7 ms·
Everyone's asking tech details and "how", but I wonder about the "why". Do we want LLMs to always write for us, or whisper in our ear what to say? By design LLM
by QuadrupleA 3y ago
Everyone's asking tech details and "how", but I wonder about the "why". Do we want LLMs to always write for us, or whisper in our ear what to say? By design LLMs tend toward the most commonplace, mainstream ideas and ways of saying things. They're not much for originality or human idiosyncracy. Are we engineering a bland world full of pablum?
- tempaccount420 3y agoI don't think people write much original thought on phones anyway.
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y agoYeah. I can’t wait to see what your parents said about desktop computers.
- dartos 3y agoMost sort messages people send on Apple devices aren’t meant to be original, just to quickly convey some information.
- elicash 3y ago"Bing Chat's" implementation already allows you to select more creative generation of text. It's just a radio button option. There are also different technical solutions for the LLM to select which word to generate that allow either for more interesting, or more predictable, words. This isn't to say a human element doesn't have a ton to offer! Just to say that we aren't necessarily engineering a bland world of pablum, either.
- QuadrupleA 3y agoThat's just temperature, which evens out the random probability a little of the N most probable next words. It's still vastly favoring the N most common ones based on the training corpus, and will have a hard time producing uncommon ones. E.g. try asking an LLM to name a real, non-famous person. The internet and it's training corpus is full of regular people, but you won't have much luck - they're statistically too uncommon to remember.
- brookst 3y ago> That's just temperature, which evens out the random probability a little of the N most probable next words. Source? A MS exec said that creative and precise are GPT4 but balanced is a not (or not 100%): https://twitter.com/MParakhin/status/1693579775590224097 https://twitter.com/MParakhin/status/1693579775590224097
- QuadrupleA 3y agoI was assuming those Bing Chat settings are temperature-based, those types of "creative/precise" controls usually are - but perhaps there's more to it.
- xp84 3y agoI would be skeptical of the results of that experiment, just because I assume the minders of the big LLMs have attempted to make it deeply uncomfortable with discussing anything that might be "personal." For a fun time, ask ChatGPT who was executed (as in capital punishment) in the US in a certain long-past year. It responds with a bunch of rubbish about privacy and about how an LLM can't be completely sure about stuff so it wouldn't be ok to speculate for fear of tarnishing someone's reputation, as though the person executed 15 years ago is going to sue OpenAI for sharing their name and what crime they were publicly convicted of and killed for.
- fulladder 3y agoEarly versions of GPT would tell me about myself, but July of this year it was saying that it could not comment on a private individual. I'm not at all famous, but there's plenty of writing by and about me in the common training datasets. So, I don't agree that there's insufficient data for it to remember a random person. This was obviously a conscious decision, probably in response to situations like this one last spring: https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-ai-made-up-sexual-harassment-allegations-jonathen-turley-report-2023-4?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-ai-made-up-sexual-ha...
- dclowd9901 3y agoMaybe not always (I assume an annoyed person could turn this feature off), but I think the general trend is, yes, especially for boring rote writing we have to get done for work or school that doesn’t require a tremendous amount of creativity. I really look forward to using GPT to help me throw together RFCs, documentation, announcement letters, daily standup write ups and other artifacts like that that prevent me from getting actual work done.
- brookst 3y agoMost human communication is bland, and people who make a point of being unpredictable and shocking are usually pretty annoying. Think of it like spellcheck : the vast majority of the time it produces desired results, but if you really want to type bjPvc9fQ, you certainly can.
- davio 3y agoThat's my mental model. First we had calculators. Then spellcheck. Now we have automated "let me google that for you"
- QuadrupleA 3y agoWell it's not so much about deliberately / affectedly being original and weird (which is annoying), but just leaving some space for natural idiosyncratic ways of writing.
- quest88 3y agoIs this an apt analogy? Don't LLMs train off these bland humans you mention? Wouldn't LLMs then also be bland?
- jsolson 3y agoYes, but sometimes that's what's called for. I think I may have found my answer to where LLMs might be useful for short communications: softening something that might be interpreted as "curt" or even "rude" while not really changing the message.
- mtkhaos 3y agoThis throws out the possibility of high quality content.
- crazygringo 3y agoIt's not LLM's writing for us, it's just autocomplete. If the suggestion doesn't match what you were already planning on saying, you just ignore it. The human desire to be original and authentic is always going to be stronger. (It's much less effort to ignore it and keep typing your original thought, than it is to think about it, compare with what you were going to say, decide its version is better, and then accept it.)
- WirelessGigabit 3y ago2 problems with suggestions: 1) there is a sort order to them. And we don't know how the 'recommendations' work. What is a recommendation? Why is Google recommending something over something else? 2) it bogs down creativity. You end up not thinking and accepting the suggestion as 'good' enough.
- Tagbert 3y agoMost writing does not need creativity. It is wrote communication. If you want to put some creativity into something or write something where you want to write with some personality, then turn off the predictions or use it just for spell check.
- maroonblazer 3y agoMy job requires me to correspond with dozens of people over email, Teams, and Slack every day. We're all trying to get work done and need our communications to be as succinct as possible. Sure, occasionally I might dress it up to add some humor, but that's ~1% of cases. An AI, with access to my entire corpus of work-related communication, could likely very easily predict most of my communications, since they fall into a small set of categories. "When can I expect to get $workproduct?" "Here's when I can commit to getting you $workproduct" "What's the estimated date for $milestone?" "Here's the project plan for $initiative" "I can't make this meeting, can you be sure to record it?" I welcome any tool that can predict what I want to type and does it for me. I'm not sure if it's my imagination or not but Outlook and Teams seem to have gotten better in this regard. I'll take more of that.
- 3y ago
- tambourine_man 3y agoIt’s an important question, but one we’re not addressing in so many areas. We’re 8 billion in the world and more culturally homogeneous than ever. I think and hope the pendulum will swing back eventually, but my guess is that it’s still got some way to go before that.
- jsolson 3y agoI find they're useful as a tool for achieving a particular structure or tone that isn't "my voice," including populating boilerplate from bullet points. Sometimes I'll go back and revisit everything they've produced, but they let me put something tolerable in place early. This lets me focus on the meaty parts of the text sooner than I'd otherwise find myself capable of. I personally don't find them useful for quick / short / informal communication like email, or at least not yet.
- avianlyric 3y agoAs someone with Dyslexia, who struggles a lot with written communication, and frequently finds myself fighting with spellcheckers, trying to get them to provide the correct correction. I’m very excited for these types of autocomplete systems. They’re like spellcheckers, except they also use context to produce better results, and frequently remove the need to play “guess the right misspelling” to get a normal spellcheck to provide good suggestions. I’ll accept the risk of blandness, if it means that written communication finally becomes “easy” for me to participate in.
- babl-yc 3y agoI disabled Gmail Smart Compose for this reason; I felt like it was putting words into my mouth suggesting entire sentences for the email. I'm much more open to using transformers as a better auto-correct, where it's one word at a time and uses the first letter as a filter. Especially on a tiny phone keyboard on the go.
- runjake 3y agoBecause at work I’m typing the same bland things all the time in documents and communications. I appreciate stuff like the predictive word stuff in Google Docs. It’s helpful because business language is expected to be normalized and boring. On the other side of that token, the average language abilities of the average American office worker are pretty low so I’m assuming they view this as an enhanced AutoCorrect and they appreciate it because it makes them look less dumb. I agree with your point though. And to answer your last question, unfortunately I think the answer is “yes”.
- vore 3y agoOn the other side of that token, the average language abilities of the average American office worker are pretty low so I’m assuming they view this as an enhanced AutoCorrect and they appreciate it because it makes them look less dumb. Awfully presumptuous, don’t you think?
- dsco 3y agoI would also assume this to be largely true, mainly because of how language in media has gone from being formal and informative to casual and less expressive.
- vore 3y agoI agree there has been a style shift, I don't think writing has gotten any less informative. I personally don't like formal writing, but either way it has no bearing on whether or not ideas can be gotten across effectively. Substance over style!
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago> because business language is expected to be normalized and boring why?
- harshaw 3y agoI might say it a bit differently. The amazon writing style is to avoid flowery prose, weasel words (maybe, perhaps, etc), give precise dates, use data, etc. I'd love a model that I could hand to engineers to help them write in this style.
- vore 3y agoIf I’m writing an email to my coworkers, what I really care about is the information I’m getting across and not really the presentation of it. If LLM autocomplete can speed up writing a totally functional email then how bland it is really isn’t at the top of my mind.
- andrei_says_ 3y agoQuite likely yes in the context of repetitive daily routine communication.
- dwringer 3y agoOne approach that I've been using with a local LLM, mostly brainstorming for my friends and my dungeons and dragons sessions, is to set up a prompt to be completed with some certain detail of storyline, character background, etc., Then running that prompt maybe 50 or 100 times and keeping informal statistics on the different results that come out. In such an application, it can be used as much for inspiration of how not to sound bland, commonplace, or derivative. You can pick the one in 100 oddity that strikes you as interesting, or simply make sure not to use any of the outcomes that the LLM came up with.
- shawnz 3y ago> Are we engineering a bland world full of pablum? Like any other technological advancement, we're freeing ourselves from the burden of wasting mental energy manually doing those commonplace unoriginal tasks which can be easily automated, so there's more bandwidth left for human beings to focus specifically on the things which can't be
- quadcore 3y agoThose who still carefully craft their text messages will stand out.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- MetaMonk 3y agoLLMs will by necessity but unintentionally enforce phonotactics but more at the sentence / thought level.