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Reasons to Not Use ChatGPT
- sonderotis 1y agoInteresting take from richard.
- baggy_trough 1y agoAll these people that go "it just predicts words" seem to be very certain that the brain does something else.
- sonderotis 1y agoactually it does. We do not predict words lol.
- baggy_trough 1y agoI find your certainty to be unwarranted.
- rmwaite 1y agoThen what do we do? lol.
- BizarroLand 1y agoWe understand the meaning that we wish to convey and then intelligently choose the best method that we have at our disposal to communicate that. LLMs find the most likely next word based on its billions of previously scanned word combinations and contexts. It's an entirely different process.
- satvikpendem 1y agoHow do you know we understand and LLMs don't? To an outsider they look the same. Indeed, that is the point of solipsism.
- BizarroLand 1y agoBecause unlike a human brain, we can actually read the whitepaper on how the process works. They do not "think", they "language", i.e. large language model.
- satvikpendem 1y agoWhat is thinking and why do you think that LLM ingesting content is not also reading? Clearly they're absorbing some sort of information from text content, aka reading.
- BizarroLand 1y agoI think you don't understand how llms work. They run on math, the only parallel between an llm and a human is the output.
- satvikpendem 1y agoAre you saying we don't run on math? How much do you know of how the brain functions? This sort of Socratic questioning shows that no one truly can answer them because no one actually knows about the human mind, or how to distinguish or even define intelligence.
- baggy_trough 1y agoSo do neurons.
- 9x39 1y agoHow does this intelligence work? Can you explain how 'meaning' is expressed in neurons, or whatever it is that makes up consciousness? I don't think we know. Or if we have theories, the error bars are massive. >LLMs find the most likely next word based on its billions of previously scanned word combinations and contexts. It's an entirely different process. How is that different than using one's learned vocabulary?
- falcor84 1y agoWell, I failed to predict the "lol" at the end of your comment; touché.
- theo1996 1y agoIt does something else yes.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- throw-the-towel 1y agoEven if it does, that's not very relevant. The airplane does not imitate the bird, yet it very much does fly.
- simianwords 1y agoWhat a horrible take from someone who used to be competent. I find that it’s usually the hardcore OSS and hardware adjacent types to be ideological about AI.
- simianparrot 1y agoAnd people will keep ignoring Stallman at their peril. But if you understand how the technology works, you also know he's right. If you think he isn't, you either don't understand or you don't _want_ to understand because your job depends on it.
- 9x39 1y agoHe's sort of right but in an unspecific way. "people should not trust systems that mindlessly play with words to be correct in what those words mean" Yes, but this applies to any media channel or just other human minds. It's an admonition to think critically about all incoming signals. "users cannot get a copy of it" Can't get a copy of my interlocutor's mind, either, for careful verification. Shall I retreat to my offline cave and ruminate deeply with only my own thoughts and perhaps a parrot? >you also know he's right. If you think he isn't, you either don't understand or you don't _want_ to understand because your job depends on it. He can't keep getting away with this!
- simianparrot 1y ago> Yes, but this applies to any media channel or just other human minds. You can hold a person responsible, first and foremost. But I am so tired of this strawman argument; it's unfalsifiable but also stupid because if you interact with real people, you immediately know the difference between people and these language models. And if you can't I feel sorry for you, because that's more than likely a mental illness. So no I can't "prove" that people aren't also just statistical probability machines and that every time you ask someone to explain their thought process they're not just bullshitting, because no, I can't know what goes on in their brain nor measure it. And some people do bullshit. But I operate in the real world with real people every day and if they _are_ just biological statistical probability machines, then they're a _heck_ of a lot more advanced than the synthetic variety. So much so that I consider them wholly different, akin to the difference between a simple circuit with a single switch vs. the SoC of a modern smartphone.
- 9x39 1y ago
- theo1996 1y agoExtremely based and to the point. Its ridiculous how all these comment somehow disagree with him, they are not inteligent systems, its justa regression function run on words or pixel data
- baobun 1y ago> all these comments All 2 of them! Way to gauge the crowd sentiment.
- falcor84 1y agoCan you please offer a measurable definition of intelligence that you would put good money on not being cracked by AI in a decade?
- alganet 1y agoWhat if I said that the ability to move the goalpost is the real trick? Machines started to hold up casual conversation well, so we came up with more clever examples of how to make it hallucinate, which made it look dumb again. We're surprisingly good and fast at it. You're trying to cap that to a decade, or a specific measure. It serves no other purpose than to force one to make a prediction mistake, which is irrelevant to the intelligence discussion.
- falcor84 1y agoI think I understand what you're saying, but disagree with the implication. If anything, I'm actually impressed by how the development of AI seems to me be making it more and more difficult for us to move the goalpoasts. There obviously still are many opportunities for us to make fun of the capability of GenAI, but it's getting harder to come up with the "clever" (as you said) prompt. They mostly don't add supernumerary fingers any more, and generally don't make silly arithmetic mistakes on a single prompt. We need to look for more complex and longer-time-horizon tasks to make them fail, and in many situations, the tasks are as likely to trip up a human as they would an AI. Indeed your comment reminded me of Plato's Dialogues, which mostly involve Socrates intentionally trying to trip up his conversation partner in a contradiction. Reading these didn't ever make me feel that Socrates's partner is not intelligent or really has a deep underlying issue in their mental model, but rather that Socrates (at least as written up by Plato) is very clever and good at rhetoric. Same in regards to AI - I don't see our ability to make them fail as illustrating a lack of intelligence, just that in some ways we are more intelligent or have more relevant experience. And if you're concerned about making a prediction and all you can fall back of on is a "I know it when I see it" argument, then to me that is as strong a signal as can be that there's no hard line separating between artificial intelligence and human intelligence.
- niam 1y agoWhether LLMs are "intelligent" seems a wholly uninteresting distinction, resembling the internet ceremony surrounding whether a hotdog is a sandwich. There's probably very interesting discussion to be had about hotdogs and LLMs, but whether they're sandwiches or intelligent isn't a useful proxy to them.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- saulpw 1y agoI disagree completely. Many people take for granted that the expression of intelligence/competence is the same as actual intelligence/competence, and many people are acting accordingly. But a simulacrum is definitively NOT the thing itself. When you trust fake intelligence, especially as a way to indulge mental laziness, your own faculties atrophy, and then in short order you can't even tell the difference between a real intelligence bomb and a dumb empty shell that has the word "intelligent" written on it.
- marcellus23 1y agoWhat are your thoughts on the Chinese room thought experiment?
- saulpw 1y agoSee my other comment above. Language manipulation is not sufficient for intelligence and understanding. There is no one in the Chinese Room who understands the questions and answers; there is no understanding in the system; there is no understanding at all.
- niam 1y agoI'm not even taking for granted what it means. Can you define it in a way that your neighbor will independently arrive at? It's an incredibly lossy container for whatever meaning that people will want to pack it with, moreso than for other words. Is a hotdog a simulacrum of a sandwich? Or a fake sandwich? I have no clue and don't care because it doesn't meaningfully inform me of the utility of the thing. An LLM might be "unintelligent" but I can't model what you think the consequences of that are. I'd skip the formalities and just talk about those instead.
- p0w3n3d 1y agoThe ChatGPT has a few self-awareness modules, it can even behave based on its certainty. Please see the Adrej Karpathy's video on it. This is the breakthrough we went beyond. There's no going back now. There is also a reasoning now in the LLM
- sanbor 1y agoInteresting points! Maybe a better term is LLMs (BTW smart phones are not smart and people don’t seem to be confused). I agree with being dependent and sending so much data to those servers. I would mention there is a version of ChatGPT you can run locally[1]. [1] https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/
- esbranson 1y agoConsciousness, in Zoltan Torey's[1] model, is the brain's layered, language-enabled off-line mechanism that reflects on its own sensory endogram, generating self-aware, internally guided behavior.[2] The off-line mechanism generates mental alternatives, which are then "run past the brainstem, which then makes the selection." Nice little accessible book.[3] > Taking “computer” first, we find that this alleged source of machine-generated consciousness is not what it is cracked up to be. It is a mere effigy, an entity in name only. It is no more than a cleverly crafted artifact, one essentially indistinguishable from the raw material out of which it is manufactured.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoltan_Torey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoltan_Torey [2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262527101/the-conscious-mind/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262527101/the-conscious-mind/ [3] https://search.worldcat.org/title/887744728 https://search.worldcat.org/title/887744728
- dudeinjapan 1y agoBy this logic, most human brains are bullshit generators too. Some humans even have a complete and utter disregard for the truth. (One such human happens to own Truth Social.)
- rpjt 1y agoIt's true that lots of people don't seem to recognize objective truth, or just don't want to admit it. Perception is reality.
- visarga 1y agoRichard makes a distinction between human understanding and AI indifference to truth. But isn't that what half the country is doing a.t.m? And more philosophically, we can't know the Truth because we rely on leaky abstractions all the way. AI models are subject to user satisfaction and sustained usage, the models also have a need to justify their existence, not just us. They are not that "indifferent", after multiple iterations the external requirement becomes internalized goal. Cost is the key - it costs to live, and it costs to execute AI. Cost becomes valence. I see it like a river - water carves the banks, and banks channel the water, you can't explain one without the other, in isolation. So are external constraints and internal goals.
- satvikpendem 1y agoAnother day, another example of the AI Effect in action: > "The AI effect" refers to a phenomenon where either the definition of AI or the concept of intelligence is adjusted to exclude capabilities that AI systems have mastered. This often manifests as tasks that AI can now perform successfully no longer being considered part of AI, or as the notion of intelligence itself being redefined to exclude AI achievements.[4][2][1] Edward Geist credits John McCarthy for coining the term "AI effect" to describe this phenomenon.[4] The earliest known expression of this notion (as identified by Quote Investigator) is a statement from 1971, "AI is a collective name for problems which we do not yet know how to solve properly by computer", attributed to computer scientist Bertram Raphael.[5] > McCorduck calls it an "odd paradox" that "practical AI successes, computational programs that actually achieved intelligent behavior were soon assimilated into whatever application domain they were found to be useful in, and became silent partners alongside other problem-solving approaches, which left AI researchers to deal only with the 'failures', the tough nuts that couldn't yet be cracked."[6] It is an example of moving the goalposts.[7] I wonder how many more times I'll have to link this page until people stop repeating it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
- falcor84 1y agoLeaving alone Stallman's extreme take, present day LLMs and other generative systems are absolutely still being referred to by society as AI, and I don't see this changing any time soon, so what does this say about the AI effect?
- mandown2308 1y agoFrom my understanding what Stallman says is that LLMs don't "understand" what they're saying. They do a probabilistic search of the most appropriate letter (say) that has had come after another letter in the text (or any media) they have been trained on, and they place it similar in resemblance in the text that they produce. This is largely (no pun) dependent on existing data that is there in the world today, and the more the data that LLMs can work through, the better they get at predicting. (Hence the big data center shops today.) But the limitation is that it cannot "imagine" (as in "imagination is more important than knowledge" by Einstein, who worked on a knowledge problem using imagination, but with the same knowledge resources as his peers.) In this video [1], Stallman talks about his machine trying to understand the "phenomenon" of a physical mechanism, which enables it to "deduce" next steps. I suppose he means it was not doing a probabilistic search on a large dataset to know what should have come next (which makes it human-knowledge dependent), essentially rendering it to an advanced search engine but not AI. [1] https://youtu.be/V6c7GtVtiGc?si=fhkG2ZA-nsQgrVwm https://youtu.be/V6c7GtVtiGc?si=fhkG2ZA-nsQgrVwm
- MathMonkeyMan 1y agoIt doesn't understand anything. Yet if you prompt it with a question about what it understands, its output is consistent with something that understands. Text in, text out. The question is how much a sequence of tokens captures what we think a mind is. "It" ceases to exist when we stop giving it a prompt, if "it" even exists. Whether you consider something "AI" says more about what you think a mind is than anything about the software.
- AstroBen 1y agoHis argument misses the point.. I don't particularly care if it's intelligent or understands anything. My question is does it help with what I'm trying to do As for it being closed source and kept at arms length? Sure.. and if it's taken away or the value proposition changes, I stop using it My freedom comes from having the ability to switch if needed, not from intentionally making myself less effective. There is no lock in
- alganet 1y ago> I don't particularly care if it's intelligent or understands anything. My question is does it help with what I'm trying to do So, he's right? All you care is that it helps you, so it doesn't matter if it's called "artificial intelligence" or not. It doesn't matter for you, and it matters for him (and lots of other people), so let's change the name to "artificial helper", what do you think? Looks like a win-win scenario. If that's really the point (that it helps you, and intelligence doesn't matter), let's remove the intelligence from the name.
- AstroBen 1y agoWell I don't agree with him saying these are a reasons not to use it
- alganet 1y agoThat's fine. You must understand that some people will not agree with you either, right? That's how it works. We don't even have to explain why, but it's a common courtesy. Think this way: it's still a win-win no matter what. What Stallman is saying is that there would be no reason not to use ChatGPT if it was free (you are able to get a copy of the source and build it yourself) and not called AI. If you change those two things, then it's Stallman compliant. That's totally doable. It would still be the exact same program you use today and helps you, and it would also now be immune to those two criticism points (whether it is intelligent or not and what's under the hood).
- 1y ago
- benrapscallion 1y agoSomeone should start a StallmanGPT that writes regular blogposts on “Don’t use <popular software or website>”. See if readers can tell those apart from the real website.