Oops! We Automated Bullshit. | Department of Computer Science and Technology
Oops! We Automated Bullshit. | Department of Computer Science and Technology
ChatGPT is a bullshit generator. To understand AI, we should think harder about bullshit
I really liked this article. If you know how AI works, it's tempting to call what it does "lying", but I like "bullshit" as a distinct concept for describing being totally indifferent to facts. And it's interesting that 30% of people in the UK view themselves as having a "bullshit" job, one where they don't think they contribute anything of value to society. You can totally see why language models would be appealing to so many people.
63confabulating
I think this is a better term for it
Edit: ChatGPT == Trump[consummate bullshitter]? I feel like its "intentions" or "programming" are slightly above that but maybe not...
Edit: its interesting how a program can be written that basically replicates Trump's speech patterns in a replicable and recognizeable way. Where did Trump derive his speech pattern? Like, I know he reads Hitler speeches on his nightstand but is it only Hitler that informs his parole (individual speech patterns)?
8I like hallucinations much more.
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It's interesting to me how many people I've argued with about LLMs. They vehemently insist that this is a world changing technology and the start of the singularity.
Meanwhile whenever I attempt to use one professionally it has to be babied and tightly scoped down or else it goes way off the rails.
And structurally LLMs seem like they'll always be vulnerable to that. They're only useful because they bullshit but that also makes them impossible to rely on for anything else.
53I've been using LLMs pretty extensively in a professional capacity and with the proper grounding work it becomes very useful and reliable.
LLMs on their own is not the world changing tech, LLMs+grounding (what is now being called a Cognitive Architecture), that's the world changing tech. So while LLMs can be vulnerable to bullshitting, there is a lot of work around them that can qualitatively change their performance.
20They are useful when you need to generate quasi meaningful bullshit in large volumes easily.
LLMs are being used in medicine now, not to help with diagnosis or correlate seemingly unrelated health data, but to write responses to complaint letters or generate reflective portfolio entries for appraisal.
Don't get me wrong, outsourcing the bullshit and waffle in medicine is still a win, it frees up time and energy for the highly trained organic general intelligences to do what they do best. I just don't think it's the exact outcome the industry expected.
18I think it's the outcome anyone really familiar with the tech expected, but that rarely translates to marketing departments and c-suite types.
I did an LLM project in school, and while that was a limited introduction, it was enough for me to doubt most of the claims coming from LLM orgs. An LLM is good at matching its corpus and that's about it. So it'll work well for things like summaries, routine text generation, and similar tasks (and it's surprisingly good at forming believable text), but it'll always disappoint with creative work.
I'm sure the tech can do quite a bit more than my class went through, but the limitations here are quite fundamental to the tech.
9That's kinda the point of my above comment: they're useful for bullshit: that's why they'll never be trustworthy
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I use chatgpt to make up stuff, imagine things that don't exist for fun - like a 'pitch' for the next new Star Trek series, or to reword my much too succinct prose for a manual for a program I am writing ('Calcula' in gitlab) or ideas for a new kind of restaurant (The chef teaches you how to cook the meal you are about to eat) - but never have it code or ask it about facts, it makes them up just as easily as the stuff I just described.
9A great use for the tool
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It's a computer that understands my words and can reply, even complete tasks upon request, nevermind the result. To me that's pretty groundbreaking.
6That is exactly what it doesn't. There is no "understanding" and that is exactly the problem. It generates some output that is similar to what it has already seen from the dataset it's been fed with that might correlate to your input.
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I've said before it writes like a corporate middle manager.
25It writes like a high school student who is supposed to hit their word count
1590% of us are having our copy graded by corporate middle managers.
5I'm mostly just shocked at how bad a vast majority of white collar workers are at writing.
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“Godfather of AI” Geoff Hinton, in recent public talks, explains that one of the greatest risks is not that chatbots will become super-intelligent, but that they will generate text that is super-persuasive without being intelligent, in the manner of Donald Trump or Boris Johnson. In a world where evidence and logic are not respected in public debate, Hinton imagines that systems operating without evidence or logic could become our overlords by becoming superhumanly persuasive, imitating and supplanting the worst kinds of political leader.
Why is "superhumanly persuasive" always being done for stupid stuff and not, I don't know, getting people to drive fuel efficient cars instead of giant pickups and suvs?
20Because superhuman persuasion generally only works on things people don't have to change to accept.
Racist dogma is so persuasive to some because it lets them recontextualize their hardships as inflicted on them by {insert race here} without materially changing their life in any way and despite it being horseshit.
Ultimately it's not superhuman persuasion: it's extremely human. It only works when it's playing to your existing biases, connects to the lazy, gut-based feeling method of navigating life rather than logic or reason.
But if popular enough it can be extremely dangerous: because the reason that persuasion machine is wrong will not be readily apparent until after the mistakes have been made.
20Great write up. I would also include the establishment of an ‘enemy’ to blame shortcomings or adversity on. I’m not going to be able to explain as well as you do but your post had be thinking of how young, depressed, disadvantaged, etc wind up indoctrinated into racism, incels, and other such hate groups.
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Because there's no money in getting people to use less. Persuasion in capitalism is about marketing. It's about convincing people to buy things they don't need.
7Wanna be the bigwig on your block? Have I got a product for YOU! Solar Panels! Make your house shine with newfangled tech that'll be the envy of all your neighbors! Go solar, baby! Stick it to the electric company and make THEM pay for a change. Solar! You'll be beaming.
ok, I suck at faking ai chat
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To me, things like ChatGPT are just more efficient ways to search sites they scrap data from like Stack Overflow. If they ever drive enough traffic away from their sources to kill the sources the likes of ChatGPT will become mostly useless.
10Not and AI expert but I've never been convinced by AI that's trained on human provided data. It's just gonna be garbage in, garbage out. To get something substantially useful from AI, it needs to be... axiomatic, I guess. A few years ago, there was Alpha Zero learning only the rules of chess but within just a few hours, it learned all the chess openings/theories that took human chess masters centuries to formulate. It even has it's own effective opening lines that used to be considered wasteful/unsound before. Granted chess game rules and win conditions are relatively simple compared to real life problems. So may be, it's too early for general purpose AI research to billions into.
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