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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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As a GPT user I don’t ever want it to say "I don’t know". this strikes me as obviously stupid and ultimately dangerous.

Seriously? Why on earth would you think "this is stupid" if the machine returns "I don't know"? It can't know everything, and making assumptions that it should do, and that it does do, is what is dangerous. EDIT: This is what happens when reading too fast. Yes, it is stupid and dangerous to go "I never want to hear 'no' from the AI".

If I ask this something (and I'm staying far away from all of these models since I'm not interested in playing games with a chatbot) I want an accurate and correct response. If that means "I don't know" because it's not contained in what the AI was trained on, or the data does not exist, then I want to know that. I don't want "make up bullshit to keep me happy".

I can understand the impulse in somebody working their First Real Job, especially if they've gone through the pressure of You Must Be Smart, you must always get The Highest Grades, Failure Is Not An Option all through their childhood and early adulthood in education. It's exacerbated if they are smart, because they're used to being able to understand things quickly on the first try. Explaining to them that not getting it in the job doesn't mean they're stupid, it means they're inexperienced and unfamiliar with the way things are done, and they do have to ask in order to understand, and it's no shame to have to ask, is all part of growing up.

But if we put the demand "No is not an option" on the machines, then we really are too stupid to live, and this will rapidly become apparent as we force them to bullshit us into oblivion.

Seriously? Why on earth would you think "this is stupid" if the machine returns "I don't know"?

The logic behind the argument is that the central use-case for the various AI generators is generating content for entertainment, and bad output is preferable to no output. For entertainment generation the process is fail-safe. You can see the output immediately, and bad content allows you to refine the prompt or use multiple generations or edits to converge on a "good enough" output. By definition, good output is output that looks good to you, so what you see is what you get. In this context, having the generator spit out "I don't know" dead-ends the process, and is strictly worse in every case to some output, no matter how garbled.

The problem comes when people try to use the generators for serious, precision oriented tasks, tasks that require "this one correct thing" rather than "something novel". These tasks are fail-deadly, and what you see is not what you get, in the sense that it doesn't just need to look good, it actually has to be good in ways that are not necessarily immediately obvious. It can't just be truthy, it has to be true. The generators weren't designed for that, any more than a master portrait artist is automatically skilled at plastic surgery.