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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16082 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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That's a bizarre question. It's well known that computers can do some things better than humans. Exactly what kind of conclusion do you draw from "computers can create garbage SPICE code and most humans can't", that you can't draw from "computers can add two fifty digit numbers and most humans can't" or "computers can spellcheck a 200 page document and most humans can't"?

Speak plainly.

I think I'm speaking pretty plainly. I'm asking OP to consider how ChatGPT performs in relation to an average human. This is a pretty common question people consider when talking about AI performance. After all, the Turing Test is one of the oldest and best-known tests of computer intelligence.

I am asking OP to consider these questions as a way of pushing back against statements like the following:

Seeing it underperform so much in my field is giving me a sort of Gellmann Amnesia effect for people touting how it can write code on its own.

"Underperform" is an interesting choice of words here, because it seems that the bar for performance is being set at "subject matter expert." Obviously ChatGPT is not at that level. To paraphrase Arnold Kling on the most recent EconTalk episode, "it's about at the level of an undergrad BS artist who didn't study for the test." But consider how much training and skill it takes a human to reach the level of "undergrad BS artist" and how few humans are able to attain even that level of performance. I think OP should be more impressed with how far we've come. We don't need to go a whole lot further to close the gap between "undergrad BS artist" and "skilled electrical engineer." The former often becomes the latter with just a few years of additional education.

I'm asking OP to consider how ChatGPT performs in relation to an average human.

But, assuming that the answer is that ChatGPT performs better than an average human, what conclusion do you mean to draw from that? You haven't stated anything. And computers have been able to perform particular tasks better than an average human for a long time.

That's like saying "computers can add numbers better than humans, so why doesn't the computer know that I want to add some numbers with my broken code?" There is no inherent strength in computers such that any program ran on a computer gains the ability to add numbers well. In other words, yes, computers can add numbers - but ChatGPT is not a computer, ChatGPT is a giant system of matrix multiplications and nonlinear transforms that happens to run on a computer. It would have exactly the same capabilities if a team of trillions of clerks evaluated it on paper. The ability of computers to add large numbers is not anywhere exposed to GPT as a reasoning system so that it could make use of it.

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