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Comment by hyhconito | Hacker News Reader

I know a guy who does this. He finds a problem, then tells ChatGPT about it. Then ChatGPT elaborates it into dross. He says look at the magical output, without reading it or bothering to understand it. Then posts it to the vendor. The vendor gets mislead and the original issue is never fixed. Then I have to start the process again from scratch after 2 weeks are wasted on it.

The root cause is that LLMs are a damage multiplier for fuckwits. It is literally an attractive hammer for the worst of humanity: laziness and incompetence.

I imagine that could be weaponised quite easily.

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> The root cause is that LLMs are a damage multiplier for fuckwits.

Reminds me of Eco's quote about giving the "village idiot" a megaphone. But, transposed to the age of AI.-

It's much worse than that. It's giving the village idiot something which turns their insane ramblings into something that is incredibly verbose and sounds credible but inherits both the original idiot's poor communication and the subtle ramblings of an electronic crackhead in it.

Bring back the days of "because it's got electrolytes" because I can easily ignore those ones.

To quote another frontpage article, it transforms the village idiot into a "Julius".

Oh shit I just read that and am utterly horrified because I've been through that and am going through it. I have instantly decided to optimise myself to retire as quickly as possible.

Don't worry, you're not alone. I'm in the same boat. :)

For others since it's about to fall off the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42494090

The culture is been driven by village idiots.

Since ...

... at least when villages were prevalent. Or, earlier ... :)

> I imagine that could be weaponised quite easily.

I've been dealing with a vexatious conartist that has been using chatgpt to dump thousands of pages of garbage on the courts and my legal team.

The plus side is that the output is exceptionally incompetent.

Goodness gracious. Are we getting to DDoJ? (Denial of Justice by AI?) ...

... getting to an "AI arms race" where the team with the better AI "wins" - if nothing else by virtue of merely being able to survive the slop and get to the actual material - and then, of course, argue.-

Flooding the court system with frivolous charges and mountains of irrelevant evidence is already a common tactic for stalling justice. Sometimes it's just to make the other side run out of money and give up. Sometimes it's an attempt to overwhelm the jury with BS so they can't be confident in their conclusion. And more recently, we've seen it used to delay a decision until they are elected and therefore immune.

> The plus side is that the output is exceptionally incompetent.

It won't be for long. This is reminiscent of the development of the first rifles, which often jammed or misfired, and weren't very accurate to a long range. Now look at weapons like a Barrett .50 cal sniper rifle -- that's what AI will look like in 10 years.

I keep hearing this but the current evidence, asymptotic progress and financials say otherwise.

I guess what you are saying would probably have been said by AI skeptics in the 70s, but LLMs provided a quantum leap. Yes, progress is often asymptotic and governed by diminishing returns, but discontinuous breakthrough must also be factored in.

Please tell me what quantum leap was provided by LLMs. Please inform me of any developments that made current LLMs possible.

I contend that there are none. Witness the actual transformer kernel technologies over the last 20 years and try to find a single new one.

Neural Networks? that's 90's technology. Scale is the only new factor I can think of.

This is an investor-dollar driven attempt to use brute-force to deliver "magical" results when the fundamental technology is being mis-represented to the general public, to CTOs, and even to Developers.

This is dishonest and will not end well.

Nailed it.

The biggest capability jump comes from semantic search. You can now search based on the content of a text rather than a literal character level match.

I am slowly coming 'round to the same conclusion: Word2Vec might be as fundamental as fire - all due caveats aside, of course ...

Technological advances tend to happen in jumps. We are no doubt approaching a local optima right now, but it won't be long until another major advancement propels things forward again. We've seen the same pattern in ML for decades.

Please name me one technological advance of major import in the fundamental transformer kernel space that has occurred in the last decade that has any import at all on today's LLMs.

I will wait.

The very idea of the Transformer architecture. Surely you've heard of "Attention is all you need".

Ah, yes, AI jam tomorrow.

(Though, perhaps an unusually pessimistic example of the “real soon now, it’ll be usable, we promise” phenomenon; rifles took about 250 years to go from ‘curiosity’ to ‘somewhat useful’).

it is unlikely that the output of LLMs will improve. there is no fundamental breakthrough in transformer technology (or anything else) powering todays' LLM "revolution"

There is only scale being employed like never before => vast datasets being plowed through being sufficient to provide the current illusion for the less observant humans out there...

10 years from now this current fad of LLM's pretending to be intelligent will look preposterous and unbelievable: "how COULD they all have fallen for such hype, and what a cost of joules/computation... the least deterministic means possible of coming to any result... just wasteful for no purpose..."

On the other hand, firearms were invented in the 10th century, and I don't think we got reliable cartridges until mid 1800's.

All that time the bow and arrow were long-range, accurate, quiet and worked in the rain. :)

[But yeah, you're right - in our lifetimes technologies have changed immensely.]

And the judge hasn't sanctioned said conartist yet?

He was just awarded a prison sentence, but it's suspended for two years on the condition that he doesn't bring any more of these cases. He's left the jurisdiction and has been hopping around extradition havens, so an arrest order would just have the effect of ending the court's ability to influence him.

He's already announced that he's going to attempt to appeal. I expect that similar to his recently rejected appeal he'll file another few thousand pages of chatgpt hallucinations in this one.

My wife has a coworker like this.

Except I stead of bug reports, he just gets some crap code written and sends it to her assuming it can be dropped in and ran. (It is often wrong)

But _why_? What’s his motivation for doing this, vs just writing a proper report?

Well said!

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