‘i am a stochastic parrot and so are u’
reminds me of
“In his desperation to have produced reality through computation, he denigrates actual reality by equating it to computation”
(from this review/analysis of the devs series). A pattern annoying common among the LLM AI fans.
E: Wow, I did not like the reactionary great man theory spin this article took there. Don’t think replacing the Altmans with Yarvins would be a big solution there. (At least that is how the NRx people would read this article). Quite a lot of the ‘we need more well read renaissance men’ people turned into hardcore trump supporters (and racists, and sexists and…). (Note this edit is after I already got 45 upvotes).
First and foremost, the dunce is incapable of valuing knowledge that they don’t personally understand or agree with. If they don’t know something, then that thing clearly isn’t worth knowing.
There is a corollary to this that I’ve seen as well, and it dovetails with the way so many of these guys get obsessed with IQ. Anything they can’t immediately understand must be nonsense not worth knowing. Anything they can understand (or think they understand) that you don’t is clearly an arcane secret of the universe that they can only grasp because of their innate superiority. I think that this is the combination that explains how so many of these dunces believe themselves to be the ubermensch who must exercise authoritarian power over the rest of us for the good of everyone.
See also the commenter(s) on this thread who insist that their lack of reading comprehension is evidence that they’re clearly correct and are in no way part of the problem.
in response to Bender pointing out that ChatGPT and its competitors simply encode relationships between words and have no concept of referent or meaning, which is a devastating critique of what the technology actually does, the absolute best response he can muster for his work is “yeah, but humans don’t do anything more complicated than that”. I mean, speak for yourself Sam: the rest of us have some concept of semiotics, and we can do things like identify anagrams or count the number of letters in a word, which requires a level of recursivity that’s beyond what ChatGPT can muster.
Boom Shanka (emphasis added)
What is up wit h the design of this website. There’s huge amounts of dead space.
The content though… it just reads like somebody who’s pretty angry. I do like the odd rant here and there, but this one misses the mark. “I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again” was much more to my liking (despite the damn 3 column design).
sorry you don’t like anger! we’ll improve your lemmyverse experience
Perhaps because I paused to read a little of the Dunciad before continuing with this essay, I think many of its attacks lack the precision and wit to justify their viciousness. I’m generally sympathetic to the premise, but whatever its merits it does not compare all that well with Alexander Pope. Maybe there is more insight and entertainment yet to be derived from comparing ChatGPT itself to Dulness.
profound reasoning indeed, this way to the egress so you can contemplate further
After all, there’s almost nothing that ChatGPT is actually useful for.
It’s takes like this that just discredit the rest of the text.
You can dislike LLM AI for its environmental impact or questionable interpretation of fair use when it comes to intellectual property. But pretending it’s actually useless just makes someone seem like they aren’t dissimilar to a Drama YouTuber jumping in on whatever the latest on-trend thing to hate is.
actually you know what? with all the motte and baileying, you can take a month off. bye!
Petition to replace “motte and bailey” per the Batman clause with “lying like a dipshit”.
Isn’t this a case of ‘the good bits are not original and the original bits are not good’. According to wikipedia it is from 2005.
various forms of equivocation
I don’t see what useful information the motte and bailey lingo actually conveys that equivocation and deception and bait-and-switch didn’t. And I distrust any turn of phrase popularized in the LessWrong-o-sphere. If they like it, what bad mental habits does it appeal to?
The original coiner appears to be in with the brain-freezing crowd. He’s written about the game theory of “braving the woke mob” for a Tory rag.
“Almost nothing” is not the same as “actually useless”. The former is saying the applications are limited, which is true.
LLMs are fine for fictional interactions, as in things that appear to be real but aren’t. They suck at anything that involves being reliably factual, which is most things including all the stupid places LLMs and other AI are being jammed in to despite being consistely wrong, which tech bros love to call hallucinations.
They have LIMITED applications, but are being implemented as useful for everything.
To be honest, as someone who’s very interested in computer generated text and poetry and the like, I find generic LLMs far less interesting than more traditional markov chains because they’re too good at reproducing clichés at the exclusion of anything surprising or whimsical. So I don’t think they’re very good for the unfactual either. Probably a homegrown neural network would have better results.
I’m in the same boat. Markov chains are a lot of fun, but LLMs are way too formulaic. It’s one of those things where AI bros will go, “Look, it’s so good at poetry!!” but they have no taste and can’t even tell that it sucks; LLMs just generate ABAB poems and getting anything else is like pulling teeth. It’s a little more garbled and broken, but the output from a MCG is a lot more interesting in my experience. Interesting content that’s a little rough around the edges always wins over smooth, featureless AI slop in my book.
slight tangent: I was interested in seeing how they’d work for open-ended text adventures a few years ago (back around GPT2 and when AI Dungeon was launched), but the mystique did not last very long. Their output is awfully formulaic, and that has not changed at all in the years since. (of course, the tech optimist-goodthink way of thinking about this is “small LLMs are really good at creative writing for their size!”)
I don’t think most people can even tell the difference between a lot of these models. There was a snake oil LLM (more snake oil than usual) called Reflection 70b, and people could not tell it was a placebo. They thought it was higher quality and invented reasons why that had to be true.
Like other comments, I was also initially surprised. But I think the gains are both real and easy to understand where the improvements are coming from. [ . . . ]
I had a similar idea, interesting to see that it actually works. [ . . . ]
I think that’s cool, if you use a regular system prompt it behaves like regular llama-70b. (??!!!)
It’s the first time I’ve used a local model and did [not] just say wow this is neat, or that was impressive, but rather, wow, this is finally good enough for business settings (at least for my needs). I’m very excited to keep pushing on it. Llama 3.1 failed miserably, as did any other model I tried.
For story telling or creative writing, I would rather have the more interesting broken english output of a Markov chain generator, or maybe a tarot deck or D100 table. Markov chains are also genuinely great for random name generators. I’ve actually laughed at Markov chains before with friends when we throw a group chat into one and see what comes out. I can’t imagine ever getting something like that from an LLM.
GPT-2 was peak LLM because it was bad enough to be interesting, it was all downhill from there
Absolutely, every single one of these tools has got less interesting as they refine it so it can only output the platonic ideal of kitsch.
Let’s be real here: when people hear the word AI or LLM they don’t think of any of the applications of ML that you might slap the label “potentially useful” on (notwithstanding the fact that many of them also are in a all-that-glitters-is-not-gold–kinda situation). The first thing that comes to mind for almost everyone is shitty autoplag like ChatGPT which is also what the author explicitly mentions.
I’m saying ChatGPT is not useless.
I’m a senior software engineer and I make use of it several times a week either directly or via things built on top of it. Yes you can’t trust it will be perfect, but I can’t trust a junior engineer to be perfect either—code review is something I’ve done long before AI and will continue to do long into the future.
I empirically work quicker with it than without and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower. If it was useless this would not be the case.
I’m a senior software engineer
ah, a señor software engineer. excusé-moi monsoir, let me back up and try once more to respect your opinion
uh, wait:
but I can’t trust a junior engineer to be perfect either
whoops no, sorry, can’t do it.
jesus fuck I hope the poor bastards that are under you find some other place real soon, you sound like a godawful leader
and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower
yep yep! as we all know, velocity is all that matters! crank that handle, produce those features! the factory must flow!!
fucking christ almighty. step away from the keyboard. go become a logger instead. your opinions (and/or the shit you’re saying) is a big part of everything that’s wrong with industry.
