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Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

> Do they not understand

I see this all the time from AI boosters. Flashy presentation, and it seems like it worked! But if you actually stare at the result for a moment, it’s mediocre at best.

Part of the issue is that people who are experts at creating ML models aren’t experts at all the downstream tasks those models are asked to do. So if you ask it to “write a poem about pizza” as long as it generally fits the description it goes into the demo.

We saw this with Gemini’s hallucination bug in one of their demos, telling you to remove film from a camera (this would ruin the photos on the film). They obviously didn’t know anything about the subject beforehand.

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> Part of the issue is that people who are experts at creating ML models aren’t experts at all the downstream tasks those models are asked to do.

Yep. CAD, music, poetry, comedy. Same pattern in each.

But it's more than not being experts: it's about a subliminal belief that there either isn't much to be expert in or a denial of the value of that expertise, like if what they do can be replicated by a neural network trained on the description, is it even expertise?

Unavoidably, all of this stuff is about allowing people to do, with software, tasks they would otherwise need experts for.

Well, comedians still exist, despite the fact that ChatGPT can write an endless stream of “jokes” for next to zero cost. So do musicians. I know less about poetry and CAD but I assume people who seek out those modalities aren’t going to be impressed with generic garbage. A person who seeks out poetry isn’t going to be easily impressed.

No. But then all of these products are marketed to people who are, at some domain-specific level, still towards the "but I wore the juice!" end of the scale, right?

Unskilled and unaware of it. Or rather, unskilled and unaware of what a skilled output actually involves. So, unaware of the damage they do to their reputations by passing off the output of a GPT.

This is what I mean about the writing, ultimately. If you don't know why ChatGPT writing is sort of essentially banal and detracts from honesty and authenticity, you're the sort of person who shouldn't be using it.

(And if you do know why, you don't need to use it)

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