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I'm having a hard time buying this anecdote. Not even the bit where its implied that multiple people read the same script multiple times and that worked for soo

I'm having a hard time buying this anecdote. Not even the bit where its implied that multiple people read the same script multiple times and that worked for soothing people, but the actual content of the before and after; the gpt version doesn't explain it any differently and the 'compassionate' writing was absurd. My most charitable interpretation is that the anecdote is true but the article itself was written by some one else and is more of an 'inspired by real events' situation. Side note; does anyone actually think that chat gpt succeeds at rewriting things 'compassionately' or 'more intelligently'? From what I have seen the actual output more resembles caricature than the requested results, in the same way that corporate communications frequently parody earnest communication.

chocolatkey 3y ago
> does anyone actually think that chat gpt succeeds at rewriting things 'compassionately' or 'more intelligently'? I've seen non-native English speakers (co-worker) use it to write lengthy apologies to customers, and I (native speaker) think it sounds over the top sincere and dramatic, especially when the same person tends to talk in a completely different manner. I believe this story, because the customer in this case was satisfied too
- robbrown451 3y ago
  "and I (native speaker) think it sounds over the top sincere and dramatic, especially when the same person tends to talk in a completely different manner." Of course, you can actually tell ChatGPT to change its style and mannerisms. Here's an example when I was experimenting with this. It went a bit over the top in the other direction, but only because I was so explicit about asking to to be casual. https://chat.openai.com/share/07f6f9aa-de02-4a0c-8eeb-574eef5722a5 https://chat.openai.com/share/07f6f9aa-de02-4a0c-8eeb-574eef...
  - fastball 3y ago
    It's even pretty good at doing this multi-lingually. I live in Indonesia, and there is a sort of dialect used by various people from Jakarta that basically combines Indonesian and English in a way that is quite recognizeable when you hear it. The other day I asked ChatGPT to answer a question I had in Indonesian, and the answer was very formal (Google Translate generally has the same problem – the translations it gives you are way too formal for most speech). So I asked it to rephrase in this Jakartan slang it and did very well.
  - layer8 3y ago
    This won't necessarily help non-native speakers who are not able to tell if and which adjustments are needed.
    - robbrown451 3y ago
      No, but if the AI is good enough, you can say things like "write in a non-formal style" and it will do just that. Whether or not ChatGPT can do this well 6 months from its launch isn't the point. Right now ChatGPT tends to write formally and cautiously, for rather obvious reasons. Better to err on that side than the other. With a combination of thoughtful prompting, and AIs getting better over time, most of the arguments against using them in such situations fade. Remember, the original article is not talking about different languages, it is simply about a doctor using it to help out. Obviously the doctor can scan it prior to showing it to anyone.
AmericanChopper 3y ago
I’m really not trying to be inflammatory when I say this, but highly technical professions that have intense training requirements for entry attract a disproportionate amount of people with social development issues, ranging from intense self-diagnosed “introversion” to full blown developmental disorders like autism/aspergers. There’s plenty of this in software development, but medicine takes it to the next level. The demands of the curriculum and placement training basically ensure that a majority of the successful entrants to the profession are highly anti-social, as anybody with an interest in having a healthy social life would almost have to give it up to make it through that selection process. My thesis is that people with these personality traits legitimately find the synthesised “compassion” or “empathy” produced by LLMs to be legitimately insightful.
- bohner 3y ago
  There is a kernel of truth to this, disproportionate sure, but I think majority is a bit over the top. There are plenty in medicine aware of this, antisocial behavior and toxicity in general, there’s a lot of crying that goes on from medical school throughout training. You can easily have a rich social life throughout training but the process doesn’t effectively filter out the trainwrecks either.
  - AmericanChopper 3y ago
    > You can easily have a rich social life throughout training This is the complete opposite of my experience, and I’d be very surprised if there were any med schools where this was legitimately possible. When my wife was in med school she had about 40 hours of course work per week, and the curriculum was so dense that she spent nearly all the rest of her time studying. She worked (a job) 10 hours a week during med school and we’d be lucky to have a couple of hours of dedicated time together per week. Most of the time we spent together was when I’d help her with revising. During semester breaks she had mandatory placements to complete, and her school operated classes on all public holidays. It only eased for a couple of months between academic years (when she also had a non-trivial study workload to get through). During her residency this got worse when she had irregular 18+ hour shifts to get through, and just wanted to spend most of her time at home sleeping. This was the same experience that all of her peers had, so either you or my wife must have had an atypical academic experience, or you have a substantially different definition of “rich social life” than I do. > There are plenty in medicine aware of this, antisocial behavior and toxicity in general To be clear I’m not referring to toxicity necessarily, or antisocial as in being destructive or disruptive. I mean averse to social settings, and not capable of or interested in participating in normal pro social behaviour. Nearly all of her peers at med school had these characteristics, if somebody told me that 90% of doctors had some form of autism, I really wouldn’t have a hard time believing it. This is very similar to the experience I had in all of my maths, physics and comp sci papers at college, and to my subsequent experience working in software development. Granted it’s not quite as severe in that setting, but the poorly socialised software engineer stereotype didn’t just materialise out of thin air. People do find these highly contrived LLM outputs to be insightful for their “perspectives” on compassion or empathy, which is totally unrelatable for me, but this just seems like a reasonably plausible explanation.
robbrown451 3y ago
"Side note; does anyone actually think that chat gpt succeeds at rewriting things 'compassionately' or 'more intelligently'?" Often, sure. A few days ago I asked ChatGPT about a situation that needed compassion and wisdom. I thought it did way better than the 5 or 6 people I had talked to about it. https://chat.openai.com/share/2dd26347-3fbd-483f-b567-21c040782050 https://chat.openai.com/share/2dd26347-3fbd-483f-b567-21c040... (ignore the first question, which was silly) FYI, we're going to give the dog another chance.... but I was glad ChatGPT didn't push for that. I think ChatGPT answered it pretty close to how someone well trained in both mental health therapy and dealing with dogs with severe behavior issues might handle it.
- southernplaces7 3y ago
  I just read the GPT snippet in the response link you gave, and while it superficially seems well written, the text is hardly what i'd call moving or good. Instead it tries just hard enough at covering all the formulaic points of empathy and sympathy to instead emerge without a human spark of either. Essentially, it reads more like a personalized distillation of a generic committee-made sympathy note. If this is today's idea of a decent compassionate note, it's a sadly bland example of what some people consider meaningful.
  - robbrown451 3y ago
    Well, I guess the difference it that it didn't write it for you, it wrote it for me. And it was exactly what I needed to hear. And exactly not what humans that I talked about the situation to were providing, who tended to be all about "here's how I fixed the (supposedly) similar situation with my own dog". (which is unhelpful, given that I've had other dogs and this one is very, very different) For whatever reason, I guess they didn't think it was important to say that it is a heartbreaking situation, they didn't say "It's a tough situation, but your compassion and consideration for your dog's well-being is commendable." They didn't say "As much as we'd like to, we can't change the innate behaviors and instincts of certain breeds." They just skipped that part, like it didn't need to be said. But that's what I needed to hear. I didn't need whatever "human spark" that you imagine (but that I personally doubt you can actually demonstrate). So on that note, why don't you show me what you'd write, if you were trying to be helpful to someone in that situation? I'm genuinely interested in seeing if you can write something that isn't formulaic, that has that human spark you speak of, and that is otherwise better than the response that a machine gave me. I get it if that's too much time and effort to do, but really, it shouldn't take a lot of time at all. At least, not if you are suggesting that a doctor in an ER should take a break from saving lives to do such a thing. So please, just write a paragraph or two that shows what you'd say if a friend came to you looking for empathy in such a situation. "it's a sadly bland example of what some people consider meaningful." Again, let's hear what you think is better, the ball is in your court. As it stands, based solely on my interaction with you as well as my above interaction with ChatGPT, it looks like machines do empathy better than humans. But I am open minded to the idea that you can actually do better than the machine. Let's hear it.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> Side note; does anyone actually think that chat gpt succeeds at rewriting things 'compassionately' or 'more intelligently'? Sure. There are some good examples in the replies already. For me, ChatGPT (specifically GPT-4, via API) does a better job than I do based on sheer breadth and command of vocabulary alone. I've used it a couple times to generate emotional texts and the results were quite good - though I'm not actually giving anyone the raw LLM output. The process always looked like: 1. Me describing in detail the kind of message I need, who the recipient is, and what the situational context is, and then asking ChatGPT to generate several variants. 2. LLM generating 2-3 variants, each of which is roughly 50% stellar, 50% meh. 3. Adding any missing details and trying again. And/or, if one of the variants looks particularly good/promising, asking the LLM to generate variations of that. 4. Taking the few best results, mixing them together, and blending with some of the text I independently wrote on my own. In those few cases (and in more cases where I'd enlist GPT to write formal e-mails for me; the process is pretty much identical), the final outcome was a piece of text that's a sentence or phrase-level blend, with 50-60% of the phrases being AI-authored and the rest my own, and 100% of it edited and reviewed by me. It still takes some work to write a good message this way, but I resort to this, because that 50% of AI-sourced text I incorporate is stellar - all well chosen words and phrases (many of them I kind of forgot they exist). It's something I could write completely on my own, but from my pre-GPT attempts I know that reaching this level would take me many hours of agonizing efforts, marked by strong feelings of self-doubt.
golergka 3y ago
> Side note; does anyone actually think that chat gpt succeeds at rewriting things 'compassionately' or 'more intelligently'? Yes, I use it for this purpose all the time. I could have done better myself if I invested time in writing it, but it allows me to get a good enough result in a couple of seconds.

chocolatkey 3y ago

> does anyone actually think that chat gpt succeeds at rewriting things 'compassionately' or 'more intelligently'? I've seen non-native English speakers (co-worker) use it to write lengthy apologies to customers, and I (native speaker) think it sounds over the top sincere and dramatic, especially when the same person tends to talk in a completely different manner. I believe this story, because the customer in this case was satisfied too

robbrown451 3y ago
"and I (native speaker) think it sounds over the top sincere and dramatic, especially when the same person tends to talk in a completely different manner." Of course, you can actually tell ChatGPT to change its style and mannerisms. Here's an example when I was experimenting with this. It went a bit over the top in the other direction, but only because I was so explicit about asking to to be casual. https://chat.openai.com/share/07f6f9aa-de02-4a0c-8eeb-574eef5722a5 https://chat.openai.com/share/07f6f9aa-de02-4a0c-8eeb-574eef...
- fastball 3y ago
  It's even pretty good at doing this multi-lingually. I live in Indonesia, and there is a sort of dialect used by various people from Jakarta that basically combines Indonesian and English in a way that is quite recognizeable when you hear it. The other day I asked ChatGPT to answer a question I had in Indonesian, and the answer was very formal (Google Translate generally has the same problem – the translations it gives you are way too formal for most speech). So I asked it to rephrase in this Jakartan slang it and did very well.
- layer8 3y ago
  This won't necessarily help non-native speakers who are not able to tell if and which adjustments are needed.
  - robbrown451 3y ago
    No, but if the AI is good enough, you can say things like "write in a non-formal style" and it will do just that. Whether or not ChatGPT can do this well 6 months from its launch isn't the point. Right now ChatGPT tends to write formally and cautiously, for rather obvious reasons. Better to err on that side than the other. With a combination of thoughtful prompting, and AIs getting better over time, most of the arguments against using them in such situations fade. Remember, the original article is not talking about different languages, it is simply about a doctor using it to help out. Obviously the doctor can scan it prior to showing it to anyone.

AmericanChopper 3y ago

I’m really not trying to be inflammatory when I say this, but highly technical professions that have intense training requirements for entry attract a disproportionate amount of people with social development issues, ranging from intense self-diagnosed “introversion” to full blown developmental disorders like autism/aspergers. There’s plenty of this in software development, but medicine takes it to the next level. The demands of the curriculum and placement training basically ensure that a majority of the successful entrants to the profession are highly anti-social, as anybody with an interest in having a healthy social life would almost have to give it up to make it through that selection process. My thesis is that people with these personality traits legitimately find the synthesised “compassion” or “empathy” produced by LLMs to be legitimately insightful.

bohner 3y ago
There is a kernel of truth to this, disproportionate sure, but I think majority is a bit over the top. There are plenty in medicine aware of this, antisocial behavior and toxicity in general, there’s a lot of crying that goes on from medical school throughout training. You can easily have a rich social life throughout training but the process doesn’t effectively filter out the trainwrecks either.
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  > You can easily have a rich social life throughout training This is the complete opposite of my experience, and I’d be very surprised if there were any med schools where this was legitimately possible. When my wife was in med school she had about 40 hours of course work per week, and the curriculum was so dense that she spent nearly all the rest of her time studying. She worked (a job) 10 hours a week during med school and we’d be lucky to have a couple of hours of dedicated time together per week. Most of the time we spent together was when I’d help her with revising. During semester breaks she had mandatory placements to complete, and her school operated classes on all public holidays. It only eased for a couple of months between academic years (when she also had a non-trivial study workload to get through). During her residency this got worse when she had irregular 18+ hour shifts to get through, and just wanted to spend most of her time at home sleeping. This was the same experience that all of her peers had, so either you or my wife must have had an atypical academic experience, or you have a substantially different definition of “rich social life” than I do. > There are plenty in medicine aware of this, antisocial behavior and toxicity in general To be clear I’m not referring to toxicity necessarily, or antisocial as in being destructive or disruptive. I mean averse to social settings, and not capable of or interested in participating in normal pro social behaviour. Nearly all of her peers at med school had these characteristics, if somebody told me that 90% of doctors had some form of autism, I really wouldn’t have a hard time believing it. This is very similar to the experience I had in all of my maths, physics and comp sci papers at college, and to my subsequent experience working in software development. Granted it’s not quite as severe in that setting, but the poorly socialised software engineer stereotype didn’t just materialise out of thin air. People do find these highly contrived LLM outputs to be insightful for their “perspectives” on compassion or empathy, which is totally unrelatable for me, but this just seems like a reasonably plausible explanation.

robbrown451 3y ago

"Side note; does anyone actually think that chat gpt succeeds at rewriting things 'compassionately' or 'more intelligently'?" Often, sure. A few days ago I asked ChatGPT about a situation that needed compassion and wisdom. I thought it did way better than the 5 or 6 people I had talked to about it. https://chat.openai.com/share/2dd26347-3fbd-483f-b567-21c040782050 https://chat.openai.com/share/2dd26347-3fbd-483f-b567-21c040... (ignore the first question, which was silly) FYI, we're going to give the dog another chance.... but I was glad ChatGPT didn't push for that. I think ChatGPT answered it pretty close to how someone well trained in both mental health therapy and dealing with dogs with severe behavior issues might handle it.

southernplaces7 3y ago
I just read the GPT snippet in the response link you gave, and while it superficially seems well written, the text is hardly what i'd call moving or good. Instead it tries just hard enough at covering all the formulaic points of empathy and sympathy to instead emerge without a human spark of either. Essentially, it reads more like a personalized distillation of a generic committee-made sympathy note. If this is today's idea of a decent compassionate note, it's a sadly bland example of what some people consider meaningful.
- robbrown451 3y ago
  Well, I guess the difference it that it didn't write it for you, it wrote it for me. And it was exactly what I needed to hear. And exactly not what humans that I talked about the situation to were providing, who tended to be all about "here's how I fixed the (supposedly) similar situation with my own dog". (which is unhelpful, given that I've had other dogs and this one is very, very different) For whatever reason, I guess they didn't think it was important to say that it is a heartbreaking situation, they didn't say "It's a tough situation, but your compassion and consideration for your dog's well-being is commendable." They didn't say "As much as we'd like to, we can't change the innate behaviors and instincts of certain breeds." They just skipped that part, like it didn't need to be said. But that's what I needed to hear. I didn't need whatever "human spark" that you imagine (but that I personally doubt you can actually demonstrate). So on that note, why don't you show me what you'd write, if you were trying to be helpful to someone in that situation? I'm genuinely interested in seeing if you can write something that isn't formulaic, that has that human spark you speak of, and that is otherwise better than the response that a machine gave me. I get it if that's too much time and effort to do, but really, it shouldn't take a lot of time at all. At least, not if you are suggesting that a doctor in an ER should take a break from saving lives to do such a thing. So please, just write a paragraph or two that shows what you'd say if a friend came to you looking for empathy in such a situation. "it's a sadly bland example of what some people consider meaningful." Again, let's hear what you think is better, the ball is in your court. As it stands, based solely on my interaction with you as well as my above interaction with ChatGPT, it looks like machines do empathy better than humans. But I am open minded to the idea that you can actually do better than the machine. Let's hear it.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> Side note; does anyone actually think that chat gpt succeeds at rewriting things 'compassionately' or 'more intelligently'? Sure. There are some good examples in the replies already. For me, ChatGPT (specifically GPT-4, via API) does a better job than I do based on sheer breadth and command of vocabulary alone. I've used it a couple times to generate emotional texts and the results were quite good - though I'm not actually giving anyone the raw LLM output. The process always looked like: 1. Me describing in detail the kind of message I need, who the recipient is, and what the situational context is, and then asking ChatGPT to generate several variants. 2. LLM generating 2-3 variants, each of which is roughly 50% stellar, 50% meh. 3. Adding any missing details and trying again. And/or, if one of the variants looks particularly good/promising, asking the LLM to generate variations of that. 4. Taking the few best results, mixing them together, and blending with some of the text I independently wrote on my own. In those few cases (and in more cases where I'd enlist GPT to write formal e-mails for me; the process is pretty much identical), the final outcome was a piece of text that's a sentence or phrase-level blend, with 50-60% of the phrases being AI-authored and the rest my own, and 100% of it edited and reviewed by me. It still takes some work to write a good message this way, but I resort to this, because that 50% of AI-sourced text I incorporate is stellar - all well chosen words and phrases (many of them I kind of forgot they exist). It's something I could write completely on my own, but from my pre-GPT attempts I know that reaching this level would take me many hours of agonizing efforts, marked by strong feelings of self-doubt.

golergka 3y ago

> Side note; does anyone actually think that chat gpt succeeds at rewriting things 'compassionately' or 'more intelligently'? Yes, I use it for this purpose all the time. I could have done better myself if I invested time in writing it, but it allows me to get a good enough result in a couple of seconds.