4 ms·

Right, I hate when people smugly repeat this anecdote as if it was totally unreasonable to expect something more. The ideas of AI and cybernetics were of course

Right, I hate when people smugly repeat this anecdote as if it was totally unreasonable to expect something more. The ideas of AI and cybernetics were of course quite far away in Babbage's time (notwithstanding the vision of Kempelen's Mechanical Turk) and learned men were enamored with the cool new steam-powered mechanical passive valve-logic worldview, but normal people's intuitions don't have to follow whatever is the new fad. If 30 years ago I asked a truck enthusiast: "If there's a car in front of me on the highway and I slam on the accelerator and don't touch the brakes, will the truck slow down before collision or am I going to crash into the car?" - Trucker in 1993: "I can't even." Truck today: *brakes*.

boredumb 3y ago
Smug or not asking an LLM to repeat a bleach based recipe and then receiving one is exactly what this quote is alluding to. ""If I ask for something I don't want, will it give me something I want??" - no
- bonoboTP 3y ago
  It's a design decision and depends on the maker's philosophy. It's not absurd to have it either one way or the other. Is the user assumed to be an idealized empowered rational adult who knows what they want, or more like a toddler babbling around who has no idea what they want and can just approximately gesture in the direction? Or where exactly inbetween. Again, depends on the philosophy.
  - boredumb 3y ago
    if it's a grocery store app they probably aren't looking to allow mustard gas recipes
- ben_w 3y ago
  > ""If I ask for something I don't want, will it give me something I want??" - no Not all the time, no — but ChatGPT 3.5 is much better at that exact thing than Google or responses from StackOverflow etc. users.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  With all the carnage of the last few years, it isn’t inconceivable that some of the ‘bleach is the covid cure’ bs got into training data sets.
  - mdp2021 3y ago
    > it isn’t inconceivable It is certainly expected. From the wrong value of iron in spinach, to prejudice, to incomplete knowledge...
  - boredumb 3y ago
    People repeat things and phrases that they attribute to people out of context all the time without AI helping them. Just look at what you mentioned “I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.” No one besides political opponents mentioned bleach and yet it is repeated ad-nauseum, so yes I'm positive that just like uninformed or over-socialized humans, LLMs can be fed incorrect information that causes them to output incorrect information.
rolandog 3y ago
Agreed. It's quite a skill to steel-man another person's arguments and then proceed to answer from that point; it's very easy to go down the "you're not obviously smart enough to question my authority" which then leads to people being hurtful towards each other. I'm very lucky that my best half is so emotionally-savvy that some of it has rubbed off on me. I just wish that civility could be taught from early ages; so much worldwide bitterness could be avoided.
jowea 3y ago
Yes, and this could just as well be the MP making a point of how humans would still be needed to check the inputs and outputs. Still, it's interesting to know how far back some of the basic issues of computing go.

boredumb 3y ago

Smug or not asking an LLM to repeat a bleach based recipe and then receiving one is exactly what this quote is alluding to. ""If I ask for something I don't want, will it give me something I want??" - no

bonoboTP 3y ago
It's a design decision and depends on the maker's philosophy. It's not absurd to have it either one way or the other. Is the user assumed to be an idealized empowered rational adult who knows what they want, or more like a toddler babbling around who has no idea what they want and can just approximately gesture in the direction? Or where exactly inbetween. Again, depends on the philosophy.
- boredumb 3y ago
  if it's a grocery store app they probably aren't looking to allow mustard gas recipes
ben_w 3y ago
> ""If I ask for something I don't want, will it give me something I want??" - no Not all the time, no — but ChatGPT 3.5 is much better at that exact thing than Google or responses from StackOverflow etc. users.
lostlogin 3y ago
With all the carnage of the last few years, it isn’t inconceivable that some of the ‘bleach is the covid cure’ bs got into training data sets.
- mdp2021 3y ago
  > it isn’t inconceivable It is certainly expected. From the wrong value of iron in spinach, to prejudice, to incomplete knowledge...
- boredumb 3y ago
  People repeat things and phrases that they attribute to people out of context all the time without AI helping them. Just look at what you mentioned “I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.” No one besides political opponents mentioned bleach and yet it is repeated ad-nauseum, so yes I'm positive that just like uninformed or over-socialized humans, LLMs can be fed incorrect information that causes them to output incorrect information.

rolandog 3y ago

Agreed. It's quite a skill to steel-man another person's arguments and then proceed to answer from that point; it's very easy to go down the "you're not obviously smart enough to question my authority" which then leads to people being hurtful towards each other. I'm very lucky that my best half is so emotionally-savvy that some of it has rubbed off on me. I just wish that civility could be taught from early ages; so much worldwide bitterness could be avoided.

jowea 3y ago

Yes, and this could just as well be the MP making a point of how humans would still be needed to check the inputs and outputs. Still, it's interesting to know how far back some of the basic issues of computing go.