4 ms·

I use it so much everyday, it’s been a massive boost to my productivity, creativity and ability to learn. I would hate for it to crash and burn.

Terr_ 2y ago
Ultimately it depends what the model is trained on, what you're using it for, and what error-rate/severity is acceptable. My main beef here involves the most-popular stuff (e.g. ChatGPT) where they are being trained on much-of-the-internet, marketed as being good for just-about-everything, and most consumers aren't checking the accuracy except when one talks about eating rocks or using glue to keep cheese on pizza.
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  I’m directly referring to chatGPT.
  - chairmansteve 2y ago
    Yeah, you use it productively. As do I. But it can be misused. It works well as an assistant to an expert. But fails when it is the expert.
- tomjen3 2y ago
  Well if you use a gpt as a search engine and don’t check sources you get burned. That’s not an issue with the gpt.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    That leads to a philosophical question: How widespread does dangerous misuse of a tool have to be before we can attribute the "fault" to the behavior/presentation of the tool itself, rather than to the user? Casting around for a simple example... Perhaps any program with a "delete everything permanently" workflow. I think most of us would agree that a lack of confirmation steps would be a flaw in the tool itself, rather than in how it's being used, even though, yes, ideally the user would have been more careful. Or perhaps the "tool" of US Social Security numbers, which as integers have a truly small surface-area for interaction. People were told not to piggyback on them for identifying customers--let alone authenticating them--but the resulting mess suggests that maybe "just educate people better" isn't enough to overcome the appeal of misuse.
  - short_sells_poo 2y ago
    This is like saying a gun that appears safe but that can easily backfire unless used by experts is completely fine. It's not an issue with the gun, the user should be competent. Yes, it's technically true, but practically it's extremely disingenuous. LLMs are being marketed as the next generation research and search tool, and they are superbly powerful in the hands of an expert. An expert who doesn't blindly trust the output. However, the public is not being educated about this at all, and it might not be possible to educate the public this way because people are fundamentally lazy and want to be spoonfed. But GPT is not a tool that can be used to spoonfeed results, because it ends up spoonfeeding you a whole bunch of shit. The shit is coated with enough good looking and smelling stuff that most of the public won't be able to detect it.
    - tomjen3 2y ago
      It does not appear safe. It clearly says at the bottom that you should checkup important facts. I have in my kitchen several knives which are sharp and dangerous. They must be sharp and dangerous to be useful - if you demand that I replace them with dull plastic because users might inadvertantly hurt themselves, then you are not making the world a safer place, you are making my kitchen significantly more useless. If you don't want to do this to my physical tools, don't do this to my info tools.
      - Terr_ 2y ago
        I attempted to respond with extending the knife-analogy, but it stops being useful for LLMs pretty quick since (A) the danger is pretty obvious to users and (B) the damage is immediate and detectable. Instead it's more like lead poisoning. Nobody's saying that you need a permit to purchase and own lead, nor that you must surrender the family pewter or old fishing-sinkers. However we should be doing something when it's being marketed as a Miracle Ingredient via colorful paints and cosmetics and dusts and gases of cheap gasoline.
      - short_sells_poo 2y ago
        Ah, because some text saying "cigarettes cause cancer" is all that's needed to educate people about the dangers of smoking and it's not a problem at all if you enjoy it responsibly, right? I'm talking about the industry and a surrounding crowd of breathless sycophants who hail them as the second coming of Christ. I'm talking about malign comments like "Our AI is so good we can't release the weights because they are too dangerous in the wrong hands". Let's not pretend that there's a strong and concerted effort to educate the public about the dangers and shortcomings of LLMs. There's too much money to be made.
juanani 2y ago
[dead]
ruszki 2y ago
Did you learn real things, or hallucinated info? How do you know which?
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  You always check multiple sources like I’ve been doing with all my Google searches previously. Anecdotally, having checked my sources, it’s usually right the vast majority of the time.
- throwaway3xo6 2y ago
  Does it matter if the hallucinations compile and do the job?
  - palmfacehn 2y ago
    Yes, if there are unintended side effects. Doubly so if the documentation warned about these specific pitfalls.
  - namaria 2y ago
    If you think coding is slinging strings that make the compiler do what you want, I pity the fool that has to work alongside or after you on code projects.
- emptiestplace 2y ago
  This argument is specious and boring: everything an LLM outputs is "hallucinated" - just like with us. I'm not about to throw you out or even think less of you for making this mistake, though; it's just a mistake.
  - exe34 2y ago
    they keep making the mistake, almost as if it's part of their training that they are regurgitating!
    - caeril 2y ago
peutetre 2y ago
> it’s been a massive boost to my productivity, creativity and ability to learn What are concrete examples of the boosts to your productivity, creativity, and ability to learn? It seems to me that when you outsource your thinking to ChatGPT you'll be doing less of all three.
- blagie 2y ago
  For me: * Rapid prototyping and trying new technologies. * Editing text for typos, flipped words, and missing words
  - Ratelman 2y ago
    Exactly this for me as well - think people really underestimate how fast it allows you to iterate through prototyping. It's not outsourcing your thinking, it's more that it can generate a lot of the basics for you so you can infer the missing parts and tweak to suit your needs.
    - namaria 2y ago
      I mainly use it for taking text input and doing stuff that's easy to describe but hard to script for. Feed it some articles and ask for a very specific and obscure bibliography format? Great! Change up the style or the wording? Fine. Don't it ask for data or facts.
- wheatgreaser 2y ago
  i used to use gpt for asking really specific questions that i cant quite search on google, but i stopped using it when i realized it presented some of the information in a really misleading way, so now i have nothing
- beretguy 2y ago
  Not OP, but it helped me to generate story for a d&d character, cause I’m new to the game, and I’m not creative enough and generally done really care about back story. But regardless, i think ai causes far more harm than good.
NoGravitas 2y ago
Any time someone says LLMs have been a massive boost to their productivity, I have to assume that they are terrible at their job, and are using it to produce a higher volume of even more terrible work.
- MiddleMan5 2y ago
  This is rude and unhelpful. Instead of bashing on someone you could learn to ask questions and continue the conversation
  - dyauspitr 2y ago
    Those replies are a dime a dozen. Unless they’re poignant, well thought out discussions on specific failures, they’re usually from folks that have an axe to grind against LLMs or are fearful that they will be replaced.
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  aye. every attempt I've tried to use ChatGPT to do some moderate to advanced python scripting had it fail at something. for the most part the code is alright... but then it references libraries that are deprecated or wrong or weren't included for some reason. example: one time I was pulling some sample financial data from Quandl and asked it why it wasn't working right -- it mentioned that I was referencing a FED dataset that was gone. And that was true, it was old code that I pulled out of a previous project. So I asked it for a new target dataset... and it gave me an older one again. Okay, fine, this time find me a new one -- again, was wrong. Didn't take a lot of time to find that, decided to find my own. Go find one, then send that back to the AI... and it mangles the API key variable. An easy fix, but again, still didn't work. The goal was to get it done quickly, to get some sample data to test a pipeline, but in practice it required help every step, and I probably could have just written it on my own from scratch in roughly the same time.

Terr_ 2y ago

Ultimately it depends what the model is trained on, what you're using it for, and what error-rate/severity is acceptable. My main beef here involves the most-popular stuff (e.g. ChatGPT) where they are being trained on much-of-the-internet, marketed as being good for just-about-everything, and most consumers aren't checking the accuracy except when one talks about eating rocks or using glue to keep cheese on pizza.

dyauspitr 2y ago
I’m directly referring to chatGPT.
- chairmansteve 2y ago
  Yeah, you use it productively. As do I. But it can be misused. It works well as an assistant to an expert. But fails when it is the expert.
tomjen3 2y ago
Well if you use a gpt as a search engine and don’t check sources you get burned. That’s not an issue with the gpt.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  That leads to a philosophical question: How widespread does dangerous misuse of a tool have to be before we can attribute the "fault" to the behavior/presentation of the tool itself, rather than to the user? Casting around for a simple example... Perhaps any program with a "delete everything permanently" workflow. I think most of us would agree that a lack of confirmation steps would be a flaw in the tool itself, rather than in how it's being used, even though, yes, ideally the user would have been more careful. Or perhaps the "tool" of US Social Security numbers, which as integers have a truly small surface-area for interaction. People were told not to piggyback on them for identifying customers--let alone authenticating them--but the resulting mess suggests that maybe "just educate people better" isn't enough to overcome the appeal of misuse.
- short_sells_poo 2y ago
  This is like saying a gun that appears safe but that can easily backfire unless used by experts is completely fine. It's not an issue with the gun, the user should be competent. Yes, it's technically true, but practically it's extremely disingenuous. LLMs are being marketed as the next generation research and search tool, and they are superbly powerful in the hands of an expert. An expert who doesn't blindly trust the output. However, the public is not being educated about this at all, and it might not be possible to educate the public this way because people are fundamentally lazy and want to be spoonfed. But GPT is not a tool that can be used to spoonfeed results, because it ends up spoonfeeding you a whole bunch of shit. The shit is coated with enough good looking and smelling stuff that most of the public won't be able to detect it.
  - tomjen3 2y ago
    It does not appear safe. It clearly says at the bottom that you should checkup important facts. I have in my kitchen several knives which are sharp and dangerous. They must be sharp and dangerous to be useful - if you demand that I replace them with dull plastic because users might inadvertantly hurt themselves, then you are not making the world a safer place, you are making my kitchen significantly more useless. If you don't want to do this to my physical tools, don't do this to my info tools.
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      I attempted to respond with extending the knife-analogy, but it stops being useful for LLMs pretty quick since (A) the danger is pretty obvious to users and (B) the damage is immediate and detectable. Instead it's more like lead poisoning. Nobody's saying that you need a permit to purchase and own lead, nor that you must surrender the family pewter or old fishing-sinkers. However we should be doing something when it's being marketed as a Miracle Ingredient via colorful paints and cosmetics and dusts and gases of cheap gasoline.
    - short_sells_poo 2y ago
      Ah, because some text saying "cigarettes cause cancer" is all that's needed to educate people about the dangers of smoking and it's not a problem at all if you enjoy it responsibly, right? I'm talking about the industry and a surrounding crowd of breathless sycophants who hail them as the second coming of Christ. I'm talking about malign comments like "Our AI is so good we can't release the weights because they are too dangerous in the wrong hands". Let's not pretend that there's a strong and concerted effort to educate the public about the dangers and shortcomings of LLMs. There's too much money to be made.

juanani 2y ago

[dead]

ruszki 2y ago

Did you learn real things, or hallucinated info? How do you know which?

dyauspitr 2y ago
You always check multiple sources like I’ve been doing with all my Google searches previously. Anecdotally, having checked my sources, it’s usually right the vast majority of the time.
throwaway3xo6 2y ago
Does it matter if the hallucinations compile and do the job?
- palmfacehn 2y ago
  Yes, if there are unintended side effects. Doubly so if the documentation warned about these specific pitfalls.
- namaria 2y ago
  If you think coding is slinging strings that make the compiler do what you want, I pity the fool that has to work alongside or after you on code projects.
emptiestplace 2y ago
This argument is specious and boring: everything an LLM outputs is "hallucinated" - just like with us. I'm not about to throw you out or even think less of you for making this mistake, though; it's just a mistake.
- exe34 2y ago
  they keep making the mistake, almost as if it's part of their training that they are regurgitating!
  - caeril 2y ago

peutetre 2y ago

> it’s been a massive boost to my productivity, creativity and ability to learn What are concrete examples of the boosts to your productivity, creativity, and ability to learn? It seems to me that when you outsource your thinking to ChatGPT you'll be doing less of all three.

blagie 2y ago
For me: * Rapid prototyping and trying new technologies. * Editing text for typos, flipped words, and missing words
- Ratelman 2y ago
  Exactly this for me as well - think people really underestimate how fast it allows you to iterate through prototyping. It's not outsourcing your thinking, it's more that it can generate a lot of the basics for you so you can infer the missing parts and tweak to suit your needs.
  - namaria 2y ago
    I mainly use it for taking text input and doing stuff that's easy to describe but hard to script for. Feed it some articles and ask for a very specific and obscure bibliography format? Great! Change up the style or the wording? Fine. Don't it ask for data or facts.
wheatgreaser 2y ago
i used to use gpt for asking really specific questions that i cant quite search on google, but i stopped using it when i realized it presented some of the information in a really misleading way, so now i have nothing
beretguy 2y ago
Not OP, but it helped me to generate story for a d&d character, cause I’m new to the game, and I’m not creative enough and generally done really care about back story. But regardless, i think ai causes far more harm than good.

NoGravitas 2y ago

Any time someone says LLMs have been a massive boost to their productivity, I have to assume that they are terrible at their job, and are using it to produce a higher volume of even more terrible work.

MiddleMan5 2y ago
This is rude and unhelpful. Instead of bashing on someone you could learn to ask questions and continue the conversation
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  Those replies are a dime a dozen. Unless they’re poignant, well thought out discussions on specific failures, they’re usually from folks that have an axe to grind against LLMs or are fearful that they will be replaced.
red-iron-pine 2y ago
aye. every attempt I've tried to use ChatGPT to do some moderate to advanced python scripting had it fail at something. for the most part the code is alright... but then it references libraries that are deprecated or wrong or weren't included for some reason. example: one time I was pulling some sample financial data from Quandl and asked it why it wasn't working right -- it mentioned that I was referencing a FED dataset that was gone. And that was true, it was old code that I pulled out of a previous project. So I asked it for a new target dataset... and it gave me an older one again. Okay, fine, this time find me a new one -- again, was wrong. Didn't take a lot of time to find that, decided to find my own. Go find one, then send that back to the AI... and it mangles the API key variable. An easy fix, but again, still didn't work. The goal was to get it done quickly, to get some sample data to test a pipeline, but in practice it required help every step, and I probably could have just written it on my own from scratch in roughly the same time.