5 ms·

The discussion here is that we're not able to distinguish them. If we cannot distinguish, I'd argue they have similar value. They must have. Otherwise, how ca

The discussion here is that we're not able to distinguish them. If we cannot distinguish, I'd argue they have similar value. They must have. Otherwise, how can we demonstrate objectively the higher value in the human output?

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
If they were of similar value would there be a problem with the deluge?
- rmbyrro 3y ago
  Can't the deluge be delusional or an overreaction at best?
emodendroket 3y ago
I can't distinguish between pills that contain the medicine that I was prescribed and those than contain something else entirely. Therefore taking either should be just as good.
- rmbyrro 3y ago
  Really. Are you comparing a complex chemical analysis required to attest the contents of a pill to reading text?
  - emodendroket 3y ago
    It depends, is the text of a technical nature? How exactly is one to know they're being deceived if, to take one of the examples that has been linked in this discussion, they receive a mushroom foraging guide but the information is actually AI-generated?
    - rmbyrro 3y ago
      You first check who published it. Is the author an expert in the matter with years, perhaps decades in the industry? Heck, we always did that since before GPT. Good authors will continue to publish good content because they have a reputation to protect. They might use ChatGPT to increase productivity, but will surely and carefully review it before signing off.
      - emodendroket 3y ago
        "We" certainly did not "always" do that before.
        rmbyrro 3y ago
        Really? You buy books without searching anything about who wrote it? If yes, well, there's the problem then. It's not AI, but the lack of guidance and research skills in support of the process of choosing a book.
        emodendroket 3y ago
        Is it about "me" specifically? Anyway, how do I know the biography of the author I find isn't also AI-generated at this rate? Or that the purported author actually wrote the book? Your solution still ultimately depends on there being non-generated information somewhere down the line.
        rmbyrro 3y ago
        I thought it would be pretty obvious that one should look for biographical data from external, independent sources. If the person has earned a reputation in any industry, they'll probably have articles on respectable publishers, would have presented in conferences, maybe even have patents, etc. Just Google their name. Then Google what's associated with them. If one doesn't find anything solid, discard the book. It takes no more than 5-10 minutes to recognize a solid reputation like that.
snailmailman 3y ago
They can be distinguished. They are just becoming more difficult to. Its slightly-more difficult, but also the amount of garbage is overwhelming. AI can spit out entire books in moments that would take an individual months or years to write. There are lots of fake recipe books on amazon for instance. But how can you really be sure without trying the recipes? It might look like a recipe at first glance, but if its telling you to use the right ingredients in a subtly-wrong way, its hard to tell at first glance that you won't actually end up with edible food. Some examples are easy to point at, like the case of the recipe book that lists Zelda food items as ingredients, but they aren't always that obvious. I saw someone giving programming advice on discord a few weeks ago. Advice that was blatantly copy/pasted from chat GPT in response to a very specific technical question. It looked like an answer at first glance, but the file type of the config file chat GPT provided wasn't correct, and on top of that it was just making up config options in attempt to solve the problem. I told the user this, they deleted their response and admitted it was from chatGPT. However, the user asking the question didn't know the intricacies of "what config options are available" and "what file types are valid configuration files". This could have wasted so much of their time, dealing with further errors about invalid config files, or options that did not exist.
- rmbyrro 3y ago
  They can indeed distinguish them, I agree. So why the fuss? I think the concern is that bad authors would game the reviews and lure audiences into bad books. But aren't they already able to do so? Is it sustainable long term? If you spit out programming books with code that doesn't even run, people will post bad reviews, ask for refunds. These authors will burn their names. It's not sustainable.
  - snailmailman 3y ago
    It doesn't need to be sustainable as one author or one book. These aren't real authors. Its people using AI to make a quick buck. By the time the fraud is found out, they've already made a profit. They make up an authors name. Publish a bunch of books on a subject. Publish a bunch of fake reviews. Dominate the search results for a specific popular search. They get people to buy their book. Its not even book specific, its been happening with actual products all over amazon for years. People make up a company, sell cheap garbage, and make a profit. But with books, they can now make the cheap garbage look slightly convincing. And the cheap garbage is so cheap to produce in mass amounts that nobody can really sort through and easily figure out "which of these 10k books published today are real and which are made up by ai". It takes time and money to produce cheap products at a factory. But once these scammers have the AI generation setup, they can just publish books on loop until someone ends up buying one. They might get found out eventually, and they will have to pretend to be a different author, and they just repeat the process.
skydhash 3y ago
I'm not a native English speaker, but ChatGPT answers in each interaction I had with it sound bland. And I dislike the bite-sized format of it. I'm reading "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman and while you may agree or disagree with his take, he developed it in a very coherent way, exploring several aspects. ChatGPT's output falls into the same uncanny valley as the robotic voice from text to speech software, understandable, but no human does write that way. ChatGPT as an autocompletion tool is fine, IMO. As well as generating alternative sentences. But anything longer than a paragraph falls back to the uncanny valley.
- rmbyrro 3y ago
  I totally agree. So why are people so worried about books being written by ChatGPT? These pseudo-authors will get bad reviews, will lose money in refunds, burn their names. It's not sustainable. Some will try, for sure, but they won't last long.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    There's too many names and it's too cheap to do this. The equilibrium shifts to making it much harder to find good books, and that was already hard enough.
failuser 3y ago
If you ask LLM something you know you can distinguish noise from good output. If you ask LLM something you don’t know then how do you know if the output is correct? There are cases where checking is easier than producing the result, e.g. when you ask for a reference.
- rmbyrro 3y ago
  Book buyers should give themselves primarily by who's the author, I think. Choose a book from someone that has a hard earned reputation to protect.
  - failuser 3y ago
    There is bootstrapping process of learning which authors in that field have good reputation before you know anything about the field. That is being disrupted by LLMs as well, though.
mostlylurks 3y ago
A piece of human-written content and a piece of AI-written content may have similar value if we cannot distinguish between them. But if you can add the information that the human-written content was written by a human to the comparison, the human-written content becomes significantly more valuable, because it allows for a much deeper reading of the text, since the reader can trust that there has been an actual intent to convey some specific set of ideas through the text. This allows the reader to take a leap of faith and put in the work required to examine the author's point of view, knowing that it is based on the desires and hopes of an actual living person with a lifetime of experience behind them instead of being essentially random noise in the distribution.

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago

If they were of similar value would there be a problem with the deluge?

rmbyrro 3y ago
Can't the deluge be delusional or an overreaction at best?

emodendroket 3y ago

I can't distinguish between pills that contain the medicine that I was prescribed and those than contain something else entirely. Therefore taking either should be just as good.

rmbyrro 3y ago
Really. Are you comparing a complex chemical analysis required to attest the contents of a pill to reading text?
- emodendroket 3y ago
  It depends, is the text of a technical nature? How exactly is one to know they're being deceived if, to take one of the examples that has been linked in this discussion, they receive a mushroom foraging guide but the information is actually AI-generated?
  - rmbyrro 3y ago
    You first check who published it. Is the author an expert in the matter with years, perhaps decades in the industry? Heck, we always did that since before GPT. Good authors will continue to publish good content because they have a reputation to protect. They might use ChatGPT to increase productivity, but will surely and carefully review it before signing off.
    - emodendroket 3y ago
      "We" certainly did not "always" do that before.
      - rmbyrro 3y ago
        Really? You buy books without searching anything about who wrote it? If yes, well, there's the problem then. It's not AI, but the lack of guidance and research skills in support of the process of choosing a book.
        emodendroket 3y ago
        Is it about "me" specifically? Anyway, how do I know the biography of the author I find isn't also AI-generated at this rate? Or that the purported author actually wrote the book? Your solution still ultimately depends on there being non-generated information somewhere down the line.
        rmbyrro 3y ago
        I thought it would be pretty obvious that one should look for biographical data from external, independent sources. If the person has earned a reputation in any industry, they'll probably have articles on respectable publishers, would have presented in conferences, maybe even have patents, etc. Just Google their name. Then Google what's associated with them. If one doesn't find anything solid, discard the book. It takes no more than 5-10 minutes to recognize a solid reputation like that.

snailmailman 3y ago

They can be distinguished. They are just becoming more difficult to. Its slightly-more difficult, but also the amount of garbage is overwhelming. AI can spit out entire books in moments that would take an individual months or years to write. There are lots of fake recipe books on amazon for instance. But how can you really be sure without trying the recipes? It might look like a recipe at first glance, but if its telling you to use the right ingredients in a subtly-wrong way, its hard to tell at first glance that you won't actually end up with edible food. Some examples are easy to point at, like the case of the recipe book that lists Zelda food items as ingredients, but they aren't always that obvious. I saw someone giving programming advice on discord a few weeks ago. Advice that was blatantly copy/pasted from chat GPT in response to a very specific technical question. It looked like an answer at first glance, but the file type of the config file chat GPT provided wasn't correct, and on top of that it was just making up config options in attempt to solve the problem. I told the user this, they deleted their response and admitted it was from chatGPT. However, the user asking the question didn't know the intricacies of "what config options are available" and "what file types are valid configuration files". This could have wasted so much of their time, dealing with further errors about invalid config files, or options that did not exist.

rmbyrro 3y ago
They can indeed distinguish them, I agree. So why the fuss? I think the concern is that bad authors would game the reviews and lure audiences into bad books. But aren't they already able to do so? Is it sustainable long term? If you spit out programming books with code that doesn't even run, people will post bad reviews, ask for refunds. These authors will burn their names. It's not sustainable.
- snailmailman 3y ago
  It doesn't need to be sustainable as one author or one book. These aren't real authors. Its people using AI to make a quick buck. By the time the fraud is found out, they've already made a profit. They make up an authors name. Publish a bunch of books on a subject. Publish a bunch of fake reviews. Dominate the search results for a specific popular search. They get people to buy their book. Its not even book specific, its been happening with actual products all over amazon for years. People make up a company, sell cheap garbage, and make a profit. But with books, they can now make the cheap garbage look slightly convincing. And the cheap garbage is so cheap to produce in mass amounts that nobody can really sort through and easily figure out "which of these 10k books published today are real and which are made up by ai". It takes time and money to produce cheap products at a factory. But once these scammers have the AI generation setup, they can just publish books on loop until someone ends up buying one. They might get found out eventually, and they will have to pretend to be a different author, and they just repeat the process.

skydhash 3y ago

I'm not a native English speaker, but ChatGPT answers in each interaction I had with it sound bland. And I dislike the bite-sized format of it. I'm reading "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman and while you may agree or disagree with his take, he developed it in a very coherent way, exploring several aspects. ChatGPT's output falls into the same uncanny valley as the robotic voice from text to speech software, understandable, but no human does write that way. ChatGPT as an autocompletion tool is fine, IMO. As well as generating alternative sentences. But anything longer than a paragraph falls back to the uncanny valley.

rmbyrro 3y ago
I totally agree. So why are people so worried about books being written by ChatGPT? These pseudo-authors will get bad reviews, will lose money in refunds, burn their names. It's not sustainable. Some will try, for sure, but they won't last long.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  There's too many names and it's too cheap to do this. The equilibrium shifts to making it much harder to find good books, and that was already hard enough.

failuser 3y ago

If you ask LLM something you know you can distinguish noise from good output. If you ask LLM something you don’t know then how do you know if the output is correct? There are cases where checking is easier than producing the result, e.g. when you ask for a reference.

rmbyrro 3y ago
Book buyers should give themselves primarily by who's the author, I think. Choose a book from someone that has a hard earned reputation to protect.
- failuser 3y ago
  There is bootstrapping process of learning which authors in that field have good reputation before you know anything about the field. That is being disrupted by LLMs as well, though.

mostlylurks 3y ago

A piece of human-written content and a piece of AI-written content may have similar value if we cannot distinguish between them. But if you can add the information that the human-written content was written by a human to the comparison, the human-written content becomes significantly more valuable, because it allows for a much deeper reading of the text, since the reader can trust that there has been an actual intent to convey some specific set of ideas through the text. This allows the reader to take a leap of faith and put in the work required to examine the author's point of view, knowing that it is based on the desires and hopes of an actual living person with a lifetime of experience behind them instead of being essentially random noise in the distribution.