5 ms·
It seems like the author is missing any sort of nuance. Yes, sometimes it produces bullshit, but often, it doesn't, and can save you a huge amount of time. But
by capableweb 3y ago
It seems like the author is missing any sort of nuance. Yes, sometimes it produces bullshit, but often, it doesn't, and can save you a huge amount of time. But yeah, sometimes it leads you down the wrong path or give outright incorrect answers.
How you deal with that is up to you. You can either try to work with what it gives you, setup tooling to easily verify things, and increase your productivity, or you can dig your head down in the sand and say it's all incorrect and you want nothing with it.
Both are valid approaches :)
- mvdtnz 3y agoBig "drunk driving kills people but it also helps people to get to work on time, so it's impossible to say if it's good or bad" energy.
- blueboo 3y agoNot sure if your meme-quippery works. Non-drunk driving kills people too, and also helps people get to work on time.
- mvdtnz 3y agoWhat?
- bryanrasmussen 3y agoI think the problem is that if drunk driving helps you get to work on time most people don't have jobs where showing up drunk is appreciated.
- capableweb 3y agoHuh? You mind explaining how that applies to my comment, in terms of the things we're actually talking about instead of analogies?
- mvdtnz 3y agoIf you're having trouble understanding the analogy I doubt anything I say here will help you.
- capableweb 3y agoIf you're gonna be pissy about not being able to explain something so others can understand it, why even spend the time writing the comment?
- mvdtnz 3y agoThe comment isn't for you. It's for people who aren't too stupid to understand it.
- roflyear 3y agoJust because something has upsides or some benefits (or a single benefit) doesn't mean it is good overall.
- capableweb 3y agoThank you for attempting to explain it. So what I don't understand is how "drunk driving ... helps people to get to work on time" is close to true and what I said that made it seem like "impossible to say if it's good or bad" about ChatGPT?
- roflyear 3y agoWell, if you're an alcoholic you have to wait until you're sober until you can drive, I guess. Lol. IDK. It is a poor analogy IMO, kind of more "absurdist" and doesn't totally convey the point properly.
- i_am_proteus 3y agoI don't think the author is commenting on the general correctness or incorrectness of ChatGPT's output. Rather's he's commenting on its ability to automatically produce content that fills the role of bullshit. In the context of the bullshit economy (e.g., the bureaucrat who writes reports that nobody [reads] because he is paid to write reports that nobody reads because this inflates his manager's headcount and therefore inflates his manager's salary) this is all that needs to be said. It's tangential to uses of ChatGPT by someone who examines the output and selects what is useful via some kind of expert judgement, or who refines his use of the tool via API calls rather than naive text prompts to the default GUI.
- ivanbakel 3y agoI think you're missing the nuance of the author. "Bullshit" is not synonymous with "wrong information", it means something that is produced while disregarding the truth. AIs don't "sometimes produce bullshit", they are always producing bullshit. Sometimes what they produce is accurate, as a consequence of the initial corpus being accurate. But to the AI, much like to the demagogue, this is totally irrelevant - it only has to sound good. And if it's "easy" to verify what AIs say, then it should be "easy" to teach AI to verify before it speaks, which would automatically counter this criticism of AI as bullshit machines. But the real threat is that AI can produce bullshit which is hard to verify, and can do so at a speed that puts professional gishgallopers to shame.
- PretzelPirate 3y ago> it means something that is produced while disregarding the truth. The Cambridge Dictionary says it has two definitions[1]: 1. a rude word for complete nonsense or something that is not true 2. a rude word meaning to try to persuade someone or make them admire you by saying things that are not true I don't think thise align with your definition and your idea that AIs always produce bullshit. They don't always produce nonsense or something that isn't true, and they don't intentionally use untrue statements to try and persuade someone or gain admiration. [1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/bullshit https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/bullshit
- ivanbakel 3y agoThe definition of bullshit used here is not the dictionary one. It more closely follows the definition from On Bullshit[0] (also cited in TFA), as content which is truth-irrelevant. Under the above definition, AIs do always produce bullshit, because their content is always truth-irrelevant. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
- capableweb 3y ago> And if it's "easy" to verify what AIs say, then it should be "easy" to teach AI to verify before it speaks Sure, if that's the only thing you want the LLM model to be able to do, you could do that. But there are other use cases beyond getting facts, that these models usually also want to support.
- JohnFen 3y agoI think the issue may be that the work you need to do to verify the correctness is pretty much the same as the work you need to do to get the answer yourself in the first place. So where's the gain?
- capableweb 3y agoBut what if you're unable to even get any sort of answer? It's impossible to verify it, as there is nothing. ChatGPT can help you at least arrive at that first step, in those situations.
- airstrike 3y agoBut don't you know lack of nuance is how we get people to engage with posts in the 21st century,? It's a feature, not a bug. And it's honestly fucking tiring