5 ms·

Ever seen someone try and search something on Google and they are just AWFUL at it? They can never find what they're looking for and then you try and can pull i

by Nadya 2y ago

Ever seen someone try and search something on Google and they are just AWFUL at it? They can never find what they're looking for and then you try and can pull it up in a single search? That's what it is like watching some people try to use LLM's. Learning how to prompt an LLM is as much a learned skill as much as learning how to phrase internet searches is a learned skill. And as much as people decried that "searching Google isn't a real skill" tech-savvy people knew better. Same thing except now it's also many tech-savvy people joining in with the tech-unsavvy in saying that prompting isn't a real skill...but people who know better know that it is. On average, people are awfully bad at describing exactly what it is they want. Ever speak with a client? And you have to go back and forward for a few hours to finally figure out what it is they wanted? In that scenario you're the LLM. Except the LLM won't keep asking probing questions and clarifications - it will simply give them what they originally asked for (which isn't what they want). Then they think the LLM is stupid and stop trying to ask it for things. Utilizing an LLM to its full potential is a lot of iterative work and, at least for the time being, requires having some understanding of how it works underneath the hood (eg. would you get better results by starting a new session or asking it to forget previous, poorly worded instructions?).

ben_w 2y ago
> On average, people are awfully bad at describing exactly what it is they want. Ever speak with a client? And you have to go back and forward for a few hours to finally figure out what it is they wanted? One of them it was the entire duration of me working for them. They didn't understand why it was taking so long despite constantly changing what they asked for.
- codr7 2y ago
  Building the software is usually like 10% of the actual job, we could do a better job of teaching that. The other 90% is mostly mushy human stuff, fleshing out the problem, setting expectations etc. Helping a group of people reach a solution everyone is happy with has little to do with technology.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Mostly agree. Until ChatGPT, I'd have agreed with all of that. > Helping a group of people reach a solution everyone is happy with has little to do with technology. This one specific thing, is actually something that ChatGPT can help with. It's not as good as the best human, or even a middling human with 5 year's business experience, but rather it's useful because it's good enough at so many different domains that it can be used to clarify thoughts and explain the boundaries of the possible — Google Translate for business jargon, though like Google Translate it is also still often wrong — the ultimate "jack of all trades, master of none".
    - codr7 2y ago
      We're currently in the shiny toy stage, once the flaws are thoroughly explored and accepted by all as fundamental I suspect interest will fade rapidly. There's no substance to be found, no added information; it's just repeating what came before, badly, which is exactly the kind of software that would be better off not written if you ask me. The plan to rebuild society on top of this crap is right up there with basing our economy on manipulating people into buying shit they don't need and won't last so they have to keep buying more. Because money.
      - threecheese 2y ago
        The worry I have is that the net value will become great enough that we’ll simply ignore the flaws, and probabilistic good-enough tools will become the new normal. Consider how many ads the average person wades through to scroll an Insta feed for hours - “we’ve” accepted a degraded experience in order to access some new technology that benefits us in some way. To paraphrase comedian Mark Normand: “Capitalism!”
        ben_w 2y ago
        Indeed, even if I were to minimise what LLMs can do, they are still achieving what "targeted advertising" very obviously isn't.
skydhash 2y ago
I'm not arguing that you can't get result with LLMs, I'm just asking is it worth the actual effort especially when there's better way to get that result you're seeking (or if the result is really something that you want). An LLM is a word (token?) generator which can be amazingly consistent according to its model. But rarely is my end goal to generate text. It's either to do something, to understand something, or to communicate. For the first, there are guides (books, manuals, ...), for the second, there are explanations (again books, manuals,...), and the third is just using language to communicate what's on my mind. That's the same thing with search engines. I use them to look for something. What I need first is a description of that something, not how to do the "looking for". Then once you know what you want to find, it's easier to use the tool to find it. If your end goal can be achieved with LLMs, be my guest to use them. But, I'm wary of people taking them at face value and then pushing the workload unto everyone else (like developers using electron).
- rvnx 2y ago
  It works quite nicely if you consider LLMs as a translator (and that’s actually why Transformers were created). Enter technical specifications in English as input language, get code as destination language.
  - lolc 2y ago
    English as input language works in simple scenarios but breaks down very very quickly. I have to get extremely specific and deliberate. At some point I have to write pseudocode to get the machine to get say double checked locking right. Because I have enough experiences where varying the prompting didn't work, I revert to just writing the code when I see the generator struggling. When I encounter somebody who says they do not write code anymore, I assume that they either: 1. Just don't do anything beyond the simplest tutorial-level stuff 2. or don't consider their post-generation edits as writing code 3. or are just bullshitting I don't know which it is for each person in question, but I don't trust that their story would work for me. I don't believe they have some secret sauce prompting that works for scenarios where I've tried to make it work but couldn't. Sure I may have missed some ways, but my map of what works and what doesn't may be very blurry at the border, but the surprises tend to be on the "doesn't work" side. And no Claude doesn't change this.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
SmartHypercube 2y ago
> That's what it is like watching some people try to use LLM's. Exactly. I made a game testing prompting skills a few days earlier, to share with some close friends, and it was your comment that inspired me to translate the game into English and submitted to HN. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41545541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41545541 ) I am really curious about how other people write prompts, so while my submission only got 7 points, I'm happy that I can see hundreds of people's own ways to write prompts thanks to HN. However, after reading most prompts (I may missed some), I found exactly 0 prompts containing any kind of common prompting techniques, such as "think step by step", explaining specific steps to solve the problem instead of only asking for final results, few-shots (showing example inputs and outputs). Half of the prompts are simply asking AI to do the thing (at least asking correctly). The other half do not make sense, even if we show the prompt to a real human, they won't know what to reply with. Well... I expected that SOME complaints about AI online are from people not familiar with prompting / not good at prompting. But now I realized there are a lot more people than I thought not knowing some basic prompting techniques. Anyway, a fun experience for me! Since it was your comment made me want to do this, I just want to share it with you.
atlex2 2y ago
Could you reference any youtube videos, blog posts, etc of people you would personally consider to be _really good_ at prompting? Curious what this looks like. While I can compare good journalists to extremely great and intuitive journalists, I don't have really any references for this in the prompting realm (except for when the Dall-e Cookbook was circulating around).
- Nadya 2y ago
  Sorry for the late response - but I can't. I don't really follow content creators at a level where I can recall names or even what they are working on. If you browse AI-dominated spaces you'll eventually find people who include AI as part of their workflows and have gotten quite proficient at prompting them to get the results they desire very consistently. Most AI stuff enters into my realm of knowledge via AI Twitter, /r/singularity, /r/stablediffusion, and Github's trending tab. I don't go particularly out of my way to find it otherwise. /r/stablediffusion used to (less so now) have a lot of workflow posts where people would share how they prompt and adjust the knobs/dials of certain settings and models to make what they make. It's not so different from knowing which knobs/dials to adjust in Apophysis to create interesting fractals and renders. They know what the knobs/dials adjust for their AI tools and so are quite proficient at creating amazing things using them. People who write "jailbreak" prompts are a kind of example. There is some effort put into preventing people from prompting the models and removing the safeguards - and yet there are always people capable of prompting the model into removing its safeguards. It can be surprisingly difficult to do yourself for recent models and the jailbreak prompts themselves are becoming more complex each time. For art in particular - knowing a wide range of artist names, names of various styles, how certain mediums will look, as well as mix & matching with various weights for the tokens can get you very interesting results. A site like https://generrated.com/ https://generrated.com/ can be good for that as it gives you a quick baseline of how including certain names will change the style of what you generate. If you're trying to hit a certain aesthetic style it can really help. But even that is a tiny drop in a tiny bucket of what is possible. Sometimes it is less about writing an overly detailed prompt but rather knowing the exact keywords to get the style you're aiming for. Being knowledgeable about art history and famous artists throughout the years will help tremendously over someone with little knowledge. If you can't tell a Picasso from a Monet painting you're going to find generating paintings in a specific style much harder than an art buff.

by Nadya 2y ago

ben_w 2y ago

> On average, people are awfully bad at describing exactly what it is they want. Ever speak with a client? And you have to go back and forward for a few hours to finally figure out what it is they wanted? One of them it was the entire duration of me working for them. They didn't understand why it was taking so long despite constantly changing what they asked for.

codr7 2y ago
Building the software is usually like 10% of the actual job, we could do a better job of teaching that. The other 90% is mostly mushy human stuff, fleshing out the problem, setting expectations etc. Helping a group of people reach a solution everyone is happy with has little to do with technology.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Mostly agree. Until ChatGPT, I'd have agreed with all of that. > Helping a group of people reach a solution everyone is happy with has little to do with technology. This one specific thing, is actually something that ChatGPT can help with. It's not as good as the best human, or even a middling human with 5 year's business experience, but rather it's useful because it's good enough at so many different domains that it can be used to clarify thoughts and explain the boundaries of the possible — Google Translate for business jargon, though like Google Translate it is also still often wrong — the ultimate "jack of all trades, master of none".
  - codr7 2y ago
    We're currently in the shiny toy stage, once the flaws are thoroughly explored and accepted by all as fundamental I suspect interest will fade rapidly. There's no substance to be found, no added information; it's just repeating what came before, badly, which is exactly the kind of software that would be better off not written if you ask me. The plan to rebuild society on top of this crap is right up there with basing our economy on manipulating people into buying shit they don't need and won't last so they have to keep buying more. Because money.
    - threecheese 2y ago
      The worry I have is that the net value will become great enough that we’ll simply ignore the flaws, and probabilistic good-enough tools will become the new normal. Consider how many ads the average person wades through to scroll an Insta feed for hours - “we’ve” accepted a degraded experience in order to access some new technology that benefits us in some way. To paraphrase comedian Mark Normand: “Capitalism!”
      - ben_w 2y ago
        Indeed, even if I were to minimise what LLMs can do, they are still achieving what "targeted advertising" very obviously isn't.

skydhash 2y ago

I'm not arguing that you can't get result with LLMs, I'm just asking is it worth the actual effort especially when there's better way to get that result you're seeking (or if the result is really something that you want). An LLM is a word (token?) generator which can be amazingly consistent according to its model. But rarely is my end goal to generate text. It's either to do something, to understand something, or to communicate. For the first, there are guides (books, manuals, ...), for the second, there are explanations (again books, manuals,...), and the third is just using language to communicate what's on my mind. That's the same thing with search engines. I use them to look for something. What I need first is a description of that something, not how to do the "looking for". Then once you know what you want to find, it's easier to use the tool to find it. If your end goal can be achieved with LLMs, be my guest to use them. But, I'm wary of people taking them at face value and then pushing the workload unto everyone else (like developers using electron).

rvnx 2y ago
It works quite nicely if you consider LLMs as a translator (and that’s actually why Transformers were created). Enter technical specifications in English as input language, get code as destination language.
- lolc 2y ago
  English as input language works in simple scenarios but breaks down very very quickly. I have to get extremely specific and deliberate. At some point I have to write pseudocode to get the machine to get say double checked locking right. Because I have enough experiences where varying the prompting didn't work, I revert to just writing the code when I see the generator struggling. When I encounter somebody who says they do not write code anymore, I assume that they either: 1. Just don't do anything beyond the simplest tutorial-level stuff 2. or don't consider their post-generation edits as writing code 3. or are just bullshitting I don't know which it is for each person in question, but I don't trust that their story would work for me. I don't believe they have some secret sauce prompting that works for scenarios where I've tried to make it work but couldn't. Sure I may have missed some ways, but my map of what works and what doesn't may be very blurry at the border, but the surprises tend to be on the "doesn't work" side. And no Claude doesn't change this.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

SmartHypercube 2y ago

> That's what it is like watching some people try to use LLM's. Exactly. I made a game testing prompting skills a few days earlier, to share with some close friends, and it was your comment that inspired me to translate the game into English and submitted to HN. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41545541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41545541 ) I am really curious about how other people write prompts, so while my submission only got 7 points, I'm happy that I can see hundreds of people's own ways to write prompts thanks to HN. However, after reading most prompts (I may missed some), I found exactly 0 prompts containing any kind of common prompting techniques, such as "think step by step", explaining specific steps to solve the problem instead of only asking for final results, few-shots (showing example inputs and outputs). Half of the prompts are simply asking AI to do the thing (at least asking correctly). The other half do not make sense, even if we show the prompt to a real human, they won't know what to reply with. Well... I expected that SOME complaints about AI online are from people not familiar with prompting / not good at prompting. But now I realized there are a lot more people than I thought not knowing some basic prompting techniques. Anyway, a fun experience for me! Since it was your comment made me want to do this, I just want to share it with you.

atlex2 2y ago

Could you reference any youtube videos, blog posts, etc of people you would personally consider to be _really good_ at prompting? Curious what this looks like. While I can compare good journalists to extremely great and intuitive journalists, I don't have really any references for this in the prompting realm (except for when the Dall-e Cookbook was circulating around).

Nadya 2y ago
Sorry for the late response - but I can't. I don't really follow content creators at a level where I can recall names or even what they are working on. If you browse AI-dominated spaces you'll eventually find people who include AI as part of their workflows and have gotten quite proficient at prompting them to get the results they desire very consistently. Most AI stuff enters into my realm of knowledge via AI Twitter, /r/singularity, /r/stablediffusion, and Github's trending tab. I don't go particularly out of my way to find it otherwise. /r/stablediffusion used to (less so now) have a lot of workflow posts where people would share how they prompt and adjust the knobs/dials of certain settings and models to make what they make. It's not so different from knowing which knobs/dials to adjust in Apophysis to create interesting fractals and renders. They know what the knobs/dials adjust for their AI tools and so are quite proficient at creating amazing things using them. People who write "jailbreak" prompts are a kind of example. There is some effort put into preventing people from prompting the models and removing the safeguards - and yet there are always people capable of prompting the model into removing its safeguards. It can be surprisingly difficult to do yourself for recent models and the jailbreak prompts themselves are becoming more complex each time. For art in particular - knowing a wide range of artist names, names of various styles, how certain mediums will look, as well as mix & matching with various weights for the tokens can get you very interesting results. A site like https://generrated.com/ https://generrated.com/ can be good for that as it gives you a quick baseline of how including certain names will change the style of what you generate. If you're trying to hit a certain aesthetic style it can really help. But even that is a tiny drop in a tiny bucket of what is possible. Sometimes it is less about writing an overly detailed prompt but rather knowing the exact keywords to get the style you're aiming for. Being knowledgeable about art history and famous artists throughout the years will help tremendously over someone with little knowledge. If you can't tell a Picasso from a Monet painting you're going to find generating paintings in a specific style much harder than an art buff.