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I'll never get this argument. If all you do is give bullet lists to chatgpt to get 50 pages of elaborated text just give me the damn bullet list. We'll both sav

I'll never get this argument. If all you do is give bullet lists to chatgpt to get 50 pages of elaborated text just give me the damn bullet list. We'll both save time and CPU cycles For example right now we have AIs writing CVs and cover letters that are read by AIs, we're "optimizing" things that shouldn't exist anymore but we're too deep in the cycle to even notice it

pvarangot 3y ago
He probably doesn't want you to see the bullet list because it gives up his agenda.
mistermann 3y ago
> I'll never get this argument. If all you do is give bullet lists to chatgpt to get 50 pages of elaborated text just give me the damn bullet list. We'll both save time and CPU cycles Some communication is intended to inform, some is intended to persuade... And often, the speaker doesn't even really know which they are dealing with.
renewiltord 3y ago
Likely your stated and revealed preferences are different. A place I noticed this was tech people (who are not in ad-tech) talking about advertisements: "Just describe the thing to me and if I like the specs and functionality, I'll buy it" but then when they go to buy the thing it's more of the thing that's not doing that and any time anything does that it's "oh that's cool but if it did X" but then the thing they end up buying won't do X either. The best way to get people to interact with you a certain way is to reward them for interacting with you that way, and you likely don't. Not because that's a failure of you but it's just how people (all of us) act. The world isn't a co-operative multi-tasking OS. We're more like the human body: a multi-agent conglomerate whose component organisms communicate via signals that are filtered and processed. Sometimes a pathogen mimics signals well enough. Other times we detect it. But the system wouldn't work if every participant trusted the counterparty.
JohnFen 3y ago
Yes, this is what I've been wondering, too. For uses like this, it seems that just publishing the prompt itself would be more efficient than giving the output the prompt generates.
badtension 3y ago
I threw up a little when at Google IO they showed how to increase a complaint email by 500% with just a single click. This is a bullshit technology that makes people's life harder. The best we can hope for is a summarization bot on the other end so in effect it's just more text gzipped between humans reading/writing bullet lists.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  The sender will always have an advantage over the receiver. Generating bullshit is cheap. Ability to interpret/summarize is limited by context size and time. Document dumping is the social DoS.
  - NBJack 3y ago
    Oof. This is a very good point. And we were already dealing with a truth dilution problem in the web before these models became available.
    - hughesjj 3y ago
      Right before reddit shut down /r/programming was overrun with chatgpt bots
- WWLink 3y ago
  This is already a big enough problem ;_;
- simplyluke 3y ago
  This feels like the natural endpoint of a couple of generations of students being subjected to word counts as the primary endpoint of essays. Most of k12 english education in the states is a game of learning how to fill pages with meaningless fluff even though it's the opposite of good communication.
SirMaster 3y ago
I gave up on it all when Google released that feature that can call a phone number for you to book a table or cancel a service or whatever else it can all do. And then I realized that in a lot of cases the entity answering the phone on the other end would be a machine as well. So now you have 2 machines talking to each other in text-to-speech English over audio, then having to do speech-to-text on each others audio streams, and then natural language processing to understand the message etc. When all we needed instead was a simple API endpoint over the internet for the business where a machine could talk to the other machine with just a few bytes of information to convey the same information and process the same transaction. Instead we are wasting bandwidth and tons of cpu cycles and electricity making the machines emulate a human analog conversation.
- sh34r 3y ago
  The friction of the phone call was a feature, not a bug, from the service provider's perspective. They wanted to make it harder to cancel the service for obvious reasons. They wanted to make it harder to book a table (so you'd be less likely to no-show). It's 2023, there really aren't that many businesses left that don't have basic functionality online out of sheer incompetence. It's a deliberate, willful choice, seldom in the consumer's favor, and I'm all for disrupting the hell out of this. I'd rather waste compute cycles on this nonsense than human beings' time. Maybe in the not so distant future, the AI agents can have a shibboleth which cuts the human gobbledygook short, and reverts to speaking in dialup tones.

pvarangot 3y ago

He probably doesn't want you to see the bullet list because it gives up his agenda.

mistermann 3y ago

> I'll never get this argument. If all you do is give bullet lists to chatgpt to get 50 pages of elaborated text just give me the damn bullet list. We'll both save time and CPU cycles Some communication is intended to inform, some is intended to persuade... And often, the speaker doesn't even really know which they are dealing with.

renewiltord 3y ago

Likely your stated and revealed preferences are different. A place I noticed this was tech people (who are not in ad-tech) talking about advertisements: "Just describe the thing to me and if I like the specs and functionality, I'll buy it" but then when they go to buy the thing it's more of the thing that's not doing that and any time anything does that it's "oh that's cool but if it did X" but then the thing they end up buying won't do X either. The best way to get people to interact with you a certain way is to reward them for interacting with you that way, and you likely don't. Not because that's a failure of you but it's just how people (all of us) act. The world isn't a co-operative multi-tasking OS. We're more like the human body: a multi-agent conglomerate whose component organisms communicate via signals that are filtered and processed. Sometimes a pathogen mimics signals well enough. Other times we detect it. But the system wouldn't work if every participant trusted the counterparty.

JohnFen 3y ago

Yes, this is what I've been wondering, too. For uses like this, it seems that just publishing the prompt itself would be more efficient than giving the output the prompt generates.

badtension 3y ago

I threw up a little when at Google IO they showed how to increase a complaint email by 500% with just a single click. This is a bullshit technology that makes people's life harder. The best we can hope for is a summarization bot on the other end so in effect it's just more text gzipped between humans reading/writing bullet lists.

jstarfish 3y ago
The sender will always have an advantage over the receiver. Generating bullshit is cheap. Ability to interpret/summarize is limited by context size and time. Document dumping is the social DoS.
- NBJack 3y ago
  Oof. This is a very good point. And we were already dealing with a truth dilution problem in the web before these models became available.
  - hughesjj 3y ago
    Right before reddit shut down /r/programming was overrun with chatgpt bots
WWLink 3y ago
This is already a big enough problem ;_;
simplyluke 3y ago
This feels like the natural endpoint of a couple of generations of students being subjected to word counts as the primary endpoint of essays. Most of k12 english education in the states is a game of learning how to fill pages with meaningless fluff even though it's the opposite of good communication.

SirMaster 3y ago

I gave up on it all when Google released that feature that can call a phone number for you to book a table or cancel a service or whatever else it can all do. And then I realized that in a lot of cases the entity answering the phone on the other end would be a machine as well. So now you have 2 machines talking to each other in text-to-speech English over audio, then having to do speech-to-text on each others audio streams, and then natural language processing to understand the message etc. When all we needed instead was a simple API endpoint over the internet for the business where a machine could talk to the other machine with just a few bytes of information to convey the same information and process the same transaction. Instead we are wasting bandwidth and tons of cpu cycles and electricity making the machines emulate a human analog conversation.

sh34r 3y ago
The friction of the phone call was a feature, not a bug, from the service provider's perspective. They wanted to make it harder to cancel the service for obvious reasons. They wanted to make it harder to book a table (so you'd be less likely to no-show). It's 2023, there really aren't that many businesses left that don't have basic functionality online out of sheer incompetence. It's a deliberate, willful choice, seldom in the consumer's favor, and I'm all for disrupting the hell out of this. I'd rather waste compute cycles on this nonsense than human beings' time. Maybe in the not so distant future, the AI agents can have a shibboleth which cuts the human gobbledygook short, and reverts to speaking in dialup tones.