The amount of times I've seen a question answered by "I asked chatgpt and blah blah blah" and the answer being completely bullshit makes me wonder who thinks asking the bullshit machine™ questions with a concrete answer is a good idea
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This is your reminder that LLMs are associative models. They produce things that look like other things. If you ask a question, it will produce something that looks like the right answer. It might even BE the right answer, but LLMs care only about looks, not facts.
A lot of people really hate uncertainty and just want an answer. They do not care much if the answer is right or not. Being certain is more important than being correct.
I feel like it's an unpopular take but people are like "I used chat gpt to write this email!" and I'm like you should be able to write email.
I think a lot of people are too excited to neglect core skills and let them atrophy. You should know how to communicate. It's a skill that needs practice.
This is a reality as most people will abandon those skills, and many more will never learn them to begin with. I'm actually very worried about children who will grow up learning to communicate with AI and being dependent on it to effectively communicate with people and navigate the world, potentially needing AI as a communication assistant/translator.
AI is patient, always available, predicts desires and effectively assumes intent. If I type a sentence with spelling mistakes, chatgpt knows what I meant 99% of the time. This will mean children don't need to spell or structure sentences correctly to effectively communicate with AI, which means they don't need to think in a way other human being can understand, as long as an AI does. The more time kids spend with AI, the less developed their communication skills will be with people. GenZ and GenA already exhibit these issues without AI. Most people go experience this communicating across generations, as language and culture context changes. This will emphasize those differences to a problematic degree.
Kids will learn to communicate will people and with AI, but those two styles with be radically different. AI communication will be lazy, saying only enough for AI to understand. With communication history, which is inevitable tbh, and AI improving every day, it can develop a unique communication style for each child, what's amounts to a personal language only the child and AI can understand. AI may learn to understand a child better than their parents do and make the child dependent on AI to effectively communicate, creating a corporate filter of communication between human being. The implications of this kind of dependency are terrifying. Your own kid talks to you through an AI translator, their teachers, friends, all their relationships could be impacted.
I have absolutely zero beleif that the private interests of these technology owners will benefit anyone other than themselves and at the expense of human freedom.
I know someone who very likely had ChatGPT write an apology for them once. Blew my mind.
I use it to communicate with my landlord sometimes. I can tell ChatGPT all the explicit shit exactly as I mean it and it'll shower it and comb it all nice and pretty for me. It's not an apology, but I guess my point is that some people deserve it.
You don’t think being able to communicate properly and control your language, even/especially for people you don’t like, is a skill you should probably have? It’s not that much more effort.
I can and I do, but I don't think he's worth the effort specifically. Lol
Why waste the brain power when the option exists not to?
Because brains literally need exercise, and conversations with other real humans are the best kind it can get, so you're literally speedrunning an increased potential of dementia and alzheimers with every fake email.
Maybe not Chat GPT specifically, but you can hardly use the internet without some AI being pushed on you.
There's a difference between passively using something and actively using something.
I use electricity every day, but I have no idea how it's generated. I (assume I) use RSA256, but if you ask me to explain block cypher encryption to you I'd just go "well you take a number and another number and....... hope they have sex to produce a bigger number?"
I use a lot of stuff without having to know how it works and having to choose to use it.
Not understanding how to use new technology, even flawed ones, isn't a flex
I understand LLMs well enough that I really don't want to use them because they are inherently incapable of judging the validity of information they are passing along.
Sometimes it's wrong. Sometimes it's right. But they don't tell you when they're wrong, and to find out if they were wrong, you now have to do the research you were trying to avoid in the first place.
I tried programming with it once, because a friend insisted it was good. But it wasn't, and it was extremly confidend, while being exceptionally wrong.
Congrats, then don't use it to validate information.
LLMs are incredible text generators. But if you are going to judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, then you are never going to find its potential.
Yes, there are tons of bogus AI implementations. But that doesn't say anything about the validity of the technology. Look at what VLC is doing with it for example.
It is pretty clear by those statements that you understand LLMs less than what you claim.
Yeah thats called ignorance and we shouldn't be celebrating it.
Wait, people actually try to use gpt for regular everyday shit?
I do lorebuilding shit (in which gpt's "hallucinations" are a feature not a bug), or I'll just ramble at it while drunk off my ass about whatever my autistic brain is hyperfixated on. I've given up on trying to do coding projects, because gpt is even worse at it than I am.
They absolutely do. Some people basically use it instead of Google or whatever. Shopping lists, vacation planning, gift lists, cooking recipes, just about everything.
It's great at it, because it'll bother trawling webpages for all that stuff that you can't be bothered to spend hours doing. The internet is really soo shitified that it's easier to use a computer to do this.
I hate that it is so. It's a complete waste of ressources, but I understand it.
It's a waste of your resources to close popups, set cookie preferences and read five full screens about grandma's farm before getting to the point: "Preheat the oven to 200°c and heat the pizza for 15 minutes.", when ChatGPT could've presented it right away without any ads.
Brought to you by chrome being the biggest browser and it willfully enshittifying adblockers, which incidentally made searching way more tedious and funneled people to LLMs.
I have encountered some people who use it as a substitute for thinking. To the extent that it's rather unnerving.
Spent this morning reading a thread where someone was following chatGPT instructions to install "Linux" and couldn't understand why it was failing.
Hmm, I find chatGPT is pretty decent at very basic techsupport asked with the correct jargon. Like "How do I add a custom string to cell formatting in excel".
It absolutely sucks for anything specific, or asked with the wrong jargon.
Good for you buddy.
Edit: sorry that was harsh. I'm just dealing with "every comment is a contrarian comment" day.
Sure, GPT is good at basic search functionality for obvious things, but why choose that when there are infinitely better and more reliable sources of information?
There's a false sense of security couple to a notion of "asking" an entity.
Why not engage in a community that can support answers? I've found the Linux community (in general) to be really supportive and asking questions is one way of becoming part of that community.
The forums of the older internet were great at this... Creating community out of commonality. Plus, they were largely self correcting I'm a way in which LLMs are not.
So not only are folk being fed gibberish, it is robbing them of the potential to connect with similar humans.
And sure, it works for some cases, but they seem to be suboptimal, infrequent or very basic.
It's so strange seeing people being proud that they can't keep up with the technologies.
Yeah, that's just judgemental and presumptive.
I have quite a lot of shit in my life, and I have actively decided to pay no attention to AI. Not because "I can't keep up with it" but because after some research into it I decided "it was bullshit and nonsense and not something I need to know about"
I used to know a guy like that. He would say stuff like "I didn't even know how to use a computer mouse!" It definitely sounded like he was bragging. Such a weird thing to be proud of.
I don't get how so many people carry their computer illiteracy as a badge of honor.
Chatgpt is useful.
Is it as useful as Tech Evangelists praise it to be? No. Not yet - and perhaps never will be.
But I sure do love to let it write my mails to people who I don't care for, but who I don't want to anger by sending my default 3 word replies.
It's a tool to save time. Use it or pay with your time if you willfully ignore it.
Tech illiteracy. Strong words.
I'm a sysadmin at the IT faculty of a university. I have a front row seat to witness the pervasive mental decline that is the result of chatbots. I have remote access to all lab computers. I see students copy-paste the exercise questions into a chatbot and the output back. Some are unwilling to write a single line of code by themselves. One of the network/cybersecurity teachers is a friend, he's seen attendance drop to half when he revealed he'd block access to chatbots during exams. Even the dean, who was elected because of his progressive views on machine learning, laments new students' unwillingness to learn. It's actual tech illiteracy.
I've sworn off all things AI because I strongly believe that its current state is a detriment to society at large. If a person, especially a kid, is not forced to learn and think, and is allowed to defer to the output of a black box of bias and bad data, it will damage them irreversibly. I will learn every skill that I need, without depending on AI. If you think that makes me an old man yelling at clouds, I have no kind words in response.
x 1000. Between the time I started and finished grad school, Chat GPT had just come out. The difference in students I TA'd at the beginning and end of my career is mind melting. Some of this has to do with COVID losses, though.
But we shouldn't just call out the students. There are professors who are writing fucking grants and papers with it. Can it be done well? Yes. But the number of games talking about Vegetative Electron Microscopy, or introductions whose first sentence reads "As a language model, I do not have opinions about the history of particle models," or completely non sensical graphics generated by spicy photoshop, is baffling.
Some days it held like LLMs are going to burn down the world. I have a hard time being optimistic about them, but even the ancient Greeks complained about writing. It just feels different this time, ya know?
ETA: Just as much of the onus is on grant reviewers and journal editors for uncritically accepting slop into their publications and awarding money to poorly written grants.
Speaking of being old, just like there are noticeable differences between people growing up before or after ready internet access. I think there will be a similar divide between people who did their learning before or after llms.
Even if you don't use them directly, there's so much more useless slop than there used to be online. I'll make it five minutes into a how-to article before realizing it doesn't actually make any sense when you look at the whole thing, let alone have anything interesting or useful to say.
If a person, especially a kid, is not forced to learn and think, and is allowed to defer to the output of a black box of bias and bad data, it will damage them irreversibly.
I grew up, mostly, in the time of digital search, but far enough back that they still resembled the old card-catalog system. Looking for information was a process that you had to follow, and the mere act of doing that process was educational and helped order your thoughts and memory. When it's physically impossible to look for two keywords at the same time, you need to use your brain or you won't get an answer.
And while it's absolutely amazing that I can now just type in a random question and get an answer, or at least a link to some place that might have the answer, this is a real problem in how people learn to mentally process information.
A true expert can explain things in simple terms, not because they learned them in simple terms or think about them in simple terms, but because they have to ability to rephrase and reorder information on the fly to fit into a simplified model of the complex system they have in their mind. That's an extremely important skill, and it's getting more and more rare.
If you want to test this, ask people for an analogy. If you can't make an analogy, you don't truly understand the subject (or the subject involves subatomic particles, relativity or topology and using words to talk about it is already basically an analogy)
Oh hey it's me! I like using my brain, I like using my own words, I can't imagine wanting to outsource that stuff to a machine.
Meanwhile, I have a friend who's skeptical about the practical uses of LLMs, but who insists that they're "good for porn." I can't help but see modern AI as a massive waste of electricity and water, furthering the destruction of the climate with every use. I don't even like it being a default on search engines, so the idea of using it just to regularly masturbate feels ... extremely selfish. I can see trying it as a novelty, but for a regular occurence? It's an incredibly wasteful use of resources just so your dick can feel nice for a few minutes.
I've tried a few GenAI things, and didn't find them to be any different than CleverBot back in the day. A bit better at generating a response that seems normal, but asking it serious questions always generated questionably accurate responses.
If you just had a discussion with it about what your favorite super hero is, it might sound like an actual average person (including any and all errors about the subject it might spew), but if you try to use it as a knowledge base, it's going to be bad because it is not intelligent. It does not think. And it's not trained well enough to only give 100% factual answers, even if it only had 100% factual data entered into it to train on. It can mix two different subjects together and create an entirely new, bogus response.