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Comment by eminent101 | Hacker News Reader

Ok, so ChatGPT got some things wrong. If everyone began posting how ChatGPT got something wrong, we will be here all day. I can't see how this article is newsworthy.

And the article has constant literary interruptions like this:

"I set down my teacup and put my face in my hands."

"There was an almost infinitesimal pause before ChatGPT chirped"

"I closed my eyes and contemplated my life choices."

"I narrowed my eyes as ChatGPT brightly informed me"

I don't know what the author is trying here but there is a time and place to use literary pauses like these and I don't think, this article is that place. The article reads like a weird cross between a rant, technical article and a wannabe literary piece.

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These interventions on the contrary made me chuckle, even at something I already knew.

I think this is a good article. It's informative, funny (subjectively) and showcases a clear example of how something trivial for a human expert is not barely understood by ChatGPT.

> trivial for a human expert is not barely understood by ChatGPT

I try to stay away from these arguments but it's a Saturday, so what the heck! I think this topic is becoming a tired topic now. One party would claim that ChatGPT doesn't "understand". Other party would claim that it's a large statistical model, of course it doesn't "understand". Do you expect your washing machine to "understand" that it's washing clothes? Then there is another party that would claim, rightfully, do we understand what "understanding" is? This has been rinsed and repeated over and over again ad nauseum. Is there anything more to learn in these arguments?

I mean, can we just give "ChatGPT got some things wrong, haha" some rest now?

You are starting to sound exactly what generated accounts by OpenAI would say in response to these kind of criticisms.

I'd strongly suggest addressing the points I've made rather than resorting to a lazy dismissal like I "sound like a generated account." It's a non-argument and contributes nothing.

For the record, I'm not affiliated with OpenAI. I use ChatGPT often. It solves my problem many times. Many times it fails miserably. I neither love it nor hate it. It is what it is.

My frustration stems from the sheer laziness of some posts and comments about LLMs here on HN. The ones that irritate me the most are those that expect LLMs to somehow possess magical abilities like being able to inherently distinguish between correct and incorrect outputs. Where does this expectation even come from? Have these people spent no time at all understanding how LLMs actually work? No? And yet they expect magic? It's baffling!

If you have a substantial critique of the points I raised, by all means, share it. If not, please spare me the hand-waving dismissals.

Your argument is upside down. If people are insisting LLMs aren’t magic, it’s only because too many people argue that they are. Just like you’re frustrated at the repeated con arguments, other people are frustrated at the repeated pro arguments.

Your "argument" is so poorly constructed that it could easily be considered trolling and therefore feels like it has no point to engage it, thats one of the main reasons it reads as generated by OpenAI bot accounts, like just today someone realized they could ask about the time Jimmy Carter kicked a klansmen in the nuts and GPT would explain with excruciating detail how and when it went down, except this never happened, but with your "argument" we should just assume that GPT making things way too frequently its just a part of life and that its still a pretty useful tool despite misleading thousands of people in a daily basis.

> I mean, can we just give "ChatGPT got some things wrong, haha" some rest now?

Sure, right after the “AI is more profound than fire and electricity”¹ arguments stop.

People keep making counter arguments because the argument keeps getting made. Stop inundating HN (and everywhere else) with praise for LLMs as if they were the second coming of Christ and the counter arguments will subside too.

¹ https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/01/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-ai-...

Article title: Google CEO: A.I. is more important than fire or electricity

Quote from article: AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on. It is more profound than, I dunno, electricity or fire," says Pichai

——

That’s not the argument he made. I have said for a long time that you can find always someone saying anything you want on the Internet, with that you can paint your side/any-side all with the same brush even if it’s an opinion held by only 1 person.

There might some someone on Twitter who actually thinks AI is more _important_ than fire or electricity but that’s not a commonly held belief and it’s not even the case in the article you linked.

> I have said for a long time that you can find always someone saying anything you want on the Internet

Agreed. But who says it matters too. Some people scream into the void, others share opinions that sway elections and affect the lives of millions.

I’m not only considering Pichai, he was merely the first proxy I remembered. The point is that the importance and abilities of LLMs are regularly overstated.

>if it’s an opinion held by only 1 person.

an opinion held by Sundar Pichai about technically important issues is much more than an opinion held by 1 person

Except the originally stated option (in the comment and in the article title) is completely false. He didn’t say AI was more _important_ but that it was more _profound_. There is a difference and words have meaning.

That is not the point of the argument. But fine, I edited the original post to use “profound” so we can end this nitpick. Yes, words have meanings and we should absolutely consider those differences when they’re the central thesis. But this wasn’t it, it was merely the first buffoon with a similar argument I could think of. He served as an example of a trend, not as the entire point. It makes zero difference if he said “profound” or “important”, they are equally stupid in this context.

as a general rule when someone discusses profound technology they mean it is important, words may have meaning but they also have common usage and when he says AI is profound he certainly doesn't mean it is deep like the ocean.

Evidently you do not agree with this - so please tell me, what technology do you consider profound and yet, also, unimportant.

My friend and I have a game where we link each other a wildly successful submission title on reddit (usually political) and then screenshot the part of the article (usually not linked on reddit) that reveals the title as phony.

Thousands of comments reacting to a headline or screenshot of a tweet that purports to summarize a headline without actually reading TFA.

Yep, I used to get caught up in headlines and I’m sure I still read too much into them but if there is an outlandish comment/position/opinion in the title OR something that perfectly fits with my “world view” I make myself find the real quote/line which often just further erodes trust in reporting institutions.

You need to consider your source of course, but more often than not the more outlandish the claim the more likely it was misquoted or they had the wrong takeaway.

it can be more profund and still fuck up all the time!

And yes, the completely blind zealous worship by these parasite outlets is even worse than the absolutely uncritical copy-pasting of AI output that some people post on forums.

I had several moments in my life where i learned about a thing from its source of truth (documentation, source code, standards) and was infuriated that the common knowledge about it was just wrong. I can give a long list but that would derail the thread.

Fact is, common knowledge is extremely bad, for whatever reason. Stochastic language models are trained on common knowledge.

Ask ChatGPT what the "B" in the name for the DB-9 connector means. Or why the "/usr" directory is named that way. ChatGPT will reliably give the popular, but wrong answers.

Who are you to decide what style the author should use? It’s consistent, entertaining, and well-written. It’s on their personal blog. If an author can’t choose for themselves a writing style on their personal blog, where can they?

Or, to put it another way: “there is a time and place to demand dry technical writing and I don’t think, this reader went to the right place.”

> Who are you to decide what style the author should use?

Who am I to decide? Well, who are you to ask me who I am to decide? Should we keep going in circles, or would you prefer we actually discuss the point at hand?

Well, seriously, to be honest, I don't care much about what style the author should use. The author should write in their style on their personal blog as much as they want. I care about it appearing on the HN main page and me having to click it and then being unhappy about my dear HN community upvoting a mundane article of questionable quality to HN main page. Who am I to do so? Well, I am the reader!

If I can't even critique an article that I read here, then what are we all even doing here?

I liked the style of the author made it felt more personal albeit with so many citations it sounds a bit like trying too much to look intellectual.

But I don't know the author and I'd take this over a dry summary.

If you don't like this kind of writing, its ok, its going to go away eventually it seems, just hold tight!

I'd rather read this kind of writing all day instead of the AI generated garbage flooding the internet.

> "I closed my eyes and contemplated my life choices."

Specifically regarding this one, I think the implication was that the author was hoping that ChatGPT, having been alerted to its mistake, would correct the mistake, as a human developer would (subordinate, coworker whose code is being reviewed). "Contemplated my life choices" then implies that the author recognizes that it was their choice to ask ChatGPT and that they were foolish for holding that hope in their heart.

The style reminded me of BOFH or dailywtf, maybe that’s what they we’re aiming for? But I agree: ChatGPT adding some unnecessary aria labels is neither newsworthy nor unexpected

It didn't get some things wrong. It got it all wrong.

Maybe it did. But what's newsworthy about it? Is it really news that ChatGPT gets stuff wrong? If every person on this thread posts one article to HN describing how they asked a question to ChatGPT and it got it wrong, does that make this site better or worse?

This article is as newsworthy as a model card from OpenAI hyping their latest model as more "thoughtful" and "safer" and whatever other bogus criteria they claim to boost their valuation. This type of real-world experience reports offset the overblown hype and marketing surrounding these tools.

So, yes, they're very much needed and important, even if the conversations around it are repetitive. You're free to ignore them.

> OpenAI hyping their latest model as more "thoughtful" and "safer" and whatever other bogus criteria they claim to boost their valuation.

If this is true, it's a valid criticism. I hear you. I think it is downright thoughtless to mislead the layman into thinking LLMs can be "thoughtful" by anthropomorphizing them! To all companies that are doing this, seriously, stop dressing up a statistical token generator as if it's some kind of sentient philosopher.

To underline the point, it got it wrong in exactly the same way 95% of current frontend developers do.

I think it's a good reminder how perfectly mediocre current AI is. That doesn't make it useless though: I'm way below mediocre in several things I need to do on most weeks in my work, so in those areas AI can be a great help.

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