abrax3141

Ha ha -- fun!

I'm embarrassed to say that I actually wrote that ELIZA ... in 1973, when I was ~13! It's a very poor BASIC knockoff of JW's 1966 ELIZA/DOCTOR. Having it talk to Bernie Cosell's Lisp ELIZA, or even better, Anthony Hay's C++ ELIZA, would be a better experiment.

See http://elizagen.org for more detail

Does someone have a link to the appeals court response to her pleading?

10 humans ranging from 13 to 70 had no trouble at all understanding it.

I’m convinced that OpenAI is actually a conputer game company and what they have discovered is actually a computer game for people who don’t like video games.

That’s almost, but not quite true. Or, perhaps, true but too vague. There is a certain amount of inference built into fluent language usage. And the statement, as well as where it, itself goes, contextualizes where it goes next. Those two taken together enable it to do a surprising amount of simple yet powerful inference.

It’s the average personality of the internet as revealed by text continuation statistics, and tuned by human-guided gan. Nothing more.

Look like it was real! (In subsequent probing it appears to have been fixed.)

Yeah, seems a little too good (in the sense of "good" that means "bad") to be real. Although faking something like this seems like a good way to get sued by MS.

Gary Marcus is sort of a troll, but I'm glad that someone is taking on this nonsense in a formal setting. I think that most sensible people treat it as an amusing curiosity, but it's popping up in unfortunate settings, like student essay and, of all places, peer reviews! There are some sensible uses, for example, code boiler plate, or, for that matter, more-or-less any boiler plate. And the amusing uses, like poetry, are...amusing. And at least it's not self-driving people into walls! But the concerns raised in this essay are mostly cogent, and not, by any means, the only concerns as I'm sure that the creativity of bad actors will flourish!

Meh. iPhones worked.

I agree that the companies themselves might be loathe to participate, except that they have published public academic papers, and are therefore publicly responsible at least for the content of those papers. But I had in mind more of an external expert panel of folks who haven't been directly involved, like academic NLP experts, maybe philosophers/sociologists of technology?

Oh, and of course Weizenbaum, who warned us of falling prey to trusting AIs that talk a good game. There's no better real-world example of this than The-Hack-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named.

It’s actually amazing how prescient folks like Kubrick (or maybe it was Minsky) and Turing were. Turing basically predicted that we would teach AIs rather than program them. (He likened it to teaching a child.) And Dave Bowman doesn’t just switch HAL off, in that incredible scene where he’s pulling HAL’s memory banks. Instead, we watch HAL gracefully degrading.

Fair enough!

More like 5.5 decades (2023-1968)

Okay, so holy f'ing s#!t!

Out of curiosity, I today asked it to program the ELIZA in MAD-SLIP, the original (and now completely dead and obscure) language that ELIZA was originally written in. My expectation was that it would have no idea what MAD-SLIP is, or maybe would barely have an idea, and in any case would have no chance of doing what I asked and that it would, very reasonably, balk.

Instead, to my shock it made up a completely bogus meaning for the acronym: "Matched Activated Decomposition by Syntactic and Lexical Interchange Program", and actually wrote an ELIZA in this non-existing language, which was in reality just Python code using the rexexp (re) package, and was perfectly fine as far as it went.

Even scarier than confabulating a non-exisistent programming language, it confabulated a citation for it, claiming that it is described in Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason, which is utterly false!

Sigh. I fear that ChatGPT is merely bringing Weizenbaum's worst fears into reality! A seemingly authoritative AI that simply makes s#!t up! I'm feeling a bit like taking up arms at the moment.

BTW, I don’t understand what the value is of making it create tests. It doesn’t actually run them. In fact, although I didn’t ask for them, it did create tests in some cases, but the code it wrote didn’t actually pass the tests!

I’ve thought about this - quite a bit, in fact, and have come to the belief that one can separately respect and honor a person’s contributions. Both JW’s antipathy toward AI, and ELIZA itself, are significant contributions. Just because he rejected ELIZA (which, BTW, I do not think is the way to think of his relationship to it, but that’s a longer story for another time) does not make ELIZA’s influence and historical value vanish.

BTW, in case you missed it:

    https://corecursive.com/eliza-with-jeff-shrager/

(Does it count as shameless self-promotion if I'm actually promoting someone else's highly relevant podcast that just happened to have me in it?)

You have to try to put yourself in a world where most computers were room-sized,a and there wasn't even anything smaller than what used to be called a "mini-computer" -- more-or-less a very large tower -- and no individual had one of their own. This was also 3 years before 2001's HAL 9000, so even before the idea of even talking to a computer was anywhere near the public consciousness. In that context, it's not too surprising that people had trouble understanding what they were talking to. OTOH, it's not actually entirely clear that JW's interpretation of what was going on in these folks' mind is correct. I mean, we rubber duck all the time...sometimes to a literal rubber duck (although usually in that case just to be funny)...so telling this inanimate thing your deepest secrets might be just a way to get them off your chest. We don't know, but my point is that it's hard to try to think about what someone in 1960 might have thought when asking to talk to a computer that was asking them seemingly intimate questions.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious but why can't we just write in MarkDown?

Actually, I did do a version of this. Note that in the posted code there's a weird comment that says: "...that includes the remainder of the input, with personal pronouns conjugated correctly", but the code actually does not do this at all. It seems to have mis-interpreted this as the pronouns in the sentence, as opposed to the pronouns in the part of the user's input. I even tried to give it examples, and it was always polite, but never got what I meant. Because you can't really have the sort of close-quarters interaction you can have with a student or co-programmer, you spend a lot of time trying to query-hack. I could have literally written what I wanted way faster than it took to fail to get it to understand what I wanted. (Which i never did.)

BTW, in the long dialog that I had with it, ChatGPT created many different versions of this code with varying degrees of matching my spec. Every version sort of matched my spec, but at the same time each and every one of them was broken in various random ways. None actually worked out of the box. As with all of these grammatical confabulation engines, they fall headlong into the uncanny valley, looking sort of like a program, but when there's a right and wrong, they tend to end up on the wrong side.

McCarthy credits FLPL as well. http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf

This is an amazing "missing link" between IPL and Lisp. Note McCarty's involvement (p. 88), and the incredibly lisp-like function names and functional expression syntax (p. 94++)

But if you use a gdoc you can access it from anywhere (incl offline) and it’s always up to date a version controlled. For me that’s enough additional value to be worth a bit of a speed hit.

I don't think that this is true, except perhaps indirectly. According to Duncan McGreggor's wonderful (and very well researched) "Hidden History of Lisp"

https://blog.lfe.io/excerpts/2015/03/27/1101-the-hidden-orig...

McCarthy was interested in computer intelligence, logic, and mathematics. Shaw, Newell, and Simon, at RAND and CIT, were already working on exactly these topics in their Logic Theorist project, using IPL, an ugly language that they designed, and ran on one the first digital computers, called JOHNNIAC - after John Von Neumann.

I you are interested in just how ugly IPL(V) was, you can see more of it than you'll ever want to here:

https://exhibits.stanford.edu/feigenbaum/catalog/ff363pt6522

Ugly as it may have been, IPL language did exactly what McCarthy wanted, and introduced the concepts of list processing, symbols, and recursion. But, a bit to your point, it's ugliness, being akin to assembly, was exceedingly off-putting.

A couple years later, at MIT, McCarthy (who was simultaneously and coincidentally playing around with lambda calculus) and his students (most centrally, Steve Russell) figured out how to do list processing etc in a much simpler syntax.

Still, the "modern" homoiconic Lisp of s-expressions was a bit farther down the line, as it was originally conceived with M-expressions, which were a bit more algol-like. S-expressions were initially just the data representation. Russell realized that the s-expression syntax could be used for both.

Thus the birth of Lisp, probably the world's most influential and enduring programming language. Sorry, this got a bit off topic.

I’m sorry. I was not trying to insinuate that you are an idiot. I was trying (and failing) to be funny.

Is your hypothesis that the OP has already forgotten more than you ever knew, or that they are too young to know much? Regardless, I can tell you that the OP has worked on (meaning deep in the guts of the OS, but not for the 'manufacturer'), a dozen OSs that they can recall off the top of their head. They were written in one of several different BAL-like assemblers and assembler macro languages, MACRO-10, PDP8, 11, and VAX assemblers, two different Lisps, several 68* assemblers, and C. So, probably the former interpretation is more likely correct.

Sorry. I meant “eloquent”. But thank you!