4 ms·

There's a big difference between linking to external content and generating your own content. It's like writing a story about a homophobic/racist character in c

There's a big difference between linking to external content and generating your own content. It's like writing a story about a homophobic/racist character in context, vs writing a homophobic book – the former is fine when done well and the latter is bad. This is however both too much nuance for an LLM to act in a way reliably (i.e. separating its role-played character and itself), and too much nuance for most humans to understand. We might understand what LLMs are, their limitations, and how we should treat the content, but for most people they will take it at face value as being a statement made by OpenAI.

jiggawatts 3y ago
Look. Some people thought Harry Potter encouraged wicca, and that Dungeons & Dragons were the gateway into diabolism. Those types of people are the outliers, not the norm.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  True but that's not who I'm thinking about. Currently, to correctly use LLM output you must: - Understand that they are basing answers on particular set of content that may not be correct, and was fixed in time. - Understand that the company producing it has not programmed in each response. - Understand that the LLM does not (as far as we can tell) have an internal concept of truth and lies, and is therefore not attempting to minimise lying, only produce truthful-sounding language. Most people engaging with LLMs today do not know these things, and this is why we already have examples like professors asking ChatGPT if it generated student essays, and failing those students – something it is entirely incapable of answering. Expanding access to 1bn users is going to run into this far more. We clearly don't have the ability to communicate these nuances effectively to early adopters, let alone 1bn users, and that's not because they're stupid, it's because LLMs are in an uncanny valley – they appear human, but are not in important ways that we have not encountered before as a society. For a long time to come, the norm will be that people will assume OpenAI wrote the answers for each question, in the same way that most people assume Google programs the search results for each query. Anything outside of this is a minority tech bubble.

jiggawatts 3y ago

Look. Some people thought Harry Potter encouraged wicca, and that Dungeons & Dragons were the gateway into diabolism. Those types of people are the outliers, not the norm.

danpalmer 3y ago
True but that's not who I'm thinking about. Currently, to correctly use LLM output you must: - Understand that they are basing answers on particular set of content that may not be correct, and was fixed in time. - Understand that the company producing it has not programmed in each response. - Understand that the LLM does not (as far as we can tell) have an internal concept of truth and lies, and is therefore not attempting to minimise lying, only produce truthful-sounding language. Most people engaging with LLMs today do not know these things, and this is why we already have examples like professors asking ChatGPT if it generated student essays, and failing those students – something it is entirely incapable of answering. Expanding access to 1bn users is going to run into this far more. We clearly don't have the ability to communicate these nuances effectively to early adopters, let alone 1bn users, and that's not because they're stupid, it's because LLMs are in an uncanny valley – they appear human, but are not in important ways that we have not encountered before as a society. For a long time to come, the norm will be that people will assume OpenAI wrote the answers for each question, in the same way that most people assume Google programs the search results for each query. Anything outside of this is a minority tech bubble.