3 ms·

I gladly admit that I was making an appeal to emotional intelligence and you won't likely agree with me no matter what back and forth we go through.

fragmede 2y ago
I'm not sure why you assume I'm coming from a position of bad faith but to skip the back and forth, I'll just plainly state where I'm coming from. I'm agnostic as to the whole thing and ultimately, to be totally transparent, I still have a human therapist, for good reason. But he's only available during set hours so when I'm in crisis at 3am on a Tuesday, I also fully admit that I'll have conversations with ChatGPT. I'm sure I'm not alone in doing so. I'm not trying to convince you that it's, right now, a replacement for a human parent/therapist/caregiver. it's the "not anywhere close" part that I'm responding to. It's closer than talking with a speak and spell, or a See'n'say, for instance, but also ahead of static worksheets that you can't have a conversation with. I have no idea if this is good for society, and I have no idea where this technology will take us. I want to know the limitations of this technology, and I'm willing to be convinced that, hey, maybe what some of it's saying isn't helpful as a therapist, because that's interesting. The number of R's in strawberry, for instance has a specific technical reason it's bad at, because of how tokenization works. If, after being fed every psychology textbook, the advice it gives would be egregiously or subtly bad/wrong/harmful, or biased towards, say, giving a Freudian analysis when the industry's moved way past that, I'd like to know and hear about it, so I better know when not to trust its advice and be able to warn others.
- throwaway314155 2y ago
  i'm of the opinion that it's like self driving cars. Even if you get 99.999% of the way there it's still "not anywhere close" to the real thing because you're speaking with something that has little to no agency and acting as though it's a good substitute for a person. My instincts tell me that humans are pretty good at detecting this difference. And when they aren't - they still won't like being lied to or tricked about it. You can see it already - generative art, or music for instance is (in some cases) objectively more impressive than art created by humans all else constant. You might trick a contest into giving you an award but the moment people find out it's generated, they almost immediately react angrily and no longer express interest in the result. That's because they used to attribute the result to a person and now they know it's not a person. The psychology there probably isn't even fully fleshed out, but i feel it instinctively, as I said before. And I suspect others do as well based on the reactions here. Sorry for assuming bad faith. i've met a lot of persons here who really do think LLM's in their current form are a kind of sentience. Blake Lemoigne (sp?) is a good example of that kind of naïveté. I too have a human therapist, doctors, etc. And I too find myself chatting with ChatGPT, etc. about personal issues and in certain cases benefit tremendously from it. In particular, whenever it is something I would normally feel embarassed to say to another actual human. Since I am very confident ChatGPT doesn't have feelings or even an internal monologue with which it could "judge" me - I have no issue telling it such things. The benefit here is from the questions I can have answered that would otherwise go unanswered. I think this makes for a potential assistive technology as you implied earlier (better than a worksheet). But for precisely that same reason, it will never work (in its current form) as a complete substitute for a human. And attempts to do so may in fact be actively harmful (as I originally suggested). Again, I'll just say that I don't think there's yet enough research on this but that "I know it when I see it". Any sufficiently serious topic I discuss with ChatGPT ultimately winds up with me drained because I feel as though I'm talking to a wall and not actually being acknowledged by anyone with agency who matters to me. I will definitely admit that this is a highly opinionated take and is rooted in a lot of my personal feelings on the matter. As such, I can't really say that I've definitively proven that my point is the correct point. But, I hope you at least get the gist of what I am saying.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    For something that's not rigorously defined, 99.999% and 100% is pretty frickin close together in my book. Like, TherapistGPT isn't going to randomly say you should go kill yourself. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what your point actually is. Is ChatGPT in it's current form, a replacement for human contact? absolutely not. do people have strong emotions around something using a GPU and a bunch of math and was generated instead of being organically hand crafted by a human being, and having it fall into the uncanny valley? totally. is this box of matrices and dot products outputting something I personally find useful, despite shortcomings? yeah. I agree that there's totally this brick wall feeling when ChatGPT spins itself in circles because it ran out the context window or whatever. at the end of the day, I think the yacht rock cover of "closer" is fun, even though it's AI generated. however that makes you feel about my opinions. https://youtu.be/ejubTfUhK9c https://youtu.be/ejubTfUhK9c
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > Like, TherapistGPT isn't going to randomly say you should go kill yourself. It won't literally do that, the labs are all careful about the obvious stuff. But consider that Google Gemini's bad instructions almost gave someone botulism*, there's a high chance of something like that in almost every field. I couldn't tell you what that would mean in therapy for the same reason I wouldn't have known Gemini's recipe would lead to culturing botulism. These are certainly more capable than anything before them, but the Peter Principle still applies, we should treat them as no more than interns for now. That may be OK, may even be an improvement on not having them, but it's easy to misjudge them. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40724283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40724283
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Hey I think you replied and then deleted it so I don't totally know what your said but I wanted to say thank you for your time, even though we didn't manage to come face to face on things it was nice talking to you.

fragmede 2y ago

I'm not sure why you assume I'm coming from a position of bad faith but to skip the back and forth, I'll just plainly state where I'm coming from. I'm agnostic as to the whole thing and ultimately, to be totally transparent, I still have a human therapist, for good reason. But he's only available during set hours so when I'm in crisis at 3am on a Tuesday, I also fully admit that I'll have conversations with ChatGPT. I'm sure I'm not alone in doing so. I'm not trying to convince you that it's, right now, a replacement for a human parent/therapist/caregiver. it's the "not anywhere close" part that I'm responding to. It's closer than talking with a speak and spell, or a See'n'say, for instance, but also ahead of static worksheets that you can't have a conversation with. I have no idea if this is good for society, and I have no idea where this technology will take us. I want to know the limitations of this technology, and I'm willing to be convinced that, hey, maybe what some of it's saying isn't helpful as a therapist, because that's interesting. The number of R's in strawberry, for instance has a specific technical reason it's bad at, because of how tokenization works. If, after being fed every psychology textbook, the advice it gives would be egregiously or subtly bad/wrong/harmful, or biased towards, say, giving a Freudian analysis when the industry's moved way past that, I'd like to know and hear about it, so I better know when not to trust its advice and be able to warn others.

throwaway314155 2y ago
i'm of the opinion that it's like self driving cars. Even if you get 99.999% of the way there it's still "not anywhere close" to the real thing because you're speaking with something that has little to no agency and acting as though it's a good substitute for a person. My instincts tell me that humans are pretty good at detecting this difference. And when they aren't - they still won't like being lied to or tricked about it. You can see it already - generative art, or music for instance is (in some cases) objectively more impressive than art created by humans all else constant. You might trick a contest into giving you an award but the moment people find out it's generated, they almost immediately react angrily and no longer express interest in the result. That's because they used to attribute the result to a person and now they know it's not a person. The psychology there probably isn't even fully fleshed out, but i feel it instinctively, as I said before. And I suspect others do as well based on the reactions here. Sorry for assuming bad faith. i've met a lot of persons here who really do think LLM's in their current form are a kind of sentience. Blake Lemoigne (sp?) is a good example of that kind of naïveté. I too have a human therapist, doctors, etc. And I too find myself chatting with ChatGPT, etc. about personal issues and in certain cases benefit tremendously from it. In particular, whenever it is something I would normally feel embarassed to say to another actual human. Since I am very confident ChatGPT doesn't have feelings or even an internal monologue with which it could "judge" me - I have no issue telling it such things. The benefit here is from the questions I can have answered that would otherwise go unanswered. I think this makes for a potential assistive technology as you implied earlier (better than a worksheet). But for precisely that same reason, it will never work (in its current form) as a complete substitute for a human. And attempts to do so may in fact be actively harmful (as I originally suggested). Again, I'll just say that I don't think there's yet enough research on this but that "I know it when I see it". Any sufficiently serious topic I discuss with ChatGPT ultimately winds up with me drained because I feel as though I'm talking to a wall and not actually being acknowledged by anyone with agency who matters to me. I will definitely admit that this is a highly opinionated take and is rooted in a lot of my personal feelings on the matter. As such, I can't really say that I've definitively proven that my point is the correct point. But, I hope you at least get the gist of what I am saying.
- fragmede 2y ago
  For something that's not rigorously defined, 99.999% and 100% is pretty frickin close together in my book. Like, TherapistGPT isn't going to randomly say you should go kill yourself. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what your point actually is. Is ChatGPT in it's current form, a replacement for human contact? absolutely not. do people have strong emotions around something using a GPU and a bunch of math and was generated instead of being organically hand crafted by a human being, and having it fall into the uncanny valley? totally. is this box of matrices and dot products outputting something I personally find useful, despite shortcomings? yeah. I agree that there's totally this brick wall feeling when ChatGPT spins itself in circles because it ran out the context window or whatever. at the end of the day, I think the yacht rock cover of "closer" is fun, even though it's AI generated. however that makes you feel about my opinions. https://youtu.be/ejubTfUhK9c https://youtu.be/ejubTfUhK9c
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > Like, TherapistGPT isn't going to randomly say you should go kill yourself. It won't literally do that, the labs are all careful about the obvious stuff. But consider that Google Gemini's bad instructions almost gave someone botulism*, there's a high chance of something like that in almost every field. I couldn't tell you what that would mean in therapy for the same reason I wouldn't have known Gemini's recipe would lead to culturing botulism. These are certainly more capable than anything before them, but the Peter Principle still applies, we should treat them as no more than interns for now. That may be OK, may even be an improvement on not having them, but it's easy to misjudge them. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40724283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40724283
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- fragmede 2y ago
  Hey I think you replied and then deleted it so I don't totally know what your said but I wanted to say thank you for your time, even though we didn't manage to come face to face on things it was nice talking to you.