Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

That's my impression of ChatGPT. It vomits out a half-page of boilerplate about any subject before getting to any real insight.

View on HN

To be fair, it was trained on a corpus that includes a ton of SEO-corrupted websites that do just this. Blame Google for rewarding bread recipes that start with thousands of words about why people like bread.

I’ve wondered if that was the case based on my experience. Every response is 80% too long, just like the real internet. Yay?

I've guessed it's the nature of the beast. Without context it's hard to gauge what part of the question is interesting to the reader. So it errs on the side of completeness.

I asked it "What's an easy recipe to make bread" and it gave me a pretty direct answer, so that's not it:

Here is a simple recipe for homemade bread:

Ingredients:

- 3 cups all-purpose flour

- 1 tablespoon sugar

- 1 teaspoon salt

- 1 packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) active dry yeast

- 1 cup warm water

- 2 tablespoons butter, melted

Instructions:

- In a large mixing bowl, combine the flour, sugar, salt, and yeast. Mix well.

- Add the warm water and melted butter to the dry ingredients and mix until a dough forms.

- Knead the dough for about 5-10 minutes until it becomes smooth and elastic.

- Place the dough in a lightly greased bowl, cover it with a towel, and set it aside in a warm place to rise for about 1 hour or until it has doubled in size.

- Punch down the dough and shape it into a loaf. Place the loaf in a greased 9x5-inch loaf pan.

- Cover the pan with a towel and let the dough rise again for about 30 minutes.

- Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C).

- Bake the bread for 30-35 minutes or until it is golden brown on top.

- Remove the bread from the oven and let it cool in the pan for a few minutes before removing it and slicing it. Enjoy!

I hope you find this recipe helpful! Let me know if you have any questions.

The boilerplate kills me. When ChatGPT first came out, I wasted an entire day chatting with it. By the end of it all, I felt this uncontrollable urge to reach into the ether, grab ChatGPT by the neck, and hold its head under water until it could no longer breathe. I have no idea why, but the way it talks to me makes me want to kill it.

(People have annoyed me before, but I've never wanted to kill them. ChatGPT has unlocked a whole new level of rage I didn't know I had available.)

> before getting to any real insight.

Your opinion is that ChatGPT has "real insight"? What is "real insight"?

That was a short phrase used to convey the concept that my direct question didn't get answered immediately. Not to suggest anything about the concept of AI, real consciousness nor civil rights for synthetic organisms.

Are you comfortable with the claim that some human writing has more insight than some other? Then you should also feel comfortable judging ChatGPT as ‘not demonstrating insight’, even if you can’t define exactly what it is.

No, I'm not comfortable with the claim that squiggles on paper can have "insight". Maybe they can demonstrate insight (on behalf of the writer). But if there's no writer, there's no insight.

I've of the opposite opinion. I read an insight in an article; it doesn't matter where it comes from, its still an insight.

The insight is from the paper to my head. The author doesn't have to matter.

Well, thank you for exposing for me the fact that there's a difference between abstract insight, and an insight as a definite object. I hadn't noticed that before, and now I think about it, it's not obvious to me that the two are closely-related.

So sure: an insight can be conveyed in writing. And I suppose that if that's true, it doesn't matter where the writing came from.

Worm: What is the secret of enlightenment, Master?

Master: You gotta fight for the right to partaaaay!

At that moment, Worm gained insight.

So essentially they've built an average 10th grade highscool student.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com