Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

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There’s an ocean of difference to me between ChatGPT and stable diffusion/DallE. Text is fundamentally different from art.

For art, I see these not as major disruptions but as new tools. There’s no right or wrong answer in art. If anything, abstract expressionism solidified that point. A drunk with a paintbrush can mint a small fortune if people decide it’s capital A Art.

More broadly, ML art models will allow more people to express themselves and more perfectly represent that weird dream they had or that place that doesn’t quite exist. We will all be richer for it.

I have less rosy things to say about ChatGPT. I feel like a broken record here but while statistical language models can be amusing (and that’s what I’d classify most of these posts as: amusing, low-impact text where precision and internal consistency isn’t paramount) but they’re not much more than that. They’re not reliable, they’re not oracles, but yeah if you need a poem about SpongeBob in the style of a 1920s mobster they can do that.

Maybe I’m a little too harsh on ChatGPT. Maybe I expect too much out of it. It can create mental eye candy and that’s awesome. I don’t know.

Strongly agree. I don't understand the excitement around ChatGPT. It's a bullshit machine, unreliable and inconsistent. It just adds noise to the world, to the point where it could actually drown all form of signal.

Hey, this bullshit machine will drive IT profits up - hardware, cloud, development. Imagine MSN news fully rewritten by ChatGPT with ChatGPT articles, chatGPT ads and ChatGPT support! Sll delivered on each Microsoft Windows installation all over the globe! Don’t you want join the train while it is not too late? You know, next .NET will heavy use ChatGPT and ChatGPT AI developers are hot now!

You may want to peruse the HN comment guidelines, especially the part about not sneering: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yet it's extremely useful in various usecases.

"Mutate this code so it adheres to XYZ pattern"

"Factor this code out into a React component and wire it up"

"Tell me what this code does, what do I need to change to make it do XZY"

"I need to programatically access AWS <service>, guide me through AWS console to set up the right IAM policies and generate those for me, then generate the correct boto3 code to call this service"

"Take this email, write a friendly and brief response and ask for setting up an appointment next week"

"Write me a bash script that uses imagemagick to perform a bunch of transformations on image files with the following filenames"

"Take this curl command, turn it into a Python function, add type annotations and comments where necessary"

And many, many more usecases. Does it bullshit? Absolutely, but that's just not always an issue. A lot of the bullshitting can be circumvented by prompting it in the right ways and having the right discourse with it.

It's a room full of employees, and you are the manager. Will you hear plenty of bullshit? Absolutely, but you will also get heaps of useful output that can solve your problem, make you think outside the box etc. It's all about how you interact with it.

It's a significantly more pleasant and productive interaction mode than using a search engine and sifting through the SEO spam. I still do that, if I need to verify something or validate if something I don't have enough domain knowledge of is bullshit or not, but more often than not I don't need to. and that's been incredibly liberating.

> It's a room full of employees, and you are the manager. Will you hear plenty of bullshit? Absolutely, but you will also get heaps of useful output that can solve your problem, make you think outside the box etc. It's all about how you interact with it.

I find GPT very useful as well!

Strictly from a rhetorical position, I’ve noticed that the “GPT fails like people fail” argument has not been very convincing in these discussions for whatever reason.

It’s the concept of thinking fast and slow. ChatGPT can write text that seems right at first glance but isn’t. That’s similar to the failure mode of a person. But if you ask it to reason slowly and show its work that’s where it falls apart. Most people are capable of slow cognition too.

Do you complain that any Google search returns lot of bullshit as well?

ChatGPT is only a tool, yet a powerful one. There are many uses that are quite reliable and producing no bullshit. If you don't see them, too bad for you.

How should we call the rejection of AI? Intelligism? Artificialism?

> Do you complain that any Google search returns lot of bullshit as well?

No, I don't. Google Search has absolutely NOTHING in common with ChatGPT. The comparison arises often here and elsewhere, and it's absurd. I will keep repeating that as many times as necessary. I guess this is my plight now.

Google Search produces no content at all. Zero. It returns page urls, and snippets of text extracted from those pages. It's always possible to verify where the information comes from, on which page.

ChatGPT speaks in its own name and says "I", and asserts that it's right, even when it obviously has no clue what "right" even means.

I don't reject AI; but ChatGPT isn't "intelligent". Yes, it's a tool. It's a hammer that randomly hits your thumb hard, and then claims it absolutely, positively was a nail.

So here another way to see ChatGPT that maybe could help you understand its value better.

I see ChatGPT as a student and you as the teacher. The student can be sometimes smart but oftentimes quite stupid. She/he's in a hurry and always try to pretend she/he knows because she/he wants the best graduation. You, as the teacher, you have to detect the bad and the good.

Later, you hire the student. Because, although she/he produces sometimes silly responses, she/he's very quick at collecting information from all kind of sources, and at making nice summaries of it, and can perform many "directed" tasks almost perfectly. And maybe, someday, she/he'll learn and produce less bullshit.

This is an interesting analogy. But a teacher is supposed to know more than a student does. If that's the case then all's good. Yet in most examples the user of ChatGPT knows less and asks it for help in a domain they don't master, be it political/philosophical essay writing or writing code in a language they don't practice, and then publishing said texts or putting said programs in production. This cannot end well.

> > Do you complain that any Google search returns lot of bullshit as well?

> No, I don't.

Well, I do. Because Google's signal to noise ratio is absolutely terrible.

> It's a bullshit machine

So are most humans

That may be true. But there's an air of authority that comes from "computers" that most human bullshitters lack. The other problem is the lowering of the cost of producing bullshit. The combination of the two make bullshitting machines, I think, much more dangerous than their human counterparts.

Most humans are honest enough to admit they don't know something, or at least are very bad at lying. ChatGPT is an excellent liar. It can present complete gibberish with absolute confidence.

> But there's an air of authority that comes from "computers" that most human bullshitters lack.

I'm not so sure. For many human bullshitters, perhaps. But there's plenty of human bullshitters that exhibit the same air of authority you talk about and they're mostly employed as politicians.

Its actually a positive as it will kill platforms that rely on having clearly human signals to be processed by a machine.

Last week I needed to write a bash script that (among other things) parsed the text inside two square brackets that may or may not be in a given string. I rarely write bash or use regex, so it would probably have taken me 1/2 hr to an hour of Google searches like "how to reference capture group in regex bash".

ChatGPT did it for me in about 3 minutes. I was intrigued so I asked it to write Swift code to RSA256 encrypt and then decrypt a string. It did that in about 30s. I told my colleagues and someone joked "ask it to do my HealthKit integration haha". I did, and it did. Not perfectly, but instructively.

Yeah there is a lot of noisy hype around this, but for me it's already shown itself capable of massively improving my productivity.

Interesting point here. ChatGPT may be especially useful in situations where the code that needs to be written is relatively simple but the user of ChatGPT has little or no experience with that language.

For example - as part of a low code/no code product. The user of these typically doesn't know much about code, but some simple scripting might greatly enhance what they can accomplish with the product. Enter ChatGPT...

To me chat GPT represents the same interaction you see on Star Trek when someone is talking to the computer. In particular when interacting with the holodeck. They ask it to modify the environment, incremental tweaks etc and the computer understands what you mean. They are programming, but in a no-code scenario.

I’ve also found it extremely useful for command line utilities with many commands and options. Things like kubectl, ffmpeg, imagemagick, aws cli etc. Tell it what you want and it usually gives you the correct command and flags in response. It’s a lot faster than the google/parsing docs/trial and error mix that I used to employ.

Surely you recognize that there exist propaganda machines whose sole purpose is to drown out signal. For them, ChatGPT and other vaguely-plausible text generating algorithms are very powerful tools. Don't forget that in a democracy, the ignorant vote counts as much as the informed vote.

I think it’s likely that within the next few years, for better or worse, everyone is going to learn to completely discount anything they see online that doesn’t come from an already known and trusted source.

AI-generated content is soon going to account for >99.99% of the internet. A significant chunk of that will be propaganda or deliberate misinformation.

We’re on the verge of some massive changes.

I agree 100%.

An intern tried some stuff, the result was a very serious talk with stakeholders while budget planning whether we should fire our copywriters - ChatGPT's bullshit is that good.

yes, I sure everyone will lose work, I don't think they can survive from it...

By adding noise to the world, perhaps we can all recalibrate our noise floor, so to speak, and lose some of the human-generated nonsense along with ChatGPTs? My hope is that these tools will end content farms and thus (eventually) improve my Google search experience. As the cost of creating low-effort SEO filler tends to zero, Google will have to radically rethink the way they rank sites.

Though maybe I’m too optimistic; they should have done this a long time ago. I’m tired of searching for, for eg. “boiling point of X” and I get a poorly written 1500 word article —- clearly aimed at robots and not humans —- instead of my desired answer.

It’s a bullshit machine which can write a convincing text on a subject and in an adequate style or convincingly hold a conversation.

That’s an extremely impressive leap from what we could do a decade ago. Sure, it lies. Sure, it needs improvement. Still if you can’t see why it’s significant and how it has tremendous potential, well, I fear there is not much we can do for you.

Verse 1: In Bikini Bottom town, where the sea folks gather round There's a squarepants wearin' mobster, they call him SpongeBob He's got a face so yellow, and a smile so broad He'll steal your krabby patty and leave you applaud

Chorus: Cause SpongeBob, he's the boss, ain't no one gonna cross This cuddly little crook, with his cartoon looks He's got a pineapple for a pad, and a pet for a pal But don't let that fool ya, he'll still give you a squish or a squelch

Verse 2: He's got a best friend named Patrick, a starfish of sorts Together they're a pair, of criminal sports They'll rob the Krusty Krab, and run from the law But somehow, they always come out on top, without a flaw

I can't help but think of Cyberiad. Has someone tried feeding ChatGPT those prompts?

Gwern already did that with regular GPT-3: https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#stanislaw-lems-cyberiad

I think my favourite bit is

> A few moments later they were rolling on the floor, and Klapaucius was screaming and gesticulating in the hand-to-hand style of the famous master-scout Krool, while Trurl, in spite of his defective voice-box, was giving such excellent imitations of a dingo howling at the rising moon that even the robots—who, of course, must be presumed to have a good deal of sympathy for such primitive forms of expression—gave him an ovation.

There is a sense in which the person/people who select the training data for a model are the artist. Or at least, a sense in which they can be an artist (models that just train on as much data as possible don't fit).

there are several layers of human artistry and craftmanship involved:

* the fundamental algorithm developer is akin to the (usually rare) genious artist that invents a new genre

* the people implementing, training and applying the machinery are like the larger numbers of followers of a particular artistic school that apply the basic principles to a wide range of topics

* the tool itself is like a brush or a new paint. a technology enabler and nothing more

I am late to the party, but I played around with ChatGPT this weekend and found it to be very useful. One of the most useful applications is in the area of language learning, particularly to see how grammar is used. Unlike textbooks, you're getting exposure to language phrasing and sentence structure is similar to what you will encounter in the wild.

I also generated an absurdist story and was able to feed ChatGPT additional information to direct the plot where I wanted it to go. In that context, I see it being useful as a catalyst to help overcome writer's block.

Finally, I had it write me an "Animated plasma effect using JavaScript and Canvas", which it did albeit one that would have needed a bit of human tweaking to get it animating properly.

I see DallE as producing similar 'regression to the mean' results. That is, no originality at all, just some center-of-the-road collage of what it's seen. It may product art, but it is derivative art.

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