So we have here a chat bot that pretty much passes for a human and some people react with "meh, it's not a genius". It makes me think of Tim Urbans chart: https://imgs.search.brave.com/YR7qt28AjhAeXSr_qvSmJubqIKJW5S...
I can't even believe I'm even spelling this out. What is the point of associating anything even remotely human with a chatbot like ChatGPT? I really don't get it. What benefit do we get from this? If anything is confuses us in ways that makes it more difficult to understand and argue about AI specifically, and technology generally.
ChatGPT is being grossly misinterpreted, and it's a shame, really, because it's such a cool piece of software.
Until now, if you ask "what makes humans different from animals" many responses could be in the line of "generating art, poetry, music, synthesise ideas"..
Well, now it seems somewhat clear that THAT part of human activity can be performend by something non-human.
(There is still a lot more to humans of course; I agree with you on that point)
Yes -- it is only reassembling stuff humans in the past have done -- but so is most of human activities in these areas. Very little humans produce is not inspired by input from others. Art, music and ideas reverberate back and forth between humans and only slowly change over the decades.
That's because we (as an agrarian society) have constructed an idea of “what a human is” in opposition to animals, but with the advance of AI maybe we'll realize that we are much closer to animals (especially other mammals) than we're comfortable to admit (and no, I'm not vegan).
ChatGPT mirrors this, producing output that feels generic precisely because it's trying to predict what's the most likely response. That's in direct opposition to interesting creative works.
You can force it off the beaten track a little by adding more details to your prompt, but it will still try and fit the best curve through those additional points.
And, to be clear, it doesn't make humans that special. Other animals have created art that expresses their sincere internal experiences and desires.
If I'm being perfectly honest with myself and you ask me what makes humans deserving of special moral consideration, I would have to say nothing. I think an elephant, gorilla, octopus probably all deserve the same consideration. I give more consideration to humans because I'm human, and what makes us human isn't art. A person with severe brain damage and the inability to understand or produce language or art is still human.
I get your perspective that a reductionist view of humans as solely intellectual agents is severely lacking, and bordering on dehumanizing if taken to an extreme but it still doesn't take credit away from the impressive capabilities that this bot exhibits.
Even if it's far from "true human" level (whatever that means), it gives us a theory about ourselves that's computationally falsifiable.
Are you human?
> No, I'm not a human. I'm a large language model trained by OpenAI. I'm a computer program that's been designed to generate human-like text based on the input I receive. I don't have my own thoughts or feelings, I just process the information I'm given and try to provide helpful responses. I tested the think now quite a bit. I am not sure how I would use it on a daily basis. Maybe for inspiration?
Careful there. There are some fellow humans who wouldn't be able to pass your conditions.
You seem to conflate the two points.
It's an incredible achievement, technologically. It's also very different from having feelings and emotions.
Or, if ChatGPT can "feel and express emotion" through this manner, does that mean its feelings and emotions are sociopathic in nature? Not in the terms of the disorder, but in simulating feelings and emotions because that helps it complete the task it's been given?
Or! What ChatGPT says after plugging the above question into it:
> No, ChatGPT does not have sociopathic tendencies. It is simply programmed to respond to certain prompts in a way that mimics human emotions and reactions, but it is not actually feeling or experiencing the emotions itself.
But you might say ChatGPT is like talking to a human who actually knows nothing about finance but doesn't let that stop them (and for that matter, if you wanted to anthropomorphize it, you could say part of the problem is ChatGPT literally "believes" everything it reads online - and you can easily make it "believe" anything through leading wording, which I think is a strong tool for strengthening the Turing test, since no human will respond that way). Sometimes they might luck into being correct, but you wouldn't want to base any information on what they say.
On the other hand, if I actually wanted reliable finance advice, a scripted finance chatbot would still win because those answers are written by people who do know what they're talking about.
This is very much a problem with humans too.
It's not unusual for humans to behave this way either. E.g. "get your government hands off my medicare".
Turns out, about half the copy we are using on the site is coming from ChatGPT. I came up with a few clever lines, but ChatGPT came up with more and faster. It produced some lines my partner and I legitimately laughed out loud at.
My copywriting skills are pretty bad. Even if ChatGPT's are "sort of basic", it's better than me. ChatGPT isn't replacing copywriters, but it's making the work they do much more accessible to people who aren't copywriters.
It felt like ~10 years ago the conversation was that "AI will do the tedious boring work and make more time to do the creative work". What actually seems to be happening is that the creative work is slowly being eaten by AI and giving it to the people who aren't good at that flavor of creative work.
Writing a few clever lines of copy for a indie puzzle company isn't the most creative work of all time, but it is still creative work. And it was done by AI. And it was done better than I could.
Sounds like it just did
It did the work of a copywriter. You might have done it yourself otherwise, or maybe outsourced it, but it did some of the copywriting work that otherwise would have been done by a human
Needless to say: Bootstrap didn't make designer nor frontend engineers jobless.
If it is sold as a sophisticated general purpose chat bot (like you did), it’s incredibly impressive.
Context matters.
The negative reactions are in response to people treating it as some kind of magic box.
I spent most of the day playing with it and saw it do some really bonkers things. I asked it to create a language similar to pig latin but with some other letter rearrangement strategy, and it gave me "frontback" language, where the first and last letters are swapped.
I also spent time investing medical case studies for it to diagnose, and it did pretty well - I was impressed when it identified ciguatera, but it couldn't differentiate between several possible shellfish toxins. Not going to take doctors' jobs (yet!)
I agree that dismissing ChatGPT is a mistake; and if you know anything about AI, you know that ChatGPT is a technological leap (not alone; part of a small category, including stuff like Stable Diffusion, etc).
But also I would make the distinction between imitation and generation. ChatGPT is great at using existing inputs, found on the Internet, to sound plausible; and I'm sure it will get better at it in just mere months.
However, the ability to provide true advice, or in other words, to "generate" ideas and content and suggestions, is a whole different story. And on this front, I am not sure that we are where the cool Tim Urban vignette tries to convey.
Maybe AI will unlock a cascade of things that will make it a self reinforcing trend as we've seen with the industrial revolution, leading to an exponential boom, but maybe it will not. And the fact that the GPT-N is doing an incredible job at simulating intelligence doesn't really give a hint about the answer.
It's just an hypothesis, not founded on anything concrete.
There might not be any path from GPR-3 to GAI, even GAI on ant or bird level.
A smart AI might not be smart enough to improve itself significantly.
However, I agree with you in general: there’s a certain amount of surprise in laughing off the creation an AI agent that could pass as a reasonably intelligent person if it just weren’t straight up wrong about random things.
The last x% to make this bot a full fledged programmer does not matter. The clients will accept bugs that would be fatal in FSD. We will lose our jobs at an astonnishing rate in some kinds of companies in the coming years. I guess agile sweatshops will be first but I have no clue how far it will go.
Even if you happen to be safe there will be a downwards pressure on wages. Algorithm cranking might be largely obsolete and our main focus might be skeleton writing. It removes a big obstacle for becoming a programmer. The "good at math in school" requirement.
Good at math at school isn’t even a requirement to be a good programmer nowadays. Maybe in certain sub-disciplines, but not all.
Being a programmer is much more than coding “in the small”. It’s about analyzing requirements and creating high level abstractions. There has been a pressure towards reducing the amount of “coding in the small” since languages started incorporating standard libraries. Then there’s been web frameworks, open source packages, API services, etc. Despite all this the need for developers has exploded and there is a perennial supply gap for talent…
Then there is the question of who is going to be manipulating these tools? Programmers.
Same promise was made of low-code tools, and what do we have now?
- As many app devs as before
- Most low-code tools (at least in the enterprise) are operated by… app devs?
Additionally, it is hard to put my finger on a good explanation, but FSD is a very specific problem that we're trying to handcraft an AI solution for.
You have to appreciate how broad this model is and how decent the results it produces are without being told specifically how to do it.
So is my Uncle. This is very much a "human level intelligence" problem.
ChatGPT is impressive at generating text, but it doesn't generate better information than GPT3, it just hides its ignorance better behind more political/vague speech so it is harder to find its errors/information. To me that is regression, not progress, the results looks better but are harder to parse correctly for humans.
When the creators of this tool present it as the frontier of machine intelligence, and when its persona revolves around being intelligent, authoritative, and knowledgeable, and yet it gets some basic, not random, stuff awfully wrong, you can't really discount the skeptic sentiments expressed in the comments here like this.
You’re assuming that this will only be used when it’s perfect and in helpful ways
This will be used at scale THIS YEAR and every subsequent year to infiltrate social networks including this one and amass points / karma / followers / clout. And also to write articles that will eventually dwarf all human-generated content.
With this and deepfakes and image/video generation, the age of trusting or caring about internet content or your friends sharing online is coming to an end. But it will be a painful 10 years as online mobs and outrage will happen over and over since people think they’re reacting to their friends’ posts of real things.
No, forget violent killbots. Today’s tech puts the nail in the coffin of human societal organization and systems of decision making and politics over the next 10 years. And AI doesn’t have to be right about stuff to destroy our systems.
We’ve been analyzing the performance of ONE agent among say 9 humans at a poker table. But imagine untold swarms of them, being owned by competing groups, infiltrating ALL human content exchange.
Not much different than what happened in trading firms over the last 20 years. Bots will be WELCOMED because they perform better on many metrics but will F everyone on the others.
I think we have made a lot of progress in the area of computer graphics - most action movies you watch now contain some level of CG characters or digital makeup that is very believable.
But really the point I was trying to make is that people become more discerning the closer something comes to being human-like, and that feeling masks the reality of the progress.
But take this, for example[1]. I asked it to write me a story in a particular genre featuring certain animals, and it did. I asked it to switch genres, which it did well. When I asked for a backstory about how different characters met, it provided a fairly plausible one, as well as songs that would accompany the story if it were a musical, and potential titles for a sequel.
When I asked it to write the beginning of a New York Times article titled "Biden Shocks Nation"[2] I got a fairly convincing news story about Biden deciding not to run for office again. If asked to continue the story and include people who might run, it generates further paragraphs talking about who might run to replace him, starting with Kamala Harris, who it claims is a strong contender.
Is any of this writing amazing? No, but very few writing is. It's amazing how well it's able to generate generic human writing, as well as how easy it is to get it to create what you want with very few prompts.
[1] https://twitter.com/LowellSolorzano/status/15997859363671941... [2] https://twitter.com/LowellSolorzano/status/15997883331018752...
Come on HN, this is a huge step and the revolution is impending.