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> When I go up the mountain to ask the ChatGPT oracle a question, I am met with a blank face. What does this oracle know? I think if your attitude is that its

> When I go up the mountain to ask the ChatGPT oracle a question, I am met with a blank face. What does this oracle know? I think if your attitude is that its an oracle, then you already have the wrong attitude for using the tool. Chatgpt is a tool, if you dont know how to use the tool, stop complaining that you don't like it. Imagine telling everyone scalpels are horrible tools because they tried to perform surgery on someone and botched it up. One day, not too far off, we are going to be able to tell a 'chat bot': make me a cartoon, it takes place in a steam punk fantasy. make it 2 seasons with 22 episodes each season. great, add a cliff hanger at the end of episode 11. add a love story component to it. reduce it back down to 1 season but 44 minute episodes. content creation is no longer going to be tied back to knowing how to draw cartoons, or have armies of writers. yes, we can get garbage out of the system. but its a tool, plenty of tools produce garbage results if you dont know how to use them. As an experiment, I asked chatgpt to write a business plan (one my brother started). The business plan was very close to what my brother produced, after working on it for a month. That's powerful, that's worthy of being 'the future'.

Baseballjodi 3y ago
[flagged]
hammyhavoc 3y ago
Yes, sure. But you know what makes most of human history's output of art, music, literature et al great? Intent, attention to detail and self-expression. Broad strokes are broad strokes. I can procedurally generate levels all day long in a video game, but for me, they're never going to be as compelling or interesting as a lower-resolution and low quality textured game from the '90s or '00s where every single tree and rock is placed with intent. I already think modern cartoons are fairly sterile and soulless versus their hand drawn or hybrid counterparts. It isn't even elitism, they just don't hold my attention or interest me artistically, stylistically, or in terms of content. If you choose to express yourself in broad strokes, that's fine, whatever floats your boat. I'll continue to chase things that have intent and artistry behind every aspect of them. Generic and formulaic is generic and formulaic all day long. It's also why I don't like most modern anime, it's sterile visually and isn't why I enjoyed the medium.
- autokad 3y ago
  I'm not arguing artists are going to go away, just that story telling is going to become a lot easier. it also doesn't mean the content produced is necessarily painted with 'broad strokes' and absolutely doesn't mean its soulless. It means the barriers to entry for producing stories just came down a whole lot - akin to the printing press did for books.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    But is the person using the tool an artist? I think this is an important question. If I give detailed instructions to a human ghost writer about a story I want them to write, I don't think anyone would say that I wrote the story. It was written by the ghost writer. If a piece of art is made by a computer based on detailed instructions, that art was made by a computer, not a person. If you are in the camp that you don't care whether or not art was made by a human, this isn't even a little problem. If, however, you are in the camp that cares a lot about that, then this is a very, very serious problem. Either way, this means that this isn't "just a tool" like a printing press. It's something completely different, and more than a tool.
    - alimov 3y ago
      > If a piece of art is made by a computer based on detailed instructions, that art was made by a computer, not a person. Tell that to music producers and digital artists. They don’t know what detailed instructions are run by the cpu of the device they use, and yet it is still art and they are still artists.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        But that's entirely different. A digital artist is directly engaging in art. The computer is, in that case, just a tool like a paintbrush. The artist is still the one making all the creative decisions. To go back to my ghost writer analogy, the reason that nobody would say I was the author is because I wasn't the one who made the creative decisions. I just described what I wanted to another person who made the creative decisions. Therefore, the other person is the author, not me.
regularjack 3y ago
Scalpel manufacturers don't advertise their scalpels as capable of performing surgery on their own.
- warent 3y ago
  Do you have an example of AI false advertising?
  - __loam 3y ago
    gesticulates broadly at the entire field
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      Fair enough
      - checkyoursudo 3y ago
        While there is a massive amount of overhype this cycle, I would still say that most of the hype comes from newly minted AI "experts" that were recently, e.g., cryptocurrency experts, or NFT experts, or epidemiology experts, or politics experts, or "integrity in gaming journalism" experts, or whatever, etc. When people like Ashton Kucthar [1] are the equivalent of shoe shine boys and taxi cab drivers giving stock tips, then I feel the hype has gotten out of control. Don't get me wrong! As someone who researches learning and intelligence, I think these developments are pretty neat. But man, the amount of people who are defining intelligence down to the level of a chatbot or predicting the impending doom of mankind are ... getting a little ahead of themselves. So many experts. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/ashton-kutcher-firms-go-out-of-business-without-ai-chatgpt-2023-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/ashton-kutcher-firms-go-out-...
MuffinFlavored 3y ago
> Chatgpt is a tool When you use a hammer or a drill, do you expect it to sometimes not hit/screw the nail? If ChatGPT is a tool for knowledge transfer/extraction, it can't hallucinate/lie to you/be wrong/make stuff up. If it's a tool for potentially discovering some knowledge that may be true and needs to almost always be verified by either a compiler or a followup "find me a reference/discussion" Google search to make sure it's accurate, then sure. But I don't think that's what it's primarily being advertised as.
- ukuina 3y ago
  > When you use a hammer or a drill, do you expect it to sometimes not hit/screw the nail? Not sure about drills, but this absolutely happens with drivers if you fumble mating the bit to the screw head, or if you miss the stud, or if you overtighten, or if you don't sometimes pre-drill, or if you strip the head, or if you don't correctly gauge underlying material composition, or thickness, or if you...
- brokencode 3y ago
  Beyond the obvious fact that you can accidentally hit your thumb with a hammer or strip the head off a screw with a screwdriver, I’d very much like to hear about any tool for collecting knowledge that is perfect. Web searches will for sure give you wrong answers. Even professors or other experts in a field will be wrong sometimes. Heck, even Einstein got some things wrong. Your goalpost is in the wrong spot. Tools don’t need to be and probably never can be perfect. But that doesn’t mean they’re not useful.
  - swexbe 3y ago
    If you hit yourself with a hammer, that’s your fault because you did something wrong. Comparatively, you can pose a completely correct and unambiguous question to ChatGPT and still get a wrong answer. I don’t like this implicit shifting of blame to the user when it’s the tool that is flawed.
    - brokencode 3y ago
vkou 3y ago
> Chatgpt is a tool, if you dont know how to use the tool, stop complaining that you don't like it. It's a tool that can be opaquely configured to be used in a million different ways, and when using it does not bring about the desired result, its acolytes sneer, and suggest that you're using it wrong. It's like a multi-tool, that only works when you're blindfolded. Sure, it can be used to hammer nails and tighten screws and strip wires and measure a tire's pressure, but it makes it quite difficult to find the magical incantation that will apply the right end to the job. (And most of the time, it quietly leaves the screw untightened, the wire clipped, and the tire with a hole in it. It's the user who's wrong, of course.)
willio58 3y ago
Exactly. I use ChatGPT for help coding sometimes and it's like 50/50 if I get an answer that is truly helpful, but that's infinitely better of a tool than I thought we'd have 1 year ago.
- GaryWilder 3y ago
  [dead]
root_axis 3y ago
ChatGPT including the GPT-4 variant sucks quite terribly at creative writing, especially the kind of writing necessary to create long-form narratives like that in serial television and especially novels. The technology will certainly improve and it will definitely become a staple in the editor's toolbox, but it is so far away from being able to produce long form narratives well that it's not a given it will eventually get there.
- barking_biscuit 3y ago
  It's just down to small context window. Once the context window is big enough to fit entire examples in the training data, then it should be trivially solvable to train a model to do it. There are various finetuned models out there for conversations or story-telling, though they're quite small in terms of parameter count at the moment, but I don't see it as being fundamentally impossible.
ambicapter 3y ago
Every "impressive chatgpt" story I hear is about someone comparing what chatgpt produced to what a human produced, and saying it's scary close. No one talks about all the times they asked chatgpt to produce something, didn't compare it to what a human could do, and then realized it was catastrophically wrong once implemented.
- barking_biscuit 3y ago
  I suppose all that really matters if the ratio of the two? I have use-cases for which I use GPT-4 and it does as good a job as I would, but faster and so I just leverage it by default now and am faster at certain things. There are also things I try it for and I don't get a useful result, so I learn not to rely on the model for that particular use-case. In that regard, it's a tool and you simply learn what it's useful for and what it's not.
  - ambicapter 3y ago
    But it's a tool that requires you to already know what you're doing, which I think cuts in to a lot of the techno-mystical powers that have been attributed to it.
tootie 3y ago
I think the point of the article is that this does not constitute a chatbot. It's not conversational. It's not really general-purpose. That doesn't mean it isn't powerful, just that telling users to have a freeform conversation isn't going to work. It's also why everyone is getting excited for "prompt engineering" to make better use of it. The biggest user value is still going to be a level above the open-ended chat UI we have right now. He's not saying GPT is useless, he's saying we haven't put it into it's optimal context yet.
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
> As an experiment, I asked chatgpt to write a business plan (one my brother started). The business plan was very close to what my brother produced, after working on it for a month. That's powerful, that's worthy of being 'the future'. How much knowledge and ideas did your brother personally develop over this month in addition to the business plan? Being handed a working plan is sometimes less useful than the aggregate experience leading up to the plan.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Case-in-point: why do some biz succeed under one CEO then fail under another quite unexpectedly? The former CEO likely understood their market, their product, their business model, maybe they even dogfooded and used what they made. The "why?" is frequently more important than the "what?" with biz. An LLM doesn't really have an understanding of how the world works, so I would be very sceptical of its ability to write a sensible business plan. It doesn't even understand the product/service, and the nuances of what it does because it can't experience it. The LLM is a yes-man with no experiences. Imagine taking a year-old old book about what worked for someone's biz years ago, then naively assuming it'll work for yours today without considering how the world, market, people, technology et al may have changed in that time. This is the same thing. It assumes x is x. Usually x is not x. People used to compare their biz to Apple, despite not even being in remotely the same industry.

Baseballjodi 3y ago

[flagged]

hammyhavoc 3y ago

Yes, sure. But you know what makes most of human history's output of art, music, literature et al great? Intent, attention to detail and self-expression. Broad strokes are broad strokes. I can procedurally generate levels all day long in a video game, but for me, they're never going to be as compelling or interesting as a lower-resolution and low quality textured game from the '90s or '00s where every single tree and rock is placed with intent. I already think modern cartoons are fairly sterile and soulless versus their hand drawn or hybrid counterparts. It isn't even elitism, they just don't hold my attention or interest me artistically, stylistically, or in terms of content. If you choose to express yourself in broad strokes, that's fine, whatever floats your boat. I'll continue to chase things that have intent and artistry behind every aspect of them. Generic and formulaic is generic and formulaic all day long. It's also why I don't like most modern anime, it's sterile visually and isn't why I enjoyed the medium.

autokad 3y ago
I'm not arguing artists are going to go away, just that story telling is going to become a lot easier. it also doesn't mean the content produced is necessarily painted with 'broad strokes' and absolutely doesn't mean its soulless. It means the barriers to entry for producing stories just came down a whole lot - akin to the printing press did for books.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  But is the person using the tool an artist? I think this is an important question. If I give detailed instructions to a human ghost writer about a story I want them to write, I don't think anyone would say that I wrote the story. It was written by the ghost writer. If a piece of art is made by a computer based on detailed instructions, that art was made by a computer, not a person. If you are in the camp that you don't care whether or not art was made by a human, this isn't even a little problem. If, however, you are in the camp that cares a lot about that, then this is a very, very serious problem. Either way, this means that this isn't "just a tool" like a printing press. It's something completely different, and more than a tool.
  - alimov 3y ago
    > If a piece of art is made by a computer based on detailed instructions, that art was made by a computer, not a person. Tell that to music producers and digital artists. They don’t know what detailed instructions are run by the cpu of the device they use, and yet it is still art and they are still artists.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      But that's entirely different. A digital artist is directly engaging in art. The computer is, in that case, just a tool like a paintbrush. The artist is still the one making all the creative decisions. To go back to my ghost writer analogy, the reason that nobody would say I was the author is because I wasn't the one who made the creative decisions. I just described what I wanted to another person who made the creative decisions. Therefore, the other person is the author, not me.

regularjack 3y ago

Scalpel manufacturers don't advertise their scalpels as capable of performing surgery on their own.

warent 3y ago
Do you have an example of AI false advertising?
- __loam 3y ago
  gesticulates broadly at the entire field
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    Fair enough
    - checkyoursudo 3y ago
      While there is a massive amount of overhype this cycle, I would still say that most of the hype comes from newly minted AI "experts" that were recently, e.g., cryptocurrency experts, or NFT experts, or epidemiology experts, or politics experts, or "integrity in gaming journalism" experts, or whatever, etc. When people like Ashton Kucthar [1] are the equivalent of shoe shine boys and taxi cab drivers giving stock tips, then I feel the hype has gotten out of control. Don't get me wrong! As someone who researches learning and intelligence, I think these developments are pretty neat. But man, the amount of people who are defining intelligence down to the level of a chatbot or predicting the impending doom of mankind are ... getting a little ahead of themselves. So many experts. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/ashton-kutcher-firms-go-out-of-business-without-ai-chatgpt-2023-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/ashton-kutcher-firms-go-out-...

MuffinFlavored 3y ago

> Chatgpt is a tool When you use a hammer or a drill, do you expect it to sometimes not hit/screw the nail? If ChatGPT is a tool for knowledge transfer/extraction, it can't hallucinate/lie to you/be wrong/make stuff up. If it's a tool for potentially discovering some knowledge that may be true and needs to almost always be verified by either a compiler or a followup "find me a reference/discussion" Google search to make sure it's accurate, then sure. But I don't think that's what it's primarily being advertised as.

ukuina 3y ago
> When you use a hammer or a drill, do you expect it to sometimes not hit/screw the nail? Not sure about drills, but this absolutely happens with drivers if you fumble mating the bit to the screw head, or if you miss the stud, or if you overtighten, or if you don't sometimes pre-drill, or if you strip the head, or if you don't correctly gauge underlying material composition, or thickness, or if you...
brokencode 3y ago
Beyond the obvious fact that you can accidentally hit your thumb with a hammer or strip the head off a screw with a screwdriver, I’d very much like to hear about any tool for collecting knowledge that is perfect. Web searches will for sure give you wrong answers. Even professors or other experts in a field will be wrong sometimes. Heck, even Einstein got some things wrong. Your goalpost is in the wrong spot. Tools don’t need to be and probably never can be perfect. But that doesn’t mean they’re not useful.
- swexbe 3y ago
  If you hit yourself with a hammer, that’s your fault because you did something wrong. Comparatively, you can pose a completely correct and unambiguous question to ChatGPT and still get a wrong answer. I don’t like this implicit shifting of blame to the user when it’s the tool that is flawed.
  - brokencode 3y ago

vkou 3y ago

> Chatgpt is a tool, if you dont know how to use the tool, stop complaining that you don't like it. It's a tool that can be opaquely configured to be used in a million different ways, and when using it does not bring about the desired result, its acolytes sneer, and suggest that you're using it wrong. It's like a multi-tool, that only works when you're blindfolded. Sure, it can be used to hammer nails and tighten screws and strip wires and measure a tire's pressure, but it makes it quite difficult to find the magical incantation that will apply the right end to the job. (And most of the time, it quietly leaves the screw untightened, the wire clipped, and the tire with a hole in it. It's the user who's wrong, of course.)

willio58 3y ago

Exactly. I use ChatGPT for help coding sometimes and it's like 50/50 if I get an answer that is truly helpful, but that's infinitely better of a tool than I thought we'd have 1 year ago.

GaryWilder 3y ago
[dead]

root_axis 3y ago

ChatGPT including the GPT-4 variant sucks quite terribly at creative writing, especially the kind of writing necessary to create long-form narratives like that in serial television and especially novels. The technology will certainly improve and it will definitely become a staple in the editor's toolbox, but it is so far away from being able to produce long form narratives well that it's not a given it will eventually get there.

barking_biscuit 3y ago
It's just down to small context window. Once the context window is big enough to fit entire examples in the training data, then it should be trivially solvable to train a model to do it. There are various finetuned models out there for conversations or story-telling, though they're quite small in terms of parameter count at the moment, but I don't see it as being fundamentally impossible.

ambicapter 3y ago

Every "impressive chatgpt" story I hear is about someone comparing what chatgpt produced to what a human produced, and saying it's scary close. No one talks about all the times they asked chatgpt to produce something, didn't compare it to what a human could do, and then realized it was catastrophically wrong once implemented.

barking_biscuit 3y ago
I suppose all that really matters if the ratio of the two? I have use-cases for which I use GPT-4 and it does as good a job as I would, but faster and so I just leverage it by default now and am faster at certain things. There are also things I try it for and I don't get a useful result, so I learn not to rely on the model for that particular use-case. In that regard, it's a tool and you simply learn what it's useful for and what it's not.
- ambicapter 3y ago
  But it's a tool that requires you to already know what you're doing, which I think cuts in to a lot of the techno-mystical powers that have been attributed to it.

tootie 3y ago

I think the point of the article is that this does not constitute a chatbot. It's not conversational. It's not really general-purpose. That doesn't mean it isn't powerful, just that telling users to have a freeform conversation isn't going to work. It's also why everyone is getting excited for "prompt engineering" to make better use of it. The biggest user value is still going to be a level above the open-ended chat UI we have right now. He's not saying GPT is useless, he's saying we haven't put it into it's optimal context yet.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago

> As an experiment, I asked chatgpt to write a business plan (one my brother started). The business plan was very close to what my brother produced, after working on it for a month. That's powerful, that's worthy of being 'the future'. How much knowledge and ideas did your brother personally develop over this month in addition to the business plan? Being handed a working plan is sometimes less useful than the aggregate experience leading up to the plan.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
Case-in-point: why do some biz succeed under one CEO then fail under another quite unexpectedly? The former CEO likely understood their market, their product, their business model, maybe they even dogfooded and used what they made. The "why?" is frequently more important than the "what?" with biz. An LLM doesn't really have an understanding of how the world works, so I would be very sceptical of its ability to write a sensible business plan. It doesn't even understand the product/service, and the nuances of what it does because it can't experience it. The LLM is a yes-man with no experiences. Imagine taking a year-old old book about what worked for someone's biz years ago, then naively assuming it'll work for yours today without considering how the world, market, people, technology et al may have changed in that time. This is the same thing. It assumes x is x. Usually x is not x. People used to compare their biz to Apple, despite not even being in remotely the same industry.