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> “most people agree that the output is trite and unpleasant to consume” That is a such a wild claim. People like the output of LLMs so much that ChatGPT is th
by brokencode 1y ago
> “most people agree that the output is trite and unpleasant to consume”
That is a such a wild claim. People like the output of LLMs so much that ChatGPT is the fastest growing app ever. It and other AI apps like Perplexity are now beginning to challenge Google’s search dominance.
Sure, probably not a lot of people would go out and buy a novel or collection of poetry written by ChatGPT. But that doesn’t mean the output is unpleasant to consume. It pretty undeniably produces clear and readable summaries and explanations.
- sejje 1y agoMaybe he's referencing how people don't like when other humans post LLM responses in the comments. "Here's what chatGPT said about..." I don't like that, either. I love the LLM for answering my own questions, though.
- jack_pp 1y ago"Here's what chatGPT said about..." Is the new lmgtfy
- zdragnar 1y agolmgtfy was (from what I saw) always used as a snarky way to tell someone to do a little work on their own before asking someone else to do it for them. I have seen people use "here's what chatGPT" said almost exclusively unironically, as if anyone else wants humans behaving like agents for chatbots in the middle of other people's discussion threads. That is to say, they offer no opinion or critical thought of their own, they just jump into a conversation with a wall of text.
- SoftTalker 1y agoYeah I don't even read those. If someone can't be bothered to communicate their own thoughts in their own words, I have little belief that they are adding anything worth reading to the conversation.
- Sharlin 1y agoWhy communicate your own thoughts when ChatGPT can give you the Correct Answer? Saves everybody time and effort, right? I guess that’s the mental model of many people. That, or they’re just excited to be able to participate (in their eyes) productively in a conversation.
- SoftTalker 1y agoIf I want the "correct answer" I'll research it, maybe even ask ChatGPT. If I'm having a conversation I'm interesed in what the other participants think. If I don't know something, I'll say I don't know, and maybe learn something by trying to understand it. If I just pretend I know by pasting in what ChatGPT says, I'm not only a fraud but also lazy.
- hattmall 1y agoI'm not really countering that ChatGPT is popular, it certainly is, but it's also sort of like "fastest growing tire brand" that came along with the adoption of vehicles. The amount of smartphone users is also growing at the fastest rate ever so whatever the new most popular app is has a good chance of being the fastest growing app ever.
- doctorpangloss 1y agoNo… dude… it’s a new household name. We haven’t had those in software for a long time, maybe since TikTok and Fortnite.
- matthewdgreen 1y agoLots of things had household recognition. Do you fondly remember the Snuggie? The question is whether it'll be durable. The lack of network effects is one reason to be skeptical.
- doctorpangloss 1y agoLack of network effects... It's the biggest thing ever! Everyone is talking about it, all the time, nonstop! How is that not a network? Network effects do not exclusively mean multiplayer software, communications or social media. And anyway, it is almost certainly all three of these things, because content is being made (and often consumed) by ChatGPT in every digital network there is. Anyway, I don't think it's possible in this forum to have a conversation about it, if "ChatGPT is humongous" is a controversial, downvotable POV.
- hattmall 1y agoI don't know if you are joking or not, but people were talking about ChatGPT non-stop in like March of 2023 in my social group. Now it's far less frequently mentioned, basically never. In fact mostly if it is, it's in some form of a sarcastic joke or reply.
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- Wowfunhappy 1y ago...I do wonder what percent of ChatGPT usage is just students cheating on their homework, though.
- genghisjahn 1y agoNeal Stephenson has a recent post that covers some of this. Also links to teachers talking about many students just putting all their work into chatgpt and turning it in. https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/emerson-ai-and-the-force https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/emerson-ai-and-the-for...
- frozenseven 1y agoHe links to Reddit, a site where most people are aggressively against AI. So, not necessarily a representative slice of reality.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoGiven recent studies, that does seem to reflect reality. Trust in AI has been waning for 2 years now.
- frozenseven 1y agoBy what relevant metric? The userbase has grown by an order of magnitude over the past few years. Models have gotten noticeably smarter and see more use across a variety of fields and contexts.
- JTbane 1y ago> Models have gotten noticeably smarter and see more use across a variety of fields and contexts. Is that really true? The papers I've read seem to indicate the hallucination rate is getting higher.
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- xnx 1y ago> AI apps like Perplexity are now beginning to challenge Google’s search dominance Now that is a wild claim. ChatGPT might be challenging Google's dominance, but Perplexity is nothing.
- brokencode 1y agoIt’s not a wild claim, though maybe your interpretation is wild. I never said Perplexity individually is challenging Google, but rather as part of a group of apps including ChatGPT, which you conveniently left out of your quote.
- underdeserver 1y ago> That is a such a wild claim. People like the output of LLMs so much that ChatGPT is the fastest growing app ever. The people using ChatGPT like its output enough when they're the ones reading it. The people reading ChatGPT output that other people asked for generally don't like it. Especially if it's not disclosed up front.
- ohyes 1y agoHad someone put up a project plan for something that was not disclosed as LLM assisted output. While technically correct it came to the wrong conclusions about the best path forward and inevitably hamstrung the project. I only discovered this later when attempting to fix the mess and having my own chat with an LLM and getting mysteriously similar responses. The problem was that the assumptions made when asking the LLM were incorrect. LLMs do not think independently and do not have the ability to challenge your assumptions or think laterally. (yet, possibly ever, one that does may be a different thing). Unfortunately, this still makes them as good as or better than a very large portion of the population. I get pissed off not because of the new technology or the use of the LLM, but the lack of understanding of the technology and the laziness with which many choose to deliver the results of these services. I am more often mad at the person for not doing their job than I am at the use of a model, the model merely makes it easier to hide the lack of competence.
- thewebguyd 1y ago> do not have the ability to challenge your assumptions or think laterally. Particularly on the challenging your assumptions part is where I think LLMs fail currently, though I won't pretend to know enough about how to even resolve that; but right now, I can put whatever nonsense I want into ChatGPT and it will happily go along telling me what a great idea that is. Even on the remote chance it does hint that I'm wrong, you can just prompt it into submission. None of the for-profit AI companies are going to start letting their models tell users they're wrong out of fear of losing users (people generally don't like to be held accountable) but ironically I think it's critically important that LLMs start doing exactly that. But like you said, the LLM can't think so how can it determine what's incorrect or not, let alone if something is a bad idea or not. Interesting problem space, for sure, but unleashing these tools to the masses with their current capabilities I think has done, and is going to continue to do more harm than good.
- ants_everywhere 1y ago> That is a such a wild claim. Some people who hate LLMs are absolutely convinced everyone else hates them. I've talked with a few of them. I think it's a form of filter bubble.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoThis isn't some niche outcry: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/03/19/is-the-public-losing-trust-in-ai/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/03/19/is-the-p... And that was 18 months ago. Yes, believe it or not, people eventually wake up and realize slop is slop. But like everything else with LLM development, tech is trying to brute force it on people anyway.
- elictronic 1y agoYou posted an article about investors trust in AI companies to deliver and societies strong distrust of large corporations. You article isn’t making the point you seem to think it is.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoWhat point do you think it means? Seems pretty clear to me. 1. Investors are pushing a lot of hype 2. People are not trusting the hype. Hence why people's trust in LLM's are waning.
- Timwi 1y agoI haven't read the article, but it sounds to me you're conflating “how much do regular users trust LLMs to produce good/correct output” with “how much do capitalists trust LLMs to become (and remain) profitable”.
- brokencode 1y agoYup, any day now people will suddenly realize that LLMs suck and you were right all along. Any day now..
- pera 1y ago> People like the output of LLMs so much that ChatGPT is the fastest growing app ever While people seem to love the output of their own queries they seem to hate the output of other people's queries, so maybe what people actually love is to interact with chatbots. If people loved LLM outputs in general then Google, OpenAI and Anthropic would be in the business of producing and selling content.
- cruffle_duffle 1y ago> While people seem to love the output of their own queries they seem to hate the output of other people's queries Listening or trying to read other peoples chats with these things is like listening to somebody describe a dream. It’s just not that interesting most of the time. It’s remarkable for the person experiencing it but it is deeply personal.
- henryfjordan 1y agoGoogle does put AI output at the top of every search now, and sometimes it's helpful and sometimes it's crap. They have been trying since long before LLMs to not just provide the links for a search but also the content. Google used to be interested in making sure you clicked either the paid link or the top link in the results, but for a few years now they'd prefer that a user doesn't even click a link after a search (at least to a non-Google site)
- LtWorf 1y agoIt made me switch away from google. The push I needed
- brokencode 1y agoI think the thing people hate about that is the lack of effort and attention to detail. It’s an incredible enabler for laziness if misused. If somebody writes a design or a report, you expect that they’ve put in the time and effort to make sure it is correct and well thought out. If you then find the person actually just had ChatGPT generate it and didn’t put any effort into editing it and checking for correctness, then that is very infuriating. They are essentially farming out the process of creating the document to AI and farming out the process of reviewing it to their colleagues. So what is their job then, exactly? These are tools, not a replacement for human thought and work. Maybe someday we can just have ChatGPT serve as an engineer or a lawyer, but certainly not today.
- tikhonj 1y agoAt some point, Groupon was the fastest growing company ever.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoPeople "like" or people "suffice" with the output? This "rise of whatever" as one blog put it gives me feelings that people are instead lowering their standards and cutting corners. Letting them cut through to stuff they actually want to do.
- satvikpendem 1y ago> People like the output of LLMs so much that ChatGPT is the fastest growing app ever And how much of that is free usage, like the parent said? Even when users are paying, ChatGPT's costs are larger than their revenue.
- shpongled 1y agoI would pay $5000 to never have to read another LLM-authored piece of text ever again.
- JohnMakin 1y ago> That is a such a wild claim. People like the output of LLMs so much that ChatGPT is the fastest growing app ever. And this kind of meaningless factoid was immediately usurped by the Threads app release, which IMO is kind of a pointless app. Maybe let's find a more meaningful metric before saying someone else's claim is wild.
- famouswaffles 1y agoAsking your Instagram Users to hop on to your ready made TikTok Clone is hardly in the same sphere as spinning up that much users from nothing. And while Threads growth and usage stalled, ChatGPT is very much still growing and has *far* more monthly visits than threads. There's really nothing meaningless about ChatGPT being the 5th most visited site on the planet, not even 3 years after release. Threads doesn't make the top 50.
- JohnMakin 1y agoI think you just precisely explained why MAU / DAU growth is a meaningless metric in such discussions.
- famouswaffles 1y agoSeems like it's only meaningless if you ignore basic context.
- JohnMakin 1y agoWhat basic context is being ignored? Here's how the thread has gone: "chatGPT has the fastest growing userbase in history which shows users really like the output!" This unsourced (and wrong) claim was offered in rebuttal to another post saying people don't like the output of LLM's. This rebuttal offers DAU/MAU as a metric of how much people like the app, I presume, and thus the output of the app. Besides that being a wild jump on its own, it's incorrect. As I pointed out - threads almost immediately beat that DAU/MAU record, and I'd offer a claim it hasn't exactly been a tremendous success either in popularity or monetarily. Pointing out that they got that DAU/MAU by registering their own users to it is precisely the point that is being made - this metric is a meaningless gauge of how popular an app is, and especially when viewed from the context of this argument, which is whether the popularity of the app (as it relates to DAU/MAU growth) also suggests people love consuming the output of it. No offense, but are you sure you're following this conversation?
- const_cast 1y ago> > “most people agree that the output is trite and unpleasant to consume” > That is a such a wild claim. I think when he said "consume" he meant in terms of content consumption. You know, media - the thing that makes Western society go round. Movies, TV, music, books. Would I watch an AI generated movie? No. What about a TV show? Uh... no. What about AI music? I mean, Spotify is trying to be tricky with that one, but no. I'd rather listen to Remi Wolf's 2024 Album "Big Ideas", which I thought was, ironically, less inspired than "Juno" but easily one of the best albums of the year. ChatGPT is a useful interface, sure, but it's not entertaining. It's not high-quality. It doesn't provoke thought or offer us some solace in times of sadness. It doesn't spark joy or make me want to get up and dance.