[HN Gopher] Unexpected ways generative AI will change how you wo...
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Unexpected ways generative AI will change how you work forever
Author : jbcranshaw
Score : 73 points
Date : 2023-01-18 20:14 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (maestroai.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (maestroai.substack.com)
| a13o wrote:
| On the topic of Content is King, I have a different view than the
| author. I think in the case of these trained AIs, 'content'
| refers to the training datasets and not the generated outputs.
|
| Trained AIs are in something like the early digital streaming
| days where there was only one provider in town, so that provider
| aggregated All The Content. Over the next decade we would see the
| content owners claw their content back from Netflix, and onto
| competitor platforms -- which takes us to where we are today.
| Netflix's third party content has dwindled and forced them to
| focus on creating their own first party content which can not be
| clawed away.
|
| When these generative AIs start to produce income, it will be at
| the expense of the artists whose art was in the training dataset
| nonconsensually. This triggers the same content clawback we saw
| in digital streaming. Training datasets will be heavily
| scrutinized and monetized because the algorithms powering
| generative AIs aren't actually carrying much water. Content is
| King.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| If social media resulted in a deluge of low quality crap, now you
| can expect that same phenomenon to the power of infinity.
| commitpizza wrote:
| I paid for Tabnine pro since it was 50% off for a year but I
| won't renew it unless it massively improves.
|
| I mean, it does give good completions sometimes but the time
| saved isn't that great imho. Maybe chatgpt is better but it feels
| like AI still have some way to go to actually be so useful you
| would be less sucessful without it.
| [deleted]
| RyanShook wrote:
| Does anyone else feel like the crypto crowd just migrated to AI?
| d_burfoot wrote:
| I don't have a problem with the main point of the article, but
| there is a huge terminology confusion that is rapidly gathering
| force to confuse people. The key breakthroughs of GPT3 et al are
| not primarily about generative AI. People had been building
| generative models long before GPT3, and it was generally found
| that discriminative models had better performance.
|
| They key to the power of GPT3 is that it has billions of
| parameters, AND those parameters are well-justified because it
| was trained on billions of documents. So the term should be
| something like "gigaparam AI" or something like that. Maybe GIGAI
| as a parallel to GOFAI. If you could somehow build a gigaparam
| discrimative model, you would get better performance on the task
| it was trained on than GPT3.
| jbcranshaw wrote:
| Good point on the terminology. What do you think the right
| terminology should be? LLMs is too much of a mouthful and is
| not as informative for the general public, imo. People are also
| using Foundation Models, which I rather like.
| zone411 wrote:
| I don't like "Foundation Models" because it's a term invented
| by Stanford and they're pushing it hard while not really
| doing all that much in the field.
| impalallama wrote:
| ChatGPT help me solve a refactoring bug today. I had spent hours
| messing around trying to figure out what the issue was until I
| realized, via asking ChatGPT, that I had misunderstood a piece of
| the code and the docs. It was able to answer and provide examples
| (until it had error and crashed) in a way a senior engineer might
| have been able to.
|
| The funny thing is I had tried just pasting in code and saying
| "find the bug" and it wasn't helpful at all, but when I posted in
| a portion and asked it to explain what the code was doing I was
| able to work backwards and solve the issue.
|
| Its nice anecdote where the AI felt additive instead of
| existentially destructive which has been a overbearing anxiety
| for me this last month.
| ape4 wrote:
| That works for a really small amount of code (like 100 lines).
| teddyh wrote:
| Sounds a lot like "rubber duck" debugging.
| henry_bone wrote:
| From Star Trek: First Contact: "When you build a machine to do
| a man's job, you take something away from the man."
|
| You surrendered the need to think to the machine. You are
| lesser for it. I don't think these AIs are just removing
| drudgery, like, say, a calculator. They actually do the work.
| Or more correctly, they produce something that will pass for
| the work.
|
| Wholesale embracing of this sort of technology is bad for us.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| That sounds pretty Luddite to me.
|
| I don't think the average person wants to be doing the menial
| work, vs architecting a grander vision IE the purpose for the
| work.
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| Meh. I'd rather find out where it can take us. That sounds
| more fun and interesting.
| XorNot wrote:
| Does this mean pair programming makes you a worse engineer?
|
| Or even just "asking for a second opinion"?
| Karunamon wrote:
| I don't know about you but if I had the ability to dictate
| requirements and to get a program out the other side that
| matches those requirements, the process of coding has become
| mere busywork that can be eliminated for the benefit of me
| and everyone else.
|
| I'm sure the buggy whip makers had pride in their work as
| well.
| acchow wrote:
| That's how Socrates thought about books. Yet here we are 2400
| years later and our minds are mostly fine.
| k__ wrote:
| I used ChatGPT for my work as a writer, and it's pretty nice.
|
| I wouldn't let it write a whole article, but it can really save
| time at research. Just needs a bit of fact checking in the end.
| astockwell wrote:
| Can you elaborate more on your process, and the venue/focus of
| the writing?
| k__ wrote:
| I write educational technical articles for a living. Dev
| tools, frameworks, security, APIs, infrastructure, web3, etc.
|
| I talk to the AI as if I would interview an expert on a
| subject matter.
|
| This usually gives a good starting point for an article, if
| the subject is general enough, and not too new.
|
| It's also good at structuring and rewriting texts. If you
| already have all the correct data, you can use it to write an
| outline or something like that.
|
| The problems I saw were that it can't follow a coherent
| thought for more than a few paragraphs, and the writing style
| is generally a bit boring.
|
| Also, the system uses sampling of results to sound more
| interesting and to prevent overfitting, it happens regularly
| that it tells you crap. One time you get a good answer, then
| you change one word in your prompt and the results isn't
| accurate anymore.
|
| But I worked for years as a developer, so I usually notice
| when things are off, and I also fact check manually with
| Google when I want to be sure.
| samvher wrote:
| No offense but this approach worries me - it seems like a
| novel mechanism to (perhaps inadvertently) generate and
| spread false information. It takes a lot of fact checking
| to make sure everything is right, and if you do the
| research yourself that's a natural part of the process. It
| seems way too easy to minimize that effort in a process
| like this.
|
| I was already worried about ChatGPT-like systems generating
| mass-produced nonsense and polluting the internet, but if
| people are also going to edit ChatGPT output just enough to
| make it seem right (a mechanism I hadn't thought of so
| far), that might make the nonsense a lot harder to detect.
|
| I totally understand the reasoning though, it sounds like a
| productive workflow.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| Do you have examples you can provide of these technical
| articles? Because those topics your offered are really
| broad and very few people are knowledgeable about all of
| them, so it sounds like you're filling in your knowledge by
| querying ChatGPT.
|
| Using ChatGPT to fill in knowledge for a technical articles
| sounds bad. If I'm reading an article about security, I
| want it written by a security expert not a semi-layman plus
| a ChatGPT model.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > The results are often wildly creative and spookily accurate,
| giving these models a human-like feel.
|
| or wildly inaccurate, particularly in fields such as programming
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup. What seems to be largely missed is that these models have
| zero understanding, and are actually destroyers of information,
| not creators. In classic Information Theory, information is
| basically surprise value -- how much _unexpected_ info is in
| the message? -- yet these "AI" systems put out the _most
| expected_ subset in each instance. This highly averaged output
| is very recognizable and so very striking, but it is not
| actually very informative (perhaps except in cases where it is
| specifically used as a verbose search engine, where the query
| takes advantage of the breadth of the AI 's training).
| Gh0stRAT wrote:
| > In classic Information Theory, information is basically
| surprise value -- how much unexpected info is in the message?
| -- yet these "AI" systems put out the most expected subset in
| each instance.
|
| Forgive me, but isn't this kind of moving-the-goalposts?
| Information is the surprise value from the recipient's point
| of view, which meas the recipient's bayesian prior
| probability is "expected". Saying "these "AI" systems put out
| the most expected subset in each instance" assumes that the
| recipient's priors exactly equal those of the model which
| would only be the case when the model is talking to itself.
| (or I suppose to an even more complex model with perfect
| knowledge of ChatGPT's weights)
|
| The fact that no information is transferred when the model
| talks to itself should not be surprising and would apply to
| any AI. (even including a superhuman post-singularity god-
| like AI)
| aero142 wrote:
| I've been asking friends in non-programming engineering fields
| how ChatGPT does in their area of expertise, and I believe
| programming is the area that ChatGPT is the most accurate.
| Finding solution to general engineering problems seems
| blatantly wrong in almost all cases, whereas in programming, it
| seems to be able to generate mostly correct code for simple,
| boiler-plate like tasks.
| zabzonk wrote:
| why is "mostly correct" ok for programming? also, i don't
| believe that good programmers want to have boiler-plate in
| their code.
| fooker wrote:
| Because that's what most programmers achieve too.
|
| You can iterate from there by taking advantage of the last
| 50 years of software engineering wisdom.
| ccozan wrote:
| yes, but why? Why is GPT so much better at programming than
| other tasks?
|
| can it be that programming itself can be so easily predicted
| in a generative way, while others require more ingenuity and
| real world model to be solved?
|
| In this case I would totally offload programming to a GPT
| /LLM AI, while my job is simply to specify largely the
| business case.
| lancesells wrote:
| Is it because programming is a more limited and specific
| language than the ones people speak? There's less room for
| double-meanings, slang, meaning, or even sentence
| structure.
| impalallama wrote:
| I have to imagine its because so much of its training data
| is readily available programming docs, tutorials, and
| general Q&A that there is an amazing abundance of online.
| How many times have you just pasted an error into google
| and hoped someone else has asked the exact same question on
| stack overflow?
| petra wrote:
| True. Also there's a lot of commented open-source code
| out there.
| benkay wrote:
| [dead]
| blablablerg wrote:
| Or worse, subtly inaccurate. The problem I have with generative
| AI right now, its product looks like it makes sense and
| sometimes it does, but there is always the risk of total
| nonsense hidden somewhere in the middle. So you still need
| someone capable to check and correct for most professional
| work, and sometimes that is harder or more time consuming than
| making the product itself.
|
| The same sort of problem with self driving cars, they are often
| correct but not often enough, and staying alert to correct the
| AI is worse than driving yourself which is more work,
| paradoxically enough.
|
| AI might manage to push through these barriers, but I remain
| skeptical with the technology in the current state: statistical
| machines that are good in the common cases but sketchy at the
| edges.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > Widespread adoption of generative AI will act as a lubricant
| between systems,
|
| I largely agree with this article, but I feel like you have to be
| careful with these general predictions. Many technologies have
| purported themselves to be this "business lubricant" tech (ever
| since the spreadsheet), but the actual number of novel
| spreadsheet applications remains small. It feels like the same
| can be said for generative AI, too. Almost every day I feel the
| need to explain that "generation" and "abstract thought" are
| distinct concepts, because conflating the two leads to _so much_
| misconception around AI. Stable Diffusion has no concept of
| artistic significance, just art. Similarly, ChatGPT can only
| predict what happens next, which doesn 't bestow it heuristic
| thought. Our collective awe-struck-ness has left us vulnerable to
| the fact that AI generation is, generally speaking, hollow and
| indirect.
|
| AI will certainly change the future, and along with it the future
| of work, but we've all heard idyllic interpretations of benign
| tech before. Framing the topic around content rather than
| capability is a good start, but you easily get lost in the weeds
| again when you start claiming it will change _everything_.
| jbcranshaw wrote:
| > Our collective awe-struck-ness has left us vulnerable to the
| fact that AI generation is, generally speaking, hollow and
| indirect.
|
| This totally resonates with me. This is absolutely correct.
| Thinking about the future of work, there's much of what I do
| every day in my job that is hollow and indirect. And I would be
| totally okay if I could have something like ChatGPT do it for
| me.
| [deleted]
| teknopaul wrote:
| "but the actual number of novel spreadsheet applications
| remains small."
|
| That's not my experience, I am continuously amazed by the
| amount of tasks worker bees manage to do in excel.
|
| I kind of wish MS access was more of a thing, because when
| eventually it doesn't scale and you need a "proper" system, it
| takes a rewrite.
| oogali wrote:
| It's not just that a system built in MS Access facing scale
| concerns needs a rewrite from an engineer's perspective.
|
| It's that the business will _also_ accept that it needs a
| rewrite. As opposed to the current status quo where they 'll
| ask what's wrong with continuing to use $Slick_and_Fancy_Tool
| (then act surprised when it stops scaling with regards to
| whatever business, performance, or compliance barriers you've
| then reached).
| smoldesu wrote:
| That's fair enough, I've seen some pretty cool things in
| spreadsheet software too.
|
| My larger point, though, is that most people end up using
| spreadsheets to do the same thing. It's fun to imagine novel
| uses for a spreadsheet, like a DAW or video game, but
| ultimately it's not very _useful_ for that. Similarly,
| ChatGPT is great for writing convincing text - that 's what
| everyone uses it for. Can it solve math though? Not very
| well. Future applications of the tech are more likely to be
| specialized, in that sense.
|
| Mostly, I'm a curmudgeon and I despise these "flying car of
| the future" articles. Popular Mechanics printed them for
| decades, and half a century later nothing has changed (not
| even the culture writing them).
| mxkopy wrote:
| I think we knew from the get-go that spreadsheets would be
| used for pretty much anything to do with numbers. That
| there aren't any new applications past that understates
| their general applicability.
|
| I agree though, chatGPT isn't a real flying car. Imagine if
| someone revolutionized the paper clip. The day-to-day of
| millions would be forever and irrevocably changed; and
| almost nothing would happen.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Weren't we all supposed to be lollygagging about, as our robots
| did everything for us, by now?
|
| I can't wait for Wall-E!
|
| https://www.thelist.com/img/gallery/things-only-adults-notic...
| thih9 wrote:
| Wall-E was about as much about post-scarcity as it was about
| escaping reality. To me it looks like we've focused on the
| second part and we got pretty good at it.
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