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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

Everytime I see someone finding something wrong about these things, I am reminded of Stoll in '95

https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...

He also had some similar things in Cuckoo's Egg. I wish I could find the quotes, but there was something about email not working all the time and therefor pointless to use.

I'm glad people are finding all the flaws in ChatGPT and the LLM things now, but won't much of this be fixed as it gets better? From my very limited view, these things are amazing, and far from perfect, but damn the can do so much already.

I guess I'm not sure why there's such a rush to dismiss this, when it's clearly a game changer in its present form, and yet so very new (at least new to me).

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I have no doubt these technologies will improve, but there's another argument to be made. The tech will get better and we'll be all the worse for it.

Stoll argued the tech will not be good enough, but paid little thought to the ramifications of the technology succeeding. The arguments against LLMs like Bard and ChatGPT that I have seen are assuming they'll be successful.

They'll become less stupid, but the problem is not that they are wrong but that they are, at present at least, unassailable. You cannot fact check through most of the normal means. You can not research the publication or the author or the date the words were written because that has all been stripped away.

You could check other sources (eg old fashion google) and put in the leg work, but as these get better that will feel less necessary - potentially exacerbating this problem.

That's not to say they aren't useful. I used Chat gpt the other day to get some work done and was impressed. However this was work easily verifiable because it was technical and had immediate feedback when the ai inevitably gave me slightly incorrect code. The same can not be said for facts, figures, and arguments of thought.

However, Stoll was largely correct: the web is not Nirvana. Some structures persisted (e.g. Wikipedia) to help round off data correctness, albeit imperfectly, but his central concerns are just as valid today as they were in 1995.

As a user, the ability for a LLM to literally make things up and present them alongside other true data with no qualms or disclaimers is highly detrimental to the central use case.

He was correct about some things, but also largely incorrect as well.

> Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

> Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Telecommuting workers is reality. Interactive libraries are a reality. Multimedia classrooms have been a reality for over a decade. Electronic town meetings, maybe not, but virtual communities? Very much a reality. Malls are dead and brick and mortar has been hurt extensively by Amazon. Offices lay empty due to remote work.

Newspapers are largely dead, at the very least compared to what they once were. There is plenty of online learning, largely without in person learning. Computer networks have definitely changed how the government works.

> but won't much of this be fixed as it gets better?

Not necessarily, no. There's a large aspect of garbage in, garbage out, to these things.

> when it's clearly a game changer in its present form

Is it? What's the game? Being wrong about telescopes?

And the more content that is created by these LLMs, the more garbage the LLMs will consume while quality content creators are simultaneously disincentivized, leading to worse content from these LLMs. Terrible image, but an organism cannot survive eating its own poop forever.

90% of that Stoll article has been proven completely correct.

I think there are two things to be aware of right now: 1) This technology is revolutionary and will change the world 2) This technology is very unreliable right now and should be seen as a tech demo rather than an actual assistant

(2) is a big problem. Kids submitting term papers with wrong information is one thing, but people are using ChatGPT for things that they shouldn't be, given how many mistakes it makes: https://www.law360.com/pulse/articles/1573108

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