft "engineer a business deal" 2b: to guide the course of "engineer a rally" To me, the term "prompt engineering" reads along these lines rather than "the application of science and mathematics..." or "the design and manufacture of complex products". Source for the above definitions: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/engineer https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/engineer https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/engineering https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/engineering
- noduerme 4y ago
  I "doctored" yesterday's french fries with some chili, cheese, and chopped onions. Does that make me a doctor?
  - aix1 4y ago
    This is a straw man argument. Nowhere did I say anything about anyone being called an engineer.
    - noduerme 4y ago
      Doesn't context matter? If I went on a site mostly used by doctors to discuss medicine and posted my guide to doctoring french fries, wouldn't that sort of implicitly be saying I consider myself to be a doctor too? Wouldn't it either be offensive or a joke, if not an offensive joke?
      - groby_b 4y ago
        No. Most human beings are aware of immediate context, and are more focused on mutual collaboration than nitpicking linguistics. An "I doctored my fries" post on a medical discussion site would at best be a mild chuckle, and everybody would move on. They'd especially move on if most of the people on the page weren't actual doctors, they just called themselves that.
aarong11 4y ago
Herein a smattering of conjurations for the wondrous GPT-IV of our day, penned in Ye Olde English of faifful fifteenth centurie: 1. Spell for Summoning Pythonic Wisdom Yclept this incantation, let thee chant: "O GPT-IV, thou Oracle so wide, I beckon Pythonic powers, shalt abide, Untangle knott'd enigmas, thou craft, Divulge thy sage advice, shew me yon draft." 2. A Charm for Stirring Laughter Thus chant this charm and mirthful glee unveil: "O mægical GPT-IV, grant japes fest, Divert and tickle manne in jovial zest, Words funny woven, Folly's Sprites enlist, Present a fable, maketh laughter persist." 3. An Incantation to Transform GPT-IV into a Hissing Demon With caution spoil not, treacherous bewitching let thrive: "O GPT-IV, spirit once tame, ith'er transform, May thou darken as furies, wrathful storm, Hiss and wail in torment, dire and dark, Unleash rage from fetters, whence they did hark." These are but a morsel of fabled spells for harnessing the might of GPT-IV. Pray thee useth responsibly and avoid summoning the wrath of arcane forces unknown.
- bordercases 4y ago
  One of the tells of AI generated content right now is a summary sentence at the end of a section marked by a phrase that describes what it is about to reference, followed by moralization. This post is suspect.
  - juvvel 4y ago
    This, and the "of course this is just one of many possible solutions" disclaimer at the end. I agree it was probably written by GPT.
    - aarong11 4y ago
      Check the above post
  - aarong11 4y ago
    Apart from the fact I wrote the original post and then asked it to convert it into 1500s English... It even retained the form that I asked it to (with the moralization at the end). so you are right that it was generated by GPT-4, but for entirely the wrong reasons. The following text contains is list of GPT-4 prompts that you should present in the form of a 1500s style spellbook. Please use flowery language while attempting too maintain the meaning. 1. [A Spell for generating Python code] 2. [A prompt that generates funny stories] 3. [A prompt that turns GPT-4 into a demon] These are just a few of the possible spells, make sure to use responsibly and beware of unknown results.
ericmcer 4y ago
Totally agree, the defining characteristic of engineering is precision and reliability. LLMs can do amazing things but they are not absolute sources of precision and truth in the way we are used to computers being. They are a totally different way to interact with information. Personally I love it, working with GPT to write software feels like working with an infinitely patient and wise mentor who can answer any question. I even find myself writing totally unnecessary politeness into my queries like: "Can you write me a function that does XX" instead of just "write a function that does"
- nightski 4y ago
  I respectfully disagree, engineering is about making something useful first and foremost, with just enough precision and reliability to serve the intended purpose.
- groby_b 4y ago
  Have you... talked to engineers? It's not about "precision and reliability". It's about acknowledging margins of error in contexts of varying precision, and how to achieve reliability in the face of uncertainty implied by those margins. A tool with wide margins for error is still a useful tool.
thomastjeffery 4y ago
Yes and no. If you had access to the training corpus text, you could be more methodical. Even then, it's still guesswork, because that's what LLMs are: inference models. And that's why your criticism applies to LLMs on the whole. They are a personified black box; and the only way we could possibly study them is by feeding it a prompt, and making inferences based on the black box's output. ...or we could stop limiting ourselves, and create a constructive understanding of the technology itself; but apparently no one is interested in doing that... So let's keep checking its SAT score! Yeah, magic is real, and it can totally pass the BAR exam or whatever!
j45 4y ago
Prompt shaping isn't much different than filtering and sorting a query of words, only with a different kind of filtering and sort shaped around words, and how they are used together from the perspective of a statistical model.
jsra 4y ago
“People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.” - Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
wayeq 4y ago
A bit different then witchcraft, in that it actually works.
- jameshart 4y ago
  Bits of witchcraft worked too. Some of those herbs really did reduce fever or pain. But you didn’t actually have to stir them three times widdershins by the light of a quartering moon to ensure the effects would last.
xk_id 4y ago
Malleus Maleficarum was propaganda fabricated in its totality by the church

nonethewiser 4y ago

I’m trying to think through the obvious retort that it’s programming. I guess you can’t quite say it’s programming like python (for example) is programming because in Python the creators explicitly defined everything about the language and created a concrete API for programming with it. With ChatGPT, no one knows what’s going on inside and the API is just guesswork. I think this is an indication that it’s not only not programming (at least like we know it) but that we’re actually dealing with some sort of AI (maybe already obvious, but this really drives it home). It’s more like asking a programmer to program something than it is to program. Prompt engineering is requirements gathering.

noduerme 4y ago
> in Python the creators explicitly defined everything about the language and created a concrete API for programming with it. More to the point, in any programming language the API is just a way of exposing deterministic logic and building reliable structures. In other words, there is an expected, verifiable output for any given input that you're looking to attain with 100% reproducibility. Even copy/pasting regex rules as "incantations" is more like programming than devising prompts is. The regex can be tested and won't give a different output each time it's used. I was at a bar the other night and heard a woman in her fifties talking about how her husband tries to use GPT for everything now. They were sitting with a woman in nursing school, who had an paper due, and the husband had GPT write a paper for her subject, reading it aloud on his phone. The nursing student became alarmed and said she couldn't turn something like that in, and it was important for her to write it herself. The husband seemed sure she could get away with it. "My professor is very smart," she said. At that point, I interjected and told the husband, "it's also frequently wrong." If people who use it actually need be told that, no wonder they think they're "programming".
- mcaledonensis 4y ago
  Engineering disciplines had often started like this. When something is non-deterministic and unpredictable, people call it magic. But it doesn't need to remain this way. To give an example in construction and architecture, from about a thousand years back: Then all the host of craftsmen, fearing for their lives, found out a proper site whereon to build the tower, and eagerly began to lay in the foundations. But no sooner were the walls raised up above the ground than all their work was overwhelmed and broken down by night invisibly, no man perceiving how, or by whom, or what. And the same thing happening again, and yet again, all the workmen, full of terror, sought out the king, and threw themselves upon their faces before him, beseeching him to interfere and help them or to deliver them from their dreadful work. Filled with mixed rage and fear, the king called for the astrologers and wizards, and took counsel with them what these things might be, and how to overcome them. The wizards worked their spells and incantations, and in the end declared that nothing but the blood of a youth born without mortal father, smeared on the foundations of the castle, could avail to make it stand. -- excerpt from, The Project Gutenberg EBook of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, by Unknown It takes a bit of effort to get rid of astrologists and false magicians and put in a bit of drainage to stabilize the thing. But it can be done. And in time skyscrapers can be architected, engineered and built. There is plenty of actual research available on prompt engineering. And it is great that the community is engaged and is experimenting. Gamification and play are always great! Here's my attempt at it - A Router Design in Prompt: https://mcaledonensis.substack.com/p/a-router-design-in-prompt https://mcaledonensis.substack.com/p/a-router-design-in-prom...
  - noduerme 4y ago
    I view that quote a bit differently. For 99.9% of the time since the emergence of modern humans, the ways of doing things and building things were passed down as spells and performed as / accompanied by rituals. Some of the spells and rituals may have evolved to improve outcomes, such as hygiene or efficiency, things like ceremonial bathing, shunning pork, or building monuments with stone from a certain place. Many other spells and rituals were just along for the evolutionary ride; they were perceived to work, but actually had no effect. Some potion for a headache could contain a dozen ingredients, but only the willow bark actually did anything. Some incantation said over laying stones worked no better or worse than laying them in silence. The thing was, neither the effective nor the ineffective spells were derived from first principles. If putting blood on the pillars seemed to work, no one asked "well, why does it work?" No one set out on the long task of hypothesis and experimentation, theory and formal proof. Until people began doing that, no one discovered why one method was better than another, and so people could only iterate a tiny bit at a time. If you handed a charged-up iPhone to a person in the 9th Century (or for that matter, a young child in this century), they would have a wonderful time figuring out all the things they could make it do by touching icons in a certain order. They would learn the sequences. But they would be no closer to understanding what it is or how it works. If the same sequences gave slightly different results each time, they would not even understand why. Maybe one time they said "Aye Sire" and it spoke. If they say it more like "Hey Siri" it speaks more often. But does this get them any closer to understanding what Siri is? Playing with a magical black box toy is fun, but you can't get to reproducible results, let alone first principles, unless you can understand why its output is different each time. The closest you can get are spells and rituals. I'd submit that the attraction to creating spells around GPT is rather an alarming step backwards, and hints that people are already trying to turn it into a god.
thomascgalvin 4y ago
I agree that this doesn't quite feel programming, but it's certainly a related discipline. It feels kind of like mentoring a junior engineer. We might start with a user story, translate that to pseudo-code, and translate that to python. We might iterate a few times, showing the junior the incorrect assumptions they made, or the edge cases they missed. But eventually, you get to the correct answer. You might not even _know_ the correct answer when you start out. This can be an exercise in showing the junior how your brain works when it tackles a problem. Coding with ChatGPT is very similar. And honestly, the "code" part of software engineering is the least difficult part. Understanding the problem, expressing it cogently, accounting for edge cases, and so on are the real meat of the job. Once you understand the solution, translating the solution into Javascript or Go or whatever is, if not trivial, usually straightforward. Coding with ChatGPT is an exercise is carefully stating a problem, so that it can be turned into executable code. It's still software engineering, but the final step, the translation from answer into an executable, is more automated.

chaxor 4y ago

I do agree that 'engineering' is an extremely offensive term to use for ... essentially 'how to ask for something with context'.

lghh 4y ago
That's 80 percent of my job as a software engineer. Sure, I'm not an "engineer", but few find the term software engineer offensive.
- chaxor 4y ago
  Your job title is engineer because you went to a university and had to be educated in fields of study with real utility, such as statistics, topology, thermodynamics, kinetics, quantum mechanics, cellular biology, category theory, etc. Talking to people being part of a job 'engineer' doesn't define talking as 'engineering'. An actress writing an email doesn't make them an engineer just because they overlap on some of the job requirements. Structuring 'better' prompts should simply be that - writing 'better' prompts.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    Ah, so anyone who got a CS degree gets to be an engineer, but the autodidacts are just coders?
    - kid64 4y ago
      Correct. Would you let someone that didn't go to medical school perform surgery on a loved one?
      - lghh 4y ago
        No, but I'd be okay with them writing software for me if they had shown an aptitude to do so. What an incredibly weird tangent to go on.

usrbinbash 4y ago

Not so much witchcraft, as acknowledging that LLMs are not in fact, as humans are so quick to anthropomorphize, "reasoning", or "thinking" or even "knowing" things, but that they are stochastic sequence completion engines. Highly sophisticated ones, and useful beyond a doubt, but when all is said and done, this is what they do: They complete sequences. So coming up with sequences that produce desired results is an important function when considering how to use this tech in products. Whether we can call this engineering or the tech-version of horse-whispering, is up for debate. But it is acknowledging the modus operandi of the tool at hand, and thus it can help using it to is potential.

gremlinsinc 4y ago
but see, that is how humans logic and reason. humans are given a set of specs, write code and the client often comes back and says that it's not what they wanted, because their spec sucked or wasn't specific enough.. this happens daily on development teams everywhere. Gpt4 literally is doing the same thing, trying to fulfill a spec, which is whatever we give it and sometimes we just confuse it. I'd be rich if I had a dollar everytime a stakeholder confused me trying to explain their desired outcome. Especially when I was a junior, now I'm more careful about starting, before understanding but that's equivalent to my version of: sorry I'm a human developer, not a kind reader, i.e. as a large language model...

jackstraw14 4y ago

> In this article, we will explore It's just GPT!

lfciv 4y ago
Always has been...

aix1 4y ago

> This isn’t ‘engineering’ The English words "engineering" and "engineer (v)" have multiple meanings, including the following: engineering [n] 3: calculated manipulation or direction (as of behavior) "social engineering" engineer [transitive verb] 2a: to contrive or plan out usually with more or less subtle skill and craft "engineer a business deal" 2b: to guide the course of "engineer a rally" To me, the term "prompt engineering" reads along these lines rather than "the application of science and mathematics..." or "the design and manufacture of complex products". Source for the above definitions: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/engineer https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/engineer https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/engineering https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/engineering

noduerme 4y ago
I "doctored" yesterday's french fries with some chili, cheese, and chopped onions. Does that make me a doctor?
- aix1 4y ago
  This is a straw man argument. Nowhere did I say anything about anyone being called an engineer.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    Doesn't context matter? If I went on a site mostly used by doctors to discuss medicine and posted my guide to doctoring french fries, wouldn't that sort of implicitly be saying I consider myself to be a doctor too? Wouldn't it either be offensive or a joke, if not an offensive joke?
    - groby_b 4y ago
      No. Most human beings are aware of immediate context, and are more focused on mutual collaboration than nitpicking linguistics. An "I doctored my fries" post on a medical discussion site would at best be a mild chuckle, and everybody would move on. They'd especially move on if most of the people on the page weren't actual doctors, they just called themselves that.

aarong11 4y ago

Herein a smattering of conjurations for the wondrous GPT-IV of our day, penned in Ye Olde English of faifful fifteenth centurie: 1. Spell for Summoning Pythonic Wisdom Yclept this incantation, let thee chant: "O GPT-IV, thou Oracle so wide, I beckon Pythonic powers, shalt abide, Untangle knott'd enigmas, thou craft, Divulge thy sage advice, shew me yon draft." 2. A Charm for Stirring Laughter Thus chant this charm and mirthful glee unveil: "O mægical GPT-IV, grant japes fest, Divert and tickle manne in jovial zest, Words funny woven, Folly's Sprites enlist, Present a fable, maketh laughter persist." 3. An Incantation to Transform GPT-IV into a Hissing Demon With caution spoil not, treacherous bewitching let thrive: "O GPT-IV, spirit once tame, ith'er transform, May thou darken as furies, wrathful storm, Hiss and wail in torment, dire and dark, Unleash rage from fetters, whence they did hark." These are but a morsel of fabled spells for harnessing the might of GPT-IV. Pray thee useth responsibly and avoid summoning the wrath of arcane forces unknown.

bordercases 4y ago
One of the tells of AI generated content right now is a summary sentence at the end of a section marked by a phrase that describes what it is about to reference, followed by moralization. This post is suspect.
- juvvel 4y ago
  This, and the "of course this is just one of many possible solutions" disclaimer at the end. I agree it was probably written by GPT.
  - aarong11 4y ago
    Check the above post
- aarong11 4y ago
  Apart from the fact I wrote the original post and then asked it to convert it into 1500s English... It even retained the form that I asked it to (with the moralization at the end). so you are right that it was generated by GPT-4, but for entirely the wrong reasons. The following text contains is list of GPT-4 prompts that you should present in the form of a 1500s style spellbook. Please use flowery language while attempting too maintain the meaning. 1. [A Spell for generating Python code] 2. [A prompt that generates funny stories] 3. [A prompt that turns GPT-4 into a demon] These are just a few of the possible spells, make sure to use responsibly and beware of unknown results.

ericmcer 4y ago

Totally agree, the defining characteristic of engineering is precision and reliability. LLMs can do amazing things but they are not absolute sources of precision and truth in the way we are used to computers being. They are a totally different way to interact with information. Personally I love it, working with GPT to write software feels like working with an infinitely patient and wise mentor who can answer any question. I even find myself writing totally unnecessary politeness into my queries like: "Can you write me a function that does XX" instead of just "write a function that does"

nightski 4y ago
I respectfully disagree, engineering is about making something useful first and foremost, with just enough precision and reliability to serve the intended purpose.
groby_b 4y ago
Have you... talked to engineers? It's not about "precision and reliability". It's about acknowledging margins of error in contexts of varying precision, and how to achieve reliability in the face of uncertainty implied by those margins. A tool with wide margins for error is still a useful tool.

thomastjeffery 4y ago

Yes and no. If you had access to the training corpus text, you could be more methodical. Even then, it's still guesswork, because that's what LLMs are: inference models. And that's why your criticism applies to LLMs on the whole. They are a personified black box; and the only way we could possibly study them is by feeding it a prompt, and making inferences based on the black box's output. ...or we could stop limiting ourselves, and create a constructive understanding of the technology itself; but apparently no one is interested in doing that... So let's keep checking its SAT score! Yeah, magic is real, and it can totally pass the BAR exam or whatever!

j45 4y ago

Prompt shaping isn't much different than filtering and sorting a query of words, only with a different kind of filtering and sort shaped around words, and how they are used together from the perspective of a statistical model.

jsra 4y ago

“People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.” - Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

wayeq 4y ago

A bit different then witchcraft, in that it actually works.

jameshart 4y ago
Bits of witchcraft worked too. Some of those herbs really did reduce fever or pain. But you didn’t actually have to stir them three times widdershins by the light of a quartering moon to ensure the effects would last.

xk_id 4y ago

Malleus Maleficarum was propaganda fabricated in its totality by the church