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One of the funniest things I've ever heard/read about chatGPT "writing" is that it writes like a highschool student trying to inflate their word count on an ess

One of the funniest things I've ever heard/read about chatGPT "writing" is that it writes like a highschool student trying to inflate their word count on an essay. It typically uses a lot of words to say very little, and the style is hard to un-see once you recognize it.

siva7 2y ago
It's called thinking out loud. Gets you better results. Try it out yourself.
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  ChatGPT doesn’t think
  - knodi123 2y ago
    Prove to my satisfaction that you think. ;-)
    - JohnMakin 2y ago
      I think that comments like this with emoticons are vague in intention and difficult to reply to especially given parent context - but basically, I think because I am thinking. No proof exists within the LLM flavor of AI products that they do any form of thinking as we understand it, because we haven’t even defined what thinking is. Charlatans tend to use vague definitions to advance whatever agenda they have, and when a subject is already poorly understood, it is prone to wild, unsubstantiated (and prone to misinterpretation) claims. Whatever you want to make of AI’s emergent abilities or whatever dumb AI meaningless buzzwords are the trend right now, you have to first prove to me you know how I think before I will accept your claim AI knows how to and as far as I’m aware that’s still an open question. Hope that explains my viewpoint.
      - JohnMakin 2y ago
        https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Therefore_I_Am:_The_Tale_of_IG-88 https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Therefore_I_Am:_The_Tale_of... Only old heads will know this but this is a Star wars old canon short story from a collection of short stories that explores the topic of what consciousness and thoughts mean and in the context of a malevolent AI. “I think, therefore I am.” However, “think” is a bit ouroboric in definition and the reason this is an interesting question.
      - knodi123 2y ago
        > are vague in intention Just poking fun at a flaw in your reasoning. You think you are thinking because of your subjective experience. However, you say that something else cannot be thinking, despite the fact that you cannot share its subjective experience- therefore ChatGPT could say the same thing about you.
        JohnMakin 2y ago
        This is turning into the type of pedantic argument I find exhausting on here and gets into complex philosophy theories of mind, but basically, I believe the flaw in your reasoning is that you are assuming ChatGPT has a subjective experience. To me that's absurd to the point of comedy and I haven't seen any evidence of it, but I'm completely uninterested in debating that.
        knodi123 2y ago
        > the flaw in your reasoning is that you are assuming ChatGPT has a subjective experience No I'm not. I don't think ChatGPT thinks either. But I can express that claim without making untestable, unscientific, circular claims. Your explanations of why it can't be conscious have all boiled down to "because it isn't [synonym for conscious]". But you are conscious "because you do [thing synonymous with consciousness]". I'm not trying to attack you as a person, just poking fun at this all-too-common style of reasoning. I apologize if I offended you by doing that.
sandworm101 2y ago
>> like a highschool student trying to inflate their word count on an essay. So the chameleon is a bad chameleon because it looks too much like a leaf, too much like the thing it is attempting to imitate? A few years ago I was tasked with editing the performance reviews for my unit (military). Every supervisor had a finite number of characters in which to describe each soldier's performance. I went through and removed all the extra/useless words. Oh the anger! While supervisors agreed I had improved their writing, they now felt obligated to fill up all the blank space I had created.
- knodi123 2y ago
  I'm glad you asked about chameleons! Determining whether a chameleon is good or bad can be very important for lizard rankings. As everyone knows, a chameleon is able to camouflage to look more like a leaf. This can help protect it from predators! But sometimes looking like a leaf can go too far.... [and so on]. I hooked ChatGPT up to a speech recognizer and far field mics etc, trying to build my own alexa, and I had to add "Please be terse" to the prompt. And that wasn't enough, so I said "Please limit yourself to as few words as possible to convey the answer. Be terse. Try to keep your speech very short." before I finally started getting reasonable replies.
  - Terretta 2y ago
    Your example showed it that by "terse" you meant explain the same thing three different ways. ;-)
jdietrich 2y ago
ChatGPT will write in essentially any style you ask it to. The default behaviour is an artifact of RLHF training and the hidden pre-prompt, not a reflection of the capabilities of the underlying model. A pre-prompt along the following lines will radically change the nature of the output: "You are a subject matter expert in x. You communicate in a terse, information-dense manner. You make clear, strong arguments without vacillation."
- famouswaffles 2y ago
  Yeah Open AI, Anthropic etc are all intentionally making LLMs sound more robotic than they are capable of sounding. It's pretty awful because the effects it has on fiction writing is disastrous.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
JojoFatsani 2y ago
I have had good luck telling it to use simplified technical English.

siva7 2y ago

It's called thinking out loud. Gets you better results. Try it out yourself.

JohnMakin 2y ago
ChatGPT doesn’t think
- knodi123 2y ago
  Prove to my satisfaction that you think. ;-)
  - JohnMakin 2y ago
    I think that comments like this with emoticons are vague in intention and difficult to reply to especially given parent context - but basically, I think because I am thinking. No proof exists within the LLM flavor of AI products that they do any form of thinking as we understand it, because we haven’t even defined what thinking is. Charlatans tend to use vague definitions to advance whatever agenda they have, and when a subject is already poorly understood, it is prone to wild, unsubstantiated (and prone to misinterpretation) claims. Whatever you want to make of AI’s emergent abilities or whatever dumb AI meaningless buzzwords are the trend right now, you have to first prove to me you know how I think before I will accept your claim AI knows how to and as far as I’m aware that’s still an open question. Hope that explains my viewpoint.
    - JohnMakin 2y ago
      https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Therefore_I_Am:_The_Tale_of_IG-88 https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Therefore_I_Am:_The_Tale_of... Only old heads will know this but this is a Star wars old canon short story from a collection of short stories that explores the topic of what consciousness and thoughts mean and in the context of a malevolent AI. “I think, therefore I am.” However, “think” is a bit ouroboric in definition and the reason this is an interesting question.
    - knodi123 2y ago
      > are vague in intention Just poking fun at a flaw in your reasoning. You think you are thinking because of your subjective experience. However, you say that something else cannot be thinking, despite the fact that you cannot share its subjective experience- therefore ChatGPT could say the same thing about you.
      - JohnMakin 2y ago
        This is turning into the type of pedantic argument I find exhausting on here and gets into complex philosophy theories of mind, but basically, I believe the flaw in your reasoning is that you are assuming ChatGPT has a subjective experience. To me that's absurd to the point of comedy and I haven't seen any evidence of it, but I'm completely uninterested in debating that.
        knodi123 2y ago
        > the flaw in your reasoning is that you are assuming ChatGPT has a subjective experience No I'm not. I don't think ChatGPT thinks either. But I can express that claim without making untestable, unscientific, circular claims. Your explanations of why it can't be conscious have all boiled down to "because it isn't [synonym for conscious]". But you are conscious "because you do [thing synonymous with consciousness]". I'm not trying to attack you as a person, just poking fun at this all-too-common style of reasoning. I apologize if I offended you by doing that.

sandworm101 2y ago

>> like a highschool student trying to inflate their word count on an essay. So the chameleon is a bad chameleon because it looks too much like a leaf, too much like the thing it is attempting to imitate? A few years ago I was tasked with editing the performance reviews for my unit (military). Every supervisor had a finite number of characters in which to describe each soldier's performance. I went through and removed all the extra/useless words. Oh the anger! While supervisors agreed I had improved their writing, they now felt obligated to fill up all the blank space I had created.

knodi123 2y ago
I'm glad you asked about chameleons! Determining whether a chameleon is good or bad can be very important for lizard rankings. As everyone knows, a chameleon is able to camouflage to look more like a leaf. This can help protect it from predators! But sometimes looking like a leaf can go too far.... [and so on]. I hooked ChatGPT up to a speech recognizer and far field mics etc, trying to build my own alexa, and I had to add "Please be terse" to the prompt. And that wasn't enough, so I said "Please limit yourself to as few words as possible to convey the answer. Be terse. Try to keep your speech very short." before I finally started getting reasonable replies.
- Terretta 2y ago
  Your example showed it that by "terse" you meant explain the same thing three different ways. ;-)

jdietrich 2y ago

ChatGPT will write in essentially any style you ask it to. The default behaviour is an artifact of RLHF training and the hidden pre-prompt, not a reflection of the capabilities of the underlying model. A pre-prompt along the following lines will radically change the nature of the output: "You are a subject matter expert in x. You communicate in a terse, information-dense manner. You make clear, strong arguments without vacillation."

famouswaffles 2y ago
Yeah Open AI, Anthropic etc are all intentionally making LLMs sound more robotic than they are capable of sounding. It's pretty awful because the effects it has on fiction writing is disastrous.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

JojoFatsani 2y ago

I have had good luck telling it to use simplified technical English.