3 ms·

Is expertise still important in the age of ChatGPT?

ido 3y ago
yes
SanderNL 3y ago
If anything it’s more important. Without it you cannot separate its confabulation from its useful output. Knowing when to use what tool, how to do it properly and to what extent takes expertise as well. Carpenters and craftsmen in general are infinitely more productive with woodworking and related tools than I will ever be. My destiny is assembling IKEA cupboards. The same principle will apply with AI tools. Sure you can whip up something, but a specialist will do it infinitely better in 1/100th of the time with the same tools. Guess who will be employed to make use of said tools?
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  Probably not the best comparison, as a carpenter or craftsmen can't tell a LLM something to build X out of wood and have it come out mostly OK (yet?). Anyone can tell ChatGPT to write some code to do X, not just expert programmers. It may not be perfect, but it's only going to get better, no?
  - SanderNL 3y ago
    This metaphor is not about the tools so much as it is about the nature of expertise and its effect on the results of said tools. Someone with expertise will use any tools, including GPT, in ways a novice can’t even understand. Same tools, different outputs. Not the tools, because basically anyone has access, but the one using it will determine the outcome. In a capitalist society you will have to compete otherwise known as staying employed. Someone with expertise can hook up AIs in ways and with a velocity that will leave amateurs in the dust. The amateurs will still be fiddling around with “prompts” and Googling or ChatGPT’ing what “latent” means while the expert has working systems ready to go. I don’t see this chasm getting smaller. These tools magnify your inherent (in)competency. Try to compete with a professional artist competent with Stable Diffusion if you want a taste of that.
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
This is a good question, and I don't think you should be downvoted. It is important for several reasons: - As other commenters pointed out, filtering, adapting and integrating ChatGPT output has a better ROI with experts. - An expert will know the ROI of using ChatGPT, including on the long run, and can assess if it's worth it or not. A non expert will use it for as long as it works, and can hit a wall of technical debts accumulated from the GPT usage that will now sunk the cost of the entire operation. - Expertise comes with a lot of implicit knowledge that ChatGPT doesn't access to. - ChatGPT doesn't learn from mistakes in the way humans does. And humans don't share the mistakes they made as much. And experts have made all the mistakes. - ChatGPT tries very hard not to not be opinionated, or to have an opinion that will offend the least amount of people. IRL though, you want opinionated takes. There are, however, many situations where being an expert to benefit from ChatGPT is no required. I also find that sometimes being an expert prevents me from getting the most of ChatGPT, because I stick to what I know instead of embracing novel workflows. I have a friend coding things with repeated ChatGPT copy/paste loops over days, and they have done great things with it.
astrobe_ 3y ago
Yeah. ChatGPT has no expertise at all, just a huge amount of knowledge. Because there are two parts in expertise: pure knowledge, and a set of weighed criteria to evaluate things. This second part is what I think TFA calls "tacit" knowledge. This stuff is a job for neural networks, but more for Alpha0 than for ChatGPT - although it does probably that under the hood, but it's an expertise used to string together questions and answers. That's enough to give the illusion of expertise, but you still face the problem how evaluating that artificial expert. There are many reports that ChatGPT can be "slightly wrong" that only experts can really spot. You can have ChatGPT do your boilerplate code or bulk work if you are an expert in the field. I personally think of this part of expertise as the expert's "intuition". This intuition is indeed sometimes difficult to communicate. Sometimes because it comes from various experiences, and describing those experiences in enough details would take far too long. Sometimes A just "feels" better than B because those criteria and weights are subconscious; pretty much like you apply a certain amount of force to lift an object because you have subconsciously evaluated its weight (either with material density and shape, or from memory because you've lifted similar things before) - and sometimes you are surprised because it is magnetized or it the box has been emptied. However, my criteria to evaluate expertise is still how well the expert can explain something to me - that is, if they are good teachers. This also an unreliable proxy like the "vocab point" of TFA. Not everyone is a good teacher, and impostors or poseurs can make you feel like you understand when they are actually bullshitting you. ChatGPT could be a good (enough) teacher that can help you becoming an expert (partly because of the fact checking work you'll have to do, something you normally don't have to do with an actual teacher), but ChatGPT as an expert, it is a no-no in my book.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ido 3y ago

yes

If anything it’s more important. Without it you cannot separate its confabulation from its useful output. Knowing when to use what tool, how to do it properly and to what extent takes expertise as well. Carpenters and craftsmen in general are infinitely more productive with woodworking and related tools than I will ever be. My destiny is assembling IKEA cupboards. The same principle will apply with AI tools. Sure you can whip up something, but a specialist will do it infinitely better in 1/100th of the time with the same tools. Guess who will be employed to make use of said tools?

candiddevmike 3y ago
Probably not the best comparison, as a carpenter or craftsmen can't tell a LLM something to build X out of wood and have it come out mostly OK (yet?). Anyone can tell ChatGPT to write some code to do X, not just expert programmers. It may not be perfect, but it's only going to get better, no?
- SanderNL 3y ago
  This metaphor is not about the tools so much as it is about the nature of expertise and its effect on the results of said tools. Someone with expertise will use any tools, including GPT, in ways a novice can’t even understand. Same tools, different outputs. Not the tools, because basically anyone has access, but the one using it will determine the outcome. In a capitalist society you will have to compete otherwise known as staying employed. Someone with expertise can hook up AIs in ways and with a velocity that will leave amateurs in the dust. The amateurs will still be fiddling around with “prompts” and Googling or ChatGPT’ing what “latent” means while the expert has working systems ready to go. I don’t see this chasm getting smaller. These tools magnify your inherent (in)competency. Try to compete with a professional artist competent with Stable Diffusion if you want a taste of that.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago

This is a good question, and I don't think you should be downvoted. It is important for several reasons: - As other commenters pointed out, filtering, adapting and integrating ChatGPT output has a better ROI with experts. - An expert will know the ROI of using ChatGPT, including on the long run, and can assess if it's worth it or not. A non expert will use it for as long as it works, and can hit a wall of technical debts accumulated from the GPT usage that will now sunk the cost of the entire operation. - Expertise comes with a lot of implicit knowledge that ChatGPT doesn't access to. - ChatGPT doesn't learn from mistakes in the way humans does. And humans don't share the mistakes they made as much. And experts have made all the mistakes. - ChatGPT tries very hard not to not be opinionated, or to have an opinion that will offend the least amount of people. IRL though, you want opinionated takes. There are, however, many situations where being an expert to benefit from ChatGPT is no required. I also find that sometimes being an expert prevents me from getting the most of ChatGPT, because I stick to what I know instead of embracing novel workflows. I have a friend coding things with repeated ChatGPT copy/paste loops over days, and they have done great things with it.

astrobe_ 3y ago

Yeah. ChatGPT has no expertise at all, just a huge amount of knowledge. Because there are two parts in expertise: pure knowledge, and a set of weighed criteria to evaluate things. This second part is what I think TFA calls "tacit" knowledge. This stuff is a job for neural networks, but more for Alpha0 than for ChatGPT - although it does probably that under the hood, but it's an expertise used to string together questions and answers. That's enough to give the illusion of expertise, but you still face the problem how evaluating that artificial expert. There are many reports that ChatGPT can be "slightly wrong" that only experts can really spot. You can have ChatGPT do your boilerplate code or bulk work if you are an expert in the field. I personally think of this part of expertise as the expert's "intuition". This intuition is indeed sometimes difficult to communicate. Sometimes because it comes from various experiences, and describing those experiences in enough details would take far too long. Sometimes A just "feels" better than B because those criteria and weights are subconscious; pretty much like you apply a certain amount of force to lift an object because you have subconsciously evaluated its weight (either with material density and shape, or from memory because you've lifted similar things before) - and sometimes you are surprised because it is magnetized or it the box has been emptied. However, my criteria to evaluate expertise is still how well the expert can explain something to me - that is, if they are good teachers. This also an unreliable proxy like the "vocab point" of TFA. Not everyone is a good teacher, and impostors or poseurs can make you feel like you understand when they are actually bullshitting you. ChatGPT could be a good (enough) teacher that can help you becoming an expert (partly because of the fact checking work you'll have to do, something you normally don't have to do with an actual teacher), but ChatGPT as an expert, it is a no-no in my book.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]