This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I gotta say, I feel like my earlier posts on AI in general and GPT in particular have been aging pretty-well.
It's too premature to conclude that. No one is expecting it to be perfect, and future iterations likely improve on it. It reminds me of those headlines from 2013-2014 about Tesla accidents, or in 2010-2012 about problems with Uber accidents or deregulation. Any large company that is the hot, trendy thing will get considerable media scrutiny, especially when it errors. Likewise, any technology that is a success can easily overcome short-term problems. AOL in the early 90s was plagued by outages, for example.
But I think Open AI risks becoming like Wolfram Alpha -- a program/app with a lot of hype and promise initially, but then slowly abandoned and degraded, with much of functionality behind a paywall.
Have either of those companies really improved on the errors in question, though? Like Tesla Autopilot is better than it was but it's hardly like it's made gigantic leaps and Uber is still a weird legal arbitrage more than a reinvention of travel.
More options
Context Copy link
No it's not. The scenario that you, Freepingcreature, and others insisted would never happen and/or be trivially easy to avoid, has now happened.
What this tells me is that my model of GPT's behavior was more much more accurate than yours.
It’s trivial to attach LLMs to a database of known information (eg. Wikipedia combined with case law data, government data, Google books’ library, whatever) and have them ‘verify’ factual claims. The lawyers in this case could have asked ChatGPT if it made up what it just said and there’s a 99% chance it would have replied “I’m sorry, it appears I can find no evidence of those cases” even without access to that data. GPT-4 already hallucinates less. As Dase said, it is literally just a matter of attaching retrieval and search capability to the model to mimic our own discrete memory pool, which LLMs by themselves do not possess.
People latching onto this with the notion that it “proves” LLMs aren’t that smart are like an artisan weaver pointing to a fault with an early version of the Spinning Jenny or whatever and claiming that it proves the technology is garbage and will never work. We already know how to solve these errors.
Saw on twitter that the lawyer did ask ChatGPT if it was made up and it said it was real
None of those prompts ask explicitly if the previous output was fictional, which is what generally triggers a higher-quality evaluation.
If these sorts of issues really are as trivially easy to fix as you claim, why haven't they been fixed?
One the core points of my post on the Minsky Paradox was that a lot of the issues that those who are "bullish" on GPT have been dismissing as easy to fix and/or irrelevant really aren't, and I feel like we are currently watching that claim be borne out.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link