7 ms·

While I believe much of what you argue is correct, I do unfortunately also believe that ultimately you are incorrect: For the non-techy part of the population,

While I believe much of what you argue is correct, I do unfortunately also believe that ultimately you are incorrect: For the non-techy part of the population, and certainly eve a percentage of the techy part of the population, there will be those who don't have an hour out of their daily lives to play around and discover the limits of chatgpt etc. Worse still, an even larger portion of that crowd, even if they have an hour to spare, just... won't. Playing around with an LLM just isn't something most people would find entertaining or enlightening enough to do out of their own volition. What I find more likely to happen, is that the members of above crowd will instead slowly, over time, get the occasional dose of exposure of an interaction with an LLM, and as long as the response yielded isn't batshit crazy, these people will likely develop a growing sense of confidence in these LLMs. At that point, it will likely be very difficult proving to them that the LLMs are far from perfect.

deltaninenine 3y ago
That's just your opinion. I say we need to prove this out. If a significant portion of the tech and non techy population anthropomorphized LLMs to the point where they don't understand that LLMs hallucinate then surely some of those people exist on HN. If one of you readers is one such person who honestly has no idea what it means for chatGPT to "hallucinate" then let us know (and be honest, please don't troll). My bet is no one will respond with affirmation because the amount of people who don't get it is miniscule.
- gregjor 3y ago
  You're arguing that something observed so often and consistently that it has had a name for decades -- the ELIZA Effect [1] -- doesn't actually happen often enough to care about. I have referred to ChatGPT hallucinations with multiple friends and family, some in tech and some not (like my parents and my kids), and with one exception none of them knew what I was talking about. Like most people they think computers can't make mistakes, so it follows logically (for them) that an (apparently) intelligent machine can't make mistakes, i.e. hallucinate. I have a couple of my own ChatGPT transcripts that include hallucinations and when I show those to people they say that I deliberately misled the AI, because how could it make a mistake? In my own experience, which includes people who work in the software field and people who don't, including a couple of friends who work with neural networks and LLMs, almost no one understands how LLMs work, or what limitations they might have, or what "hallucinate" means in the context of ChatGPT. Almost everyone I know is much more likely to believe AIs have already or will soon put them out of a job and start turning us into slaves or launching nuclear strikes, because that's the nonsense they get fed my the media. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
  - deltaninenine 3y ago
    >doesn't actually happen often enough to care about. That's my entire point. It doesn't happen often enough to care about. Sounds like you have some anecdotal experience of it happening to your entire family and a lot of your friends. I experience the opposite. It has happened to exactly none of my friends and family. We do live in contradictory universes where you experience one thing and I experience another thing. Given the contradiction let's refer to the shared experience: nobody on this entire HN thread has experienced the Eliza effect. The shared experience proves my pov. >Almost everyone I know is much more likely to believe AIs have already or will soon put them out of a job This first part of your sentence has a higher likelihood of being true. The reason is because there are instances of it are already happening. It's limited given the limitations of LLMs but we are at a point where if the hallucinations are fixed then it can very much replace many jobs. Nuclear strikes and slavery is a bit far fetched.
    - gregjor 3y ago
      I think you misread my first sentence.
      - deltaninenine 3y ago
        No. You just mis expressed your point with a logical mistake. You wanted to explain why I can't find evidence for the Eliza effect on HN, but you didn't realize that it contradicts your overall point of the effect. I exploited the flaw to point out the contradiction in your thinking. Your ideas are not logically coherent your following a sort of bias here where you're trying to construct ideas to support your bias.
ack_inc 3y ago
Couldn't "proving to them that the LLMs are far from perfect" be accomplished by showing a few examples of LLM hallucination? This does not seem very difficult.
- gregjor 3y ago
  A significant portion of the American population doesn't accept the results of the 2020 election. No amount of proof will change their mind. Everyone alive has been exposed for decades to both sci-fi tropes and media hype around AI, and the ideas that stick in their heads tend to be those repeated and reinforced by media, not by direct experience. When LLMs get rolled out to everyday users who aren't experts it will come in the form of chatbots or plugins or text summarizers or code writers, not in the form of carefully fact-checked conversations with ChatGPT. Lots of people already use ChatGPT through Bing, and they aren't likely to check what it tells them. We see people misled and scammed every day because of their own ignorance and misinformation promulgated by both mainstream and social media. I can't begin to understand how anyone would think -- contrary to all evidence -- that the huge population of non-experts will figure out the limitations of an opaque technology on their own after a few interactions with it.
  - deltaninenine 3y ago
    >A significant portion of the American population doesn't accept the results of the 2020 election. No amount of proof will change their mind. This is different. There's obvious bias here. Many people don't want to believe the election is legit because of team and group mentality. People tend to believe what they want. Additionally, people can't "see" the results. It can't fully be proven because there is always a layer of indirection here where you need to trust a potential compromised source. From the perspective of the public what happened during the election can only be ascertained through a network of indirect sources so it's convenient for people to assume any one of those sources is compromised in a way such that the conclusion is closer to the one they desire. For chatGPT seeing is believing. You can see the thing hallucinates right in front of your freaking eyes. There is no layer of indirection. There is no room for someone to lie to themselves. Additionally, the bias for chatGPT is actually in the other direction. Nobody wants to believe that an AI can trivialize their skill set. People would rather believe chatGPT is garbage because that is what they prefer to believe. In fact I would argue this exact bias is the thing effecting many people right now. The same type of biases that make people believe the trump votes are rigged are the same type of biases that prevent people from even considering the fact that an LLM is more than just a stochastic parrot. They don't want to believe it... So they don't.

deltaninenine 3y ago

That's just your opinion. I say we need to prove this out. If a significant portion of the tech and non techy population anthropomorphized LLMs to the point where they don't understand that LLMs hallucinate then surely some of those people exist on HN. If one of you readers is one such person who honestly has no idea what it means for chatGPT to "hallucinate" then let us know (and be honest, please don't troll). My bet is no one will respond with affirmation because the amount of people who don't get it is miniscule.

gregjor 3y ago
You're arguing that something observed so often and consistently that it has had a name for decades -- the ELIZA Effect [1] -- doesn't actually happen often enough to care about. I have referred to ChatGPT hallucinations with multiple friends and family, some in tech and some not (like my parents and my kids), and with one exception none of them knew what I was talking about. Like most people they think computers can't make mistakes, so it follows logically (for them) that an (apparently) intelligent machine can't make mistakes, i.e. hallucinate. I have a couple of my own ChatGPT transcripts that include hallucinations and when I show those to people they say that I deliberately misled the AI, because how could it make a mistake? In my own experience, which includes people who work in the software field and people who don't, including a couple of friends who work with neural networks and LLMs, almost no one understands how LLMs work, or what limitations they might have, or what "hallucinate" means in the context of ChatGPT. Almost everyone I know is much more likely to believe AIs have already or will soon put them out of a job and start turning us into slaves or launching nuclear strikes, because that's the nonsense they get fed my the media. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
- deltaninenine 3y ago
  >doesn't actually happen often enough to care about. That's my entire point. It doesn't happen often enough to care about. Sounds like you have some anecdotal experience of it happening to your entire family and a lot of your friends. I experience the opposite. It has happened to exactly none of my friends and family. We do live in contradictory universes where you experience one thing and I experience another thing. Given the contradiction let's refer to the shared experience: nobody on this entire HN thread has experienced the Eliza effect. The shared experience proves my pov. >Almost everyone I know is much more likely to believe AIs have already or will soon put them out of a job This first part of your sentence has a higher likelihood of being true. The reason is because there are instances of it are already happening. It's limited given the limitations of LLMs but we are at a point where if the hallucinations are fixed then it can very much replace many jobs. Nuclear strikes and slavery is a bit far fetched.
  - gregjor 3y ago
    I think you misread my first sentence.
    - deltaninenine 3y ago
      No. You just mis expressed your point with a logical mistake. You wanted to explain why I can't find evidence for the Eliza effect on HN, but you didn't realize that it contradicts your overall point of the effect. I exploited the flaw to point out the contradiction in your thinking. Your ideas are not logically coherent your following a sort of bias here where you're trying to construct ideas to support your bias.

ack_inc 3y ago

Couldn't "proving to them that the LLMs are far from perfect" be accomplished by showing a few examples of LLM hallucination? This does not seem very difficult.

gregjor 3y ago
A significant portion of the American population doesn't accept the results of the 2020 election. No amount of proof will change their mind. Everyone alive has been exposed for decades to both sci-fi tropes and media hype around AI, and the ideas that stick in their heads tend to be those repeated and reinforced by media, not by direct experience. When LLMs get rolled out to everyday users who aren't experts it will come in the form of chatbots or plugins or text summarizers or code writers, not in the form of carefully fact-checked conversations with ChatGPT. Lots of people already use ChatGPT through Bing, and they aren't likely to check what it tells them. We see people misled and scammed every day because of their own ignorance and misinformation promulgated by both mainstream and social media. I can't begin to understand how anyone would think -- contrary to all evidence -- that the huge population of non-experts will figure out the limitations of an opaque technology on their own after a few interactions with it.
- deltaninenine 3y ago
  >A significant portion of the American population doesn't accept the results of the 2020 election. No amount of proof will change their mind. This is different. There's obvious bias here. Many people don't want to believe the election is legit because of team and group mentality. People tend to believe what they want. Additionally, people can't "see" the results. It can't fully be proven because there is always a layer of indirection here where you need to trust a potential compromised source. From the perspective of the public what happened during the election can only be ascertained through a network of indirect sources so it's convenient for people to assume any one of those sources is compromised in a way such that the conclusion is closer to the one they desire. For chatGPT seeing is believing. You can see the thing hallucinates right in front of your freaking eyes. There is no layer of indirection. There is no room for someone to lie to themselves. Additionally, the bias for chatGPT is actually in the other direction. Nobody wants to believe that an AI can trivialize their skill set. People would rather believe chatGPT is garbage because that is what they prefer to believe. In fact I would argue this exact bias is the thing effecting many people right now. The same type of biases that make people believe the trump votes are rigged are the same type of biases that prevent people from even considering the fact that an LLM is more than just a stochastic parrot. They don't want to believe it... So they don't.