[HN Gopher] Superhuman: What can AI do in 30 minutes?
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Superhuman: What can AI do in 30 minutes?
Author : EMM_386
Score : 284 points
Date : 2023-03-26 09:40 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oneusefulthing.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (oneusefulthing.substack.com)
| rapiz wrote:
| I found the main content generated, which are the campiagns,
| plain and too generic to be useful. And I doubt the effort needed
| to pull out a better result, even with better models. The article
| does provide some inspiration on what will the AI-enhanced
| workflow look like, but also shows the weakness. All results look
| like pretty generic and skeleton and further polishing from pros
| is needed. IMO, the future will more be like everyone do their
| job better with the help of AI, instead of that everyone do all
| the work with AI and no one is really needed.
| SergeAx wrote:
| > It then proceeded to create the four emails. without me doing
| anything.
|
| I wonder how quickly we gonna put any ML-generated email directly
| to spam folder? I personally would like to have at least a
| marking of such content in my inbox.
| arbol wrote:
| It feels like there's going to be a whole lot more marketing
| content that's not getting read.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| yeah, the end result is boring. I'd rather watch a 2 minute
| Loom of someone using the product, which would have taken them
| less time then the AI approach.
| refactor_master wrote:
| Perhaps this will only further devalue and misalign the
| already in-shambles communication between producer and
| consumer.
|
| For example, I'd trust 1 video review over 1000 text reviews,
| and even then, a family member's opinion over 1000 video
| reviews. The number of "agendas" out there is staggering, and
| it feels naive to assume that most of them would align with
| mine.
| madsbuch wrote:
| oh the content arms race is tightening!
|
| I have seen myself visiting much fewer websites after I
| incorporated chatgpt in my workflows. why would I visit some
| random dev blog that promises me an answer, when I don't need to?
| and now I don't have to be annoyed by that pesky popup asking me
| to suvscribe.
|
| it will be the same with marketing. it might be easier to create
| the content, but way fewer people will even see it.
|
| it is gong to be interesting to see if there will be an implosion
| of more a fizz out.
|
| it is also going to be interesting to see how marketers will
| target LLMs.
| coldtea wrote:
| The problem is that, business wise, this doesn't increase your
| ability to do stuff.
|
| Superficially it does that, but that would be the case edge-wise
| if ChatGPT was just available to you. You have no business
| advantage because of it over anyone else using it.
|
| What it does do, is devalue your skills (if you had the skills
| before to manually create all that material), and devalue the
| final product.
|
| Once, having such online marketing material used to be a great
| asset, even if it was crudely made by today's standards (think
| 1996). Later, as there were all kinds of services to help create
| one (with assets, etc.), more people that could do it for
| cheaper, template-based website builders and so on, it was far
| less valuable. Now, with ChatGPT churning good-enough material in
| 30 minutes, it would be as valuable as spam.
|
| In fact, there will be (already is) an entirely huge industry of
| automated AI spam content, including fake companies with
| marketing material. Not the hand/template build of today, where
| someone has made 30-50 slightly different BS companies to e.g.
| scam or drop-ship. But where every scam artist can have 1000s of
| them within an hour, and get them be topical on the latest
| products and trends, complete with "chat support" and everything.
| And of course any person who has some BS idea, but couldn't even
| use Wix to make a website before, even less so to write copy for
| it, now will have one (they'd probably wont be able to use
| ChatGPT directly, but they'd be able to use a turnkey "make me a
| website" GPT-powered version of something like Wix.
|
| The bussiness advantage of using GPT to boost your productivity
| is like getting rich by the UN giving everybody on earth 100
| billion dollars!
| sandworm101 wrote:
| A task for me on monday: justify why you just requested 3x
| laptops speced for 32gb ram.
|
| AI answer: More ram is better. Computer go faster with bigger
| files and less swap. Business needs demand. (Useless answer)
|
| What the boss wants: I assess that software X requires 32gb to
| perform the task we need. We tried with 8, hard fail. We tried
| with 16 and it crashed every 30min. And we havent asked for new
| laptops in years so you owe us.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| This might be an issue with your prompt. Here's what I get for
| "Our software is crashing constantly when run on laptops with
| 8GB ram and every 30 minutes when run on laptops with 16Gb ram.
| Further, our laptops are multiple years old and require
| frequent maintenance. Write a brief email to my boss asking for
| approval to purchase 3 laptops with 32GB ram." It's a bit more
| formal-ish than I'd prefer but with a little tweaking it'd
| probably get the job done.
|
| "Dear [Boss's name],
|
| I hope this email finds you well. I am writing to request your
| approval for the purchase of 3 laptops with 32GB RAM.
|
| As you are aware, we have been experiencing frequent software
| crashes, particularly on laptops with 8GB of RAM, and even on
| those with 16GB of RAM. This is affecting our productivity and
| causing delays in our work. Additionally, our current laptops
| are several years old and require frequent maintenance.
|
| To address these issues and ensure that we can work efficiently
| and effectively, I believe it is essential that we invest in
| new laptops with increased RAM capacity. With 32GB of RAM, we
| will be able to run our software smoothly and reduce the
| frequency of crashes.
|
| I have researched several options and identified three laptops
| that meet our requirements and are within our budget. I have
| attached the details and prices of each laptop for your review.
|
| I would appreciate your prompt approval for this purchase so
| that we can continue to work without interruptions and complete
| our projects within the given timeline.
|
| Thank you for your attention to this matter.
|
| Best regards, [Your Name]"
| sandworm101 wrote:
| That answer would not fly in our organization (military). It
| reads like someone who isn't part of our organization, making
| little assumptions about our organizational structure. For
| instance, we would never "invest". We "acquire" equipment to
| meet needs. Likewise, nobody would ever talk of something
| impacting work. Everything is written in terms of operational
| requirements and missions. Even "approval" isn't appropriate.
| My boss will "support" my request that will go to another
| part of the organization for assessment and procurement. If I
| used language from an AI that did not understand our specific
| organizational mannerisms, it would be flagged as so odd that
| my boss would probably drop by my office for an explanation.
|
| This is typical of generalize AI. Everything it writes sounds
| like it comes from a total stranger. It has no internal
| voice, no distinct style. It sounds like it comes from a
| child writing an essay ... which is basically what it is.
| keyle wrote:
| Well there is going to be a lot of geocities style websites
| coming back as the GPT clients can certainly output valid HTML,
| without any acquired taste when it comes to web design.
|
| Regardless of the role... GPT as a helping tool, absolutely!
|
| But as a replacement for the role... You're setting yourself as a
| joke.
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| Yes this is not particularly great aesthetically. But visually
| it is much better than what a lot of "full stack" (i.e.
| backend) developers can knock up, no matter how long you give
| them, as a lot of developers have no interest in making things
| look nice or even making them useable as long as they get to
| tick off another story point. It is definitely better than
| anyone without any experience of development could produce. It
| is also better than what an experienced designer could knock up
| in 30 minutes. It is also rapidly improving. I genuinely think
| that five years from now almost all developers front or backend
| will be obsolete, in the same way that buggy whip makers are
| now.
| gwoolhurme wrote:
| Then what do us software engineers do? If we are obsolete.
| College diplomas are worthless outside of self improvement.
| UBI isn't coming. Even then, I'm in the country I live in
| through a working visa. If what you say is true... I see this
| on HN every day at this point. It fills me with enough
| anxiety. To me, as an engineer I like to think of different
| scenarios but there is no good scenario with AI. The worst
| one is, I lose my visa, job, house, at that point I lose 10+
| years of my life. I've thought about just ending it at that
| point... talking to a therapist over that obviously, but
| there are days when that dread is there. There is the thread
| about the 3D artist replaced essentially by AI. Due to my
| visa I can't legally work a blue collar job that will be safe
| until a robot comes. I don't want to move back to a country I
| don't even know anymore. Death doesn't sound bad...
| tablatom wrote:
| None of us know how this is going to play out. I feel
| anxious too but let's at least see what happens. Right now
| the world is still much the same as it was before LLMs
| arrived. Take some time to look at the flowers. They are
| still there.
| gwoolhurme wrote:
| I hope so... I really do. Looking at HN, and I understand
| nobody knows what the future holds, but to get to those
| flowers a lot of pain is going to come I think. For me,
| for other people... to me the most disgusting comments
| I've seen on HN has been SV people who say that I should
| have saved up enough as a buffer. That isn't the case for
| us SWEs who live abroad. Not all of us make SV salary. I
| could go on and on about this. I really just hope there
| is a light at the end of the tunnel for us in the short
| term, because if it is coming for our jobs in 5 years or
| less, many of us in society will be left for rot.
| s__s wrote:
| Life is always better than death. If things really do get
| bad, you won't be alone. Take solace in the fact that there
| will be a huge community of people in the same boat as you
| with whom you can connect and work with.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| It's going to raise the bar for people on a lot of fronts.
| Also, people will get bored with bland, boring fluff pretty
| quickly. That's always the challenge for marketing people: how
| do you stand out from the crowd? The generated movie is
| actually pretty bland and boring. It's mainly impressive
| because it almost but not quite looks realistic. It's basically
| a talking head moving its head between 5 or so positions with
| an expression less bland face narrating some generic marketing
| pitch. It's not bad. But it's also not very good. It's
| marketing box ticking "we got to have the talking head thing on
| the website somewhere" but it's not going to achieve any
| miracles in terms of engagement.
|
| That's the problem with this stuff: it's formulaic,
| unimaginative, etc. Like a lot of real world marketing. If you
| look at what companies actually do, it's mostly pretty low
| quality and bad right now. For every well run marketing
| campaign there are hundreds of really poorly thought out and
| cringe worthy campaigns. Trying to imitate what the good ones
| do.
|
| So, AI is going to run circles around that crowd. Just like any
| competent marketing person would. Except an AI will do it a lot
| cheaper. This is going to decimate the market for incompetent
| charlatans and create a new market for effective directors that
| can work the tools more effectively and cheaply.
|
| That kind of is the point. These tools are really effective in
| the hands of a skilled professional that knows what to ask for
| and has a notion of what good and bad look like. It's an
| iterative process of asking and refining and directing that
| allows them to take a lot of short cuts.
|
| Imagine Steven Spielberg directing a movie. But without the
| actors, camera people, post production, makeup, lights, CGI,
| and all the rest. That kind of is what this could be. How would
| somebody like that use AI to produce a movie. Well, he'd be
| directing and refining and iterating and be getting results a
| lot quicker than is possible now. Maybe he'd raise the ambition
| level a little and ask for things that are really hard right
| now. But in the end they'd produce a movie that is hopefully
| very entertaining and interesting to watch.
|
| Now imagine a young inexperienced director with some vague
| ambition to be a better director. Would that person be able to
| produce something with the tools. Sure. And they'd learn a lot
| in the process. As you iterate, you better yourself. It's not a
| one way street. The more you engage with some activity, they
| better you get at it. We'll have a lot of very skilled
| directors in a few years. And they won't just be directing
| movies.
|
| And now imagine a very cynical third rate director that
| produces straight to dvd content for the masses. No budget,
| hilariously bad scripts, actors that don't give a shit and
| can't act, etc. That guy is going to produce some amazing
| results. But there will be so much of it that it won't have any
| value.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| Apparently Mr. Spielberg does exactly this: he seems to be on
| the advisory board of a company for generating movies from
| phone footage [1].
|
| We will probably have tons of movies with Avatar-like
| graphics, unfortunately, also with Avatar-like story, since
| that's really the hard part: encapsulating emotion in the
| artifact.
|
| [1] https://wonderdynamics.com/#team
| darepublic wrote:
| This is a bunch of fluff. I am sold on the groundbreaking
| possibilities of AI but not impressed by this.
| maxdoop wrote:
| For a supposed smart group of individuals who are good at leaning
| into the latest innovations, I feel most HN comments as of late
| are completely , ignorantly dismissive of LLMs simply because
| LLMs aren't "amazingly perfect" in their current state .
|
| Yet... we are are talking about a tool that came out literally
| FOUR MONTHS AGO. And the huge advancement on that came out TWO
| WEEKS AGO.
|
| Yet everyone here continues to proclaim, "it's not even that good
| , honestly." As though no progress will ever be made from this
| current moment in time.
|
| I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| You're implicitly trying to make a prediction on where the
| technology is going based on present trends, something that the
| industry has never been good at.
|
| Remember how 3D printing was supposed to be ubiquitous by now?
| Or how self-driving cars would lead to an economic apocalypse
| because of how reliant the economy is on truckers? Remember all
| the predictions of bitcoin going to $100k? Remember how an AI
| startup called "The Grid" was making news for their AI website
| builder back in 2016 (edit: 2014)?
|
| Don't even get me started on VR and mixed reality. Remember
| Magic Leap?
|
| My takeaway from all this, other than that futurists are
| hucksters, is that progress is actually quite slow, and relies
| on sudden, unpredictable breakthroughs. I mean, without the
| iPhone, we arguably wouldn't have smartphone apps, the death of
| Flash, or responsive websites. Arguably, without this single
| pivotal product, tech as we know it would be a very different
| place. I know it's a stretch to some to call the iPhone a
| breakthrough, but it's impact has been pretty huge.
|
| The catch is knowing when something is a real breakthrough, and
| when it isn't. I genuinely thought that the Oculus was at the
| time, and yet here we are, years later, and it seems like
| nothing has changed, aside from incremental improvements in VR
| display technology and a very niche VR gaming community.
|
| GPT-4 is clearly impressive from a technical standpoint, useful
| even, but where does it really go from here? Does the
| technology take off, or does it plateau in its present state?
|
| Is it VR and 3D printers all over again?
| pkoird wrote:
| And remember Transistors?
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Yep, but that's true for HN and almost every new piece of tech.
| The general reaction is always "meh, it's not 100% perfect so
| it should be trashed".
| kgwgk wrote:
| On the other hand we finally got full self-driving cars by
| now. Or did we?
|
| https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-promises-full-self-driving-
| ne...
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| If you're on HN, I would assume that unlike regular
| customers, the journey towards a technical achievement
| should be as exciting to you as the final achievement
| itself.
|
| ChatGPT is a giant step forward in the journey towards AGI.
| Tesla's cars, for all their flaws, are big steps forward in
| EVs and even self-driving.
|
| I personally find that exciting enough.
| rco8786 wrote:
| People are generally very resistant to change. Our minds are
| literally programmed against it...acknowledging an enormous
| change happening very quickly triggers all sorts of yucky
| things in our lizard brains. So we try and rationalize things
| and fid _some way_ of explaining to ourselves that "no, this
| isn't actually a big change, my model of the world is still
| rock solid" as a pure survival mechanism.
| martindbp wrote:
| I would have thought filtering people on "being in tech"
| would have weeded out the people resistant to change, so I'm
| surprised by the negativity on anything innovative here,
| whether it's EVs, self driving cars, AI, crypto (although I
| can forgive this one) or VR.
| rco8786 wrote:
| People in tech are still just people.
| 93po wrote:
| 100000% this. HN attracts some smart people but they're
| still often very flawed people. Myself included.
| belter wrote:
| I would be careful with the extrapolation... -
| https://xkcd.com/605/
| ldoughty wrote:
| I asked Google Bard to tell me a short story about a computer
| hacker. Here was the result, completely unedited... Blew me
| away:
|
| Sure, here is a short story about a computer hacker:
|
| Once upon a time, there was a young hacker named Kevin who
| loved to explore the world of computers. He was always curious
| about how things worked, and he loved to find new ways to break
| into systems. One day, Kevin was exploring a new website when
| he came across a hidden file. The file contained a list of
| passwords, and Kevin was curious to see what they were for. He
| tried a few of the passwords, and to his surprise, they all
| worked! Kevin had just hacked into a major company's computer
| system.
|
| Kevin was excited about his discovery, but he also knew that he
| had done something wrong. He had hacked into a system without
| permission, and he could get in a lot of trouble. But Kevin
| couldn't help himself. He was too curious about what he could
| find in the system. He started exploring the files, and he
| quickly found out that the company was up to some shady
| business. They were involved in illegal activities, and Kevin
| knew that he had to do something to stop them.
|
| Kevin decided to hack into the company's website and post a
| warning to their customers. He wanted to let them know that the
| company was not trustworthy, and that they should avoid doing
| business with them. Kevin knew that his actions would get him
| in trouble, but he didn't care. He was doing what he thought
| was right, and he was willing to face the consequences.
|
| The company was furious when they found out what Kevin had
| done. They threatened to sue him, and they even tried to have
| him arrested. But Kevin was not afraid. He knew that he had
| done the right thing, and he was willing to fight for what he
| believed in.
|
| In the end, Kevin was able to expose the company's illegal
| activities, and he helped to protect the company's customers.
| He also learned a valuable lesson about the importance of doing
| what is right, even when it is difficult.
| barking_biscuit wrote:
| FREE KEVIN
| zabzonk wrote:
| but isn't this "story" deeply boring?
| karencarits wrote:
| Yes, but it seemed like the prompt asked for a "boring"
| story. I guess you could make it more interesting by
| writing a more detailed prompt
| Peritract wrote:
| The prompt didn't ask for a boring story; nothing
| suggests that at all.
| [deleted]
| TMWNN wrote:
| > Yet everyone here continues to proclaim, "it's not even that
| good , honestly." As though no progress will ever be made from
| this current moment in time.
|
| As a non-expert in the field I was hesitant last year to
| disagree with the legions of experts who denounced Blake
| Lemoine and his claims about Google's AI being alive. I know
| enough to know, though, of the AI effect
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect>, a longstanding
| tradition/bad habit of advances being dismissed by those in the
| field itself as "not real AI". Anyone, expert or not, in 1950,
| 1960, or even 1970 who was told that before the turn of the
| century a computer would defeat the world chess champion would
| conclude that said feat must have come as part of a
| breakthrough in AGI. Same if told that by 2015 many people
| would have in their homes, and carry around in their pockets,
| devices that can respond to spoken queries on a variety of
| topics.
|
| To put another way, I was hesitant to be as self-assuredly
| certain about how to define consciousness, intelligence, and
| sentience--and what it takes for them to emerge--as the experts
| who denounced Lemoine. The recent GPT breakthroughs have made
| me more so.
|
| I found this recent Sabine Hossenfelder video interesting.
| <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5zGh2fui0>
| andrepd wrote:
| LLMs were invented four months ago?
|
| Honestly, I feel the opposite. I'm sick of the endless fawning
| over ChatGPT because it can print code that exists in a
| stackoverflow answer somewhere.
|
| I'm also cautious about extrapolating. Constant improvement,
| let alone exponential, is far from a guarantee, but from what
| the LLM acolytes would have you believe it's pretty much a
| given that GPT6 will be an AGI before 2030.
| tasuki wrote:
| > Yet everyone here continues to proclaim, "it's not even that
| good , honestly."
|
| We must be reading different HN. This is not at all what I'm
| seeing. As of now, the first comment I'm seeing which is
| dismissive is the sixth from the top, while your comment is
| second from the top.
| 93po wrote:
| I feel like it's a tale as old as time that people have very
| different experiences reading HN despite it being the same
| content for everyone. I assume due to some elements of human
| psychology.
|
| Ask an HN person if the website is pro-spaceman and anti-
| spaceman. A lot of people feel very strongly about one way or
| the other.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > As though no progress will ever be made from this current
| moment in time.
|
| The issue is that the folks promoting chatGPT are for the most
| part incredibly dishonest. E.g. this entire blog post is about
| the AI having written a sales email, with zero written about
| how well it actually converted. The author is claiming that the
| AI can do a superhuman amount of work in 30 minutes, but we
| don't actually know if it did any work at all.
|
| How can we even know whether OpenAI is making progress if we
| don't know how good it is in its current state? Back when Go AI
| was far less good than even the average club player, we at
| least knew what rank the AI was playing at. Whereas right now
| the ChatGPT equivalent is basically that it's putting stones on
| the board in a way that looks somewhat like a real game, but
| you're not allowed to know what level it's playing at.
| 300bps wrote:
| Exactly. It's similar to someone saying Google can do a
| superhuman amount of work.
|
| "All I had to do is search for a sample product launch email
| and POOF it appeared! Just had to fill in the company name."
|
| It's the same thing with the minor code snippets being
| "written" by Chat GPT. Any real programmer knows that Google
| could give you pretty much the same thing. And they also know
| how complicated their actual job is that goes well beyond the
| simple prompts people are using that everyone has been
| googling for over a decade now.
|
| It's all hyperbole. This technology is just an evolutionary
| improvement on Google.
| dTal wrote:
| That's one application. You don't find it at least a little
| jaw dropping that the _same_ program that is "an
| evolutionary improvement on Google" for programming tasks
| can also translate text, write (bad but improving) poetry,
| give reasonable relationship advice, creatively answer
| questions of the form "what do <x> and <y> have in common"
| for even radically different x and y, and correctly solve
| analogy puzzles? All in fluent English?
| copperx wrote:
| English? I've been prompting GPT-4 in Spanish all along,
| and it responds in impeccable Spanish. I can ask it to
| change the writing style of an essay to famous Latin
| American writers and it does it admirably. Translating
| back and forth between English and Spanish respecting
| meaning and context, even subtleties, no problem. Better
| than DeepL.
|
| If y'all have been focusing on GPT-4 coding abilities, I
| ask you to try it with literature-based prompts. GPT-4 is
| an exceptional writer, summarizer, and style corrector.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| I don't understand this perspective, the only way it makes
| sense is if you haven't bothered to really try to use the
| tool to get something done. There are literally a hundred
| million+ people out there using it to get shit done. I didn't
| sign up until the GPT-4 release because I had tried 3.5 and
| thought it was ok but limited, I had more luck using the API
| and custom prompts with GPT-3 but GPT-4 converted me. I've
| been using it daily and for increasingly more stuff. It's so
| good that I'm actively trying to break the habit of using
| search engines to look up docs, error messages, and SO
| answers. Mandatory disclaimer: it doesn't always produce
| perfect output that works on the first try but you know what?
| the old search result method doesn't work on the first try
| either especially if I have to read bad or limited
| documentation, parse a somewhat related SO answer into the
| solution I need or search through miles of issues about the
| error message where everyone is just complaining and no one
| has found a solution. The big difference is that GPT is a
| hundred times faster, provides better explanations and even
| when it's wrong it gives me enough information to figure out
| the problem on my own.
|
| Sorry but it's just frustrating seeing "how can we know it's
| better?" when it's right f-ing there in front of you. Maybe
| you don't want to spend $20USD to try it out, fine whatever,
| wait until it's free to use but don't make lazy negative
| remarks from a place of ignorance.
| rybosworld wrote:
| I was just thinking this same thing.
|
| I think the sentiment is warranted in some contexts, but in
| others it just seems dismissive.
|
| For instance, I am not impressed by ChatGPT's code output. It
| seems to be incapable of understanding the nuance that is
| required to modify known or similar solutions to fit a novel
| problem. In that sense, I don't think it's doing much more than
| a search engine. It could be it just hasn't had enough training
| examples. It could also be that there is something uniquely
| more difficult in regards to solving novel problems via code (I
| doubt this).
|
| But to get a marketing campaign and a website (albeit in
| mediocre quality) from text prompts is truly amazing imo. A lot
| of people are missing the point that these models are in the
| toddler stage of their life.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| This might be how the singularity plays out.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| I'm not going to claim I know where this is going right now
| with LLMs, but: throughout history, I don't think anyone really
| saw automation coming for their own jobs until it happened. I
| think people tend to think of their craft as an 'art' rather
| than a product. They miss that other people would MUCH prefer
| it to be automated, and that people will be willing to put up
| with slightly inferior output if it's practically free in
| comparison.
| lancesells wrote:
| But it's not free. They keyholders might be making it cheap
| right now but once the quarterly reports aren't showing
| enough growth it'll all go up.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| I don't buy that at all - you should look at what happened
| in the past, not to what's happening in the present. Over
| time, prices will go DOWN not up, due to improvements in
| hardware, engineering and probably smaller, more
| specialised models. A lot of investment will go into making
| that happen, like any other automation. If OpenAI did want
| to try and price gouge, then they'd just make a gap in the
| market for someone else to fill. Also - just consider how
| absurdly high SWE salaries are - it would have to get
| orders of magnitude more expensive than GPT 3.5 (say) for
| it not to be 'basically free' in comparison.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| This is already a meme but I'll repeat it here "hard pills to
| swallow: if you're afraid of ChatGPT taking your job then
| maybe you're not very good at your job"
|
| What this means to me is that if you see the parts of your
| job that are basically drudgery as being what you're good at
| then you should worry. If instead you see them as a necessary
| evil that you have to do in order to accomplish the bigger
| goals you're aiming for then you should be happy.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| That's the kind of take that I was referring to. Yes, if
| GPT could replace you now, your job is not very skilled.
| But if investors see a signal that software might be
| automatable, they are going to throw mountains of cash at
| that and they'll be gunning for your job as much as anyone
| else's.
|
| I've seen a lot of comments on here like "well LLMs are
| good at writing snippets, but could never write or maintain
| large codebases to accomplish a larger goal" - but are you
| SURE about that 'never' given the current generation is
| already doing things people suspected they could never do?
| "But they'll never be able to manage / interpret
| stakeholders", Are you SURE that LLMs will have to adapt to
| fit stakeholders, and not the other way round? I don't know
| for sure, and even if this is coming, I've no idea on the
| timelines. But I'm not completely writing it off as a
| possibility anymore either.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| I think there's a good chance that the next version of
| GPT will be better at writing code than a junior level
| dev. I don't think this is going to result in a net loss
| of jobs. As software development becomes less expensive
| per unit volume I think demand will increase so much that
| both the total number of jobs and average salaries are
| going to increase.
| visarga wrote:
| Yes, because our entitlement expands even faster than
| GPT's capabilities.
| [deleted]
| akiselev wrote:
| _> I 've seen a lot of comments on here like "well LLMs
| are good at writing snippets, but could never write or
| maintain large codebases to accomplish a larger goal" -
| but are you SURE about that 'never' given the current
| generation is already doing things people suspected they
| could never do? "But they'll never be able to manage /
| interpret stakeholders", Are you SURE that LLMs will have
| to adapt to fit stakeholders, and not the other way
| round?_
|
| That sounds a _lot_ like the self driving cheerleaders
| five or ten years ago. That work so far has resulted in
| some awesome features like adaptive cruise control and
| parking assist but it fell far short of what the hype was
| promising to deliver by now.
|
| Five or ten years later Mercedes is the _only_ company
| getting ready to ship level three self driving. Level
| four and five are still a pipe dream, practically
| restricted to a few companies like Waymo in a few
| controlled environments like Phoenix and San Francisco.
|
| GPT4 is great and I can't wait to see what 32K or even
| 100K/1M token models can do, but I fear we're about to
| hit the point where progress grinds to a halt because
| going further requires something closer to AGI than what
| we have now.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| As I say, I'm not sure about anything here, I just think
| it's risky to write the idea off right now just because
| it requires progress we can't forsee.
|
| I also don't think the comparison quite works, because no
| one is saying that we need to get down to zero humans for
| this to to be profoundly disruptive, just enough humans
| to code review and make relatively small changes, I
| wouldn't be amazed if that's what software engineering
| becomes in the coming decades.
| mypastself wrote:
| Completely agreed. Plenty of criticism focuses on specific
| algorithms or frameworks, as though there's something inherent
| to LLMs that render them unable to improve in that regard.
|
| Other objections, such as "if your job can be replaced by an
| algorithm, you weren't particularly valuable in the first
| place" or "software development is much broader than writing
| code" are irrelevant to the question of whether a large portion
| of developers will be replaced.
|
| I don't think they will, given the world's appetite for
| software, but it might become a less prestigious and lucrative
| profession on average.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Why do you think it will become less prestigious? This
| technology is going to 10x the abilities of every developer
| and since we are now all guiding an AI to write code instead
| of typing it out ourselves it's going to become even more
| important that software engineers earn the "engineer" part of
| their title through education or experience. More than ever
| we will need to know how to describe the problem and the
| solution and how to think critically about the code that the
| AI produces. The people with the knowledge to do so are going
| to become even more valuable since they will be among the
| most productive but even the fresh out of bootcamp junior
| will be more productive as a prompt-monkey instead of a code-
| monkey.
| mypastself wrote:
| My reasoning starts from the idea that "prompting" is
| essentially programming in a higher-level language, and it
| will eventually replace traditional coding. At a certain
| point, we'll be stating business requirements, and the
| algorithm will take care of logic and resource
| provisioning.
|
| Longer-term, what we now consider tech skills will be
| replaced with communication skills and business domain
| knowledge. This will cause an influx of workers from
| different professions and walks of life. As the field
| starts encompassing a broader spectrum of work, the barrier
| for entry will be lowered, and there'll be more work and
| more practitioners.
|
| There will still be high-paid jobs, but _on average_ ,
| software development will become a more traditional middle-
| class profession.
|
| This is all speculation on my part, of course.
| brazzy wrote:
| People were saying this exact thing in 1960 about COBOL.
| The job of programmer was going to go extinct because
| business users could write their own software.
|
| We've been through a number of iterations of the same
| pipe dream since then, but it always turns out that the
| actually hard problem in programming is figuring out the
| requirements in full detail without handwaving and
| glossing over anything, and translating them into
| unambiguous instructions. And "workers from different
| professions and walks of life" just inevitably _suck_ at
| that.
|
| Whether this time it really is different will hinge on
| whether LLMs can really figure out the handwavey parts,
| or whether those will be exactly where they will always
| make up shit and be confidently wrong.
| mypastself wrote:
| No, higher-level programming languages didn't make
| developers obsolete, but they've been increasingly
| lowering the barrier for entry into the field. Plenty of
| business people can write basic SQL queries nowadays, and
| Python is jokingly referred to as pseudocode.
|
| Even before the recent ML advances, there's been a shift
| towards involving a broader, less skilled workforce as
| the amount of work expands. Hence the people switching
| careers and getting gainful employment after a few months
| of even weeks in a coding bootcamp. Don't think that was
| as common in the assembly coding days.
|
| So while none of those advances suddenly destroyed the
| profession, there's been a gradual change to include a
| broader spectrum of practicioners. I don't expect the
| LLMs to revolutionize the field in two months, but I feel
| like it's safe to extrapolate that this is where it's
| headed eventually.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I'm with you. I believe we haven't even got started in
| exploring what you can do with the existing tools, let alone
| what new and improved ones we are about to get.
|
| I can imagine LLMs becoming a UI in front of just about
| everything. Instead of googling the ffmpeg flags you need,
| you'll just ask your terminal to walk you through it.
| morsecodist wrote:
| This is honestly so interesting to me because I feel like I
| have the exact opposite experience. I have never experienced
| the level of hype there is for LLMs both here on HN and in
| society at large. I see people talking about how amazing they
| are, how they will replace everyone in a matter of years and
| even achieve super intelligence. I see people argue strongly
| against even the mildest LLM skepticism. I use these tools
| every day because they are useful but I'm also blown away by
| how often the answers are completely wrong, like not even
| close. I sometimes feel like I am crazy or everyone is using an
| entirely different product to me.
|
| But the fact that you feel the exact opposite shows that maybe
| this is just an artifact of cognitive bias.
| fspoettel wrote:
| I guess we are two then, I feel the pretty much the same way
| as you. I might be completely wrong about all this, but it is
| getting to a point where it feels like I'm getting gaslit
| when I compare it with my own experience with these tools so
| far.
| maxdoop wrote:
| Genuine question as I definitely need more to balance my
| own thinking --
|
| What has your experience with GPT been? For me, GPT-3 was
| not really useful as a software dev.
|
| But GPT-4 is miles ahead of that. It's helped me write code
| maybe 4-8x faster than usual, and has even allowed me to
| debug existing issues far, far quicker and more accurately
| than I'd ever be able to on my own.
|
| Part of the gap very well might be my own mediocrity with
| development . I wouldn't argue that folks with far superior
| skills and novel challenges day-to-day might be
| unimpressed.
|
| But as an average dev writing pretty boring code (REST APIs
| and system integration mostly), I've been blown away by
| GPT-4. I am pretty well compensated and have been in the
| field for 10 years, too; but I am aware of my own
| shortcomings.
| naasking wrote:
| Crafting good prompts makes a big difference. Also, after
| it gives you an answer, say you think there's an error and
| ask it to check its own result. It will often correct
| itself. This self-reflection ability leading to more
| accurate outputs was pointed out in the new Reflexion
| paper:
|
| https://nanothoughts.substack.com/p/reflecting-on-reflexion
|
| https://twitter.com/Orwelian84/status/1639859947948363777
| naasking wrote:
| Here's another good thread about it:
|
| https://twitter.com/ericjang11/status/1639882111338573824
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I've rarely seen completely wrong answers. When I did see
| them it was because I was too prescriptive.
|
| Like, I might ask "using this library, implement that
| feature" in the hopes that there it has learned of some way
| to do a thing I haven't been able to figure out. In those
| cases I see it hallucinate, which I assume means it's just
| combining information from multiple distinct environments.
|
| If I'm not too specific, it does a pretty good job.
|
| IMO its biggest fault is that it is not good at admitting it
| doesn't know something. If they can crank up the minimum
| confidence values (or whatever, the values used to guess the
| next token), maybe we'll see better results.
| naasking wrote:
| > But the fact that you feel the exact opposite shows that
| maybe this is just an artifact of cognitive bias.
|
| Or social media/advertising engagement algorithms doing their
| work. After all, you get more engagement with negative
| emotions than positive ones.
|
| It seems plausible that you and the OP are at least slightly
| on different sides of the LLM issue, and so you and the OP
| could literally be seeing two different realities crafted by
| engagement algorithms, because it detects that each of you
| pay more attention to the other side that you disagree with,
| and that snowballs into seeing only the other side and
| thinking you're taking crazy pills.
| 300bps wrote:
| _I feel like I'm taking crazy pills_
|
| I feel the same way but on the other side. All I see are non-
| technical or quasi-technical people using AI tools to perform
| work that is x% better than Google could do.
|
| The only entity at risk of being displaced from this technology
| for the foreseeable future is Google.
|
| The only thing left to discern is what % better this technology
| is than Google's antiquated algorithms.
|
| Think about it for a second. Putting the right query into
| Google could give similar templated results. This technology is
| just an evolutionary improvement on that.
| maxdoop wrote:
| While I'm aware of my own mediocre programming skills and by
| no means claim to be an expert, I've been a software engineer
| for 10+ years and have done pretty well for myself. I'd hope
| that doesn't qualify for "quasi-technical", but maybe you are
| lucky enough to work on novel problems that require advanced
| problem solving every day.
|
| Regardless, I'd argue that GPT-4 is actually far better at
| programming assistance, understanding concepts (it's
| phenomenal at explaining things when prompted within a
| context), writing in general, and kick-starting creative
| pursuits than it is being a Google-replacement (for now, at
| least).
|
| Have you seen or used GPT-4? What has your experience been?
| What has it failed at, or rather, what would you wish to see
| in such a system that might make you to, "huh, ok -- that is
| pretty cool."
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| That's just wrong, have you used GPT-4? Last I checked I
| can't ask Google to invent a new programming language
| specification for me and get a result in under a minute. I
| then asked it to write a short tutorial for that language in
| the style of Learn X in Y minutes and got a good result. I
| then asked it to write bubble sort in the new language and
| got a result. Comments like this make me feel like I'm taking
| crazy pills but really I just know that there are a bunch of
| lazy curmudgeons out there that can't be bothered to look for
| themselves.
| 300bps wrote:
| _That 's just wrong, have you used GPT-4?_
|
| Yes. A lot.
|
| _Last I checked I can 't ask Google to invent a new
| programming language specification for me_
|
| I have literally never done this in my job. Ever. I've been
| a professional software developer for multiple decades.
|
| _I then asked it to write a short tutorial for that
| language in the style of Learn X in Y minutes_
|
| So you can't Google, "Tutorial How to Learn X in Y
| minutes", get a result that has a completely viable format
| and details and then do the remaining 15% of the work to
| fill in your specific items?
|
| _I then asked it to write bubble sort in the new language
| and got a result_
|
| Do you know how many times I've written a bubble sort in my
| actual software profession?
|
| The use cases you're bringing up is very typical of what
| people bring up with GPT-4. Contrived stuff without real-
| world application or something that is an evolutionary
| improvement on Google.
|
| Overinflated claims of what GPT-4 can do causes real harm
| to our industry. There are business owners making decisions
| now based on the smoke and mirror demos that people are
| showing that has convinced them that they won't need
| developers in a few years. I literally met with a computer
| science major who was considering switching majors because
| of GPT-4.
|
| Over the next decade, GPT-4 will be an amazing productivity
| enhancer for actual software engineers. Just like Google
| has been but with significant improvements.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| > There are business owners making decisions now based on
| the smoke and mirror demos that people are showing that
| has convinced them that they won't need developers in a
| few years
|
| If they aren't doing their due diligence on this then
| that's their problem. If my example isn't good enough
| then provide one of your own that you couldn't get to
| work.
| xwdv wrote:
| The root of the problem is that no matter how hard you want to
| believe, the LLM doesn't actually _know_ anything.
|
| If you gave an idiot something very intelligent to say and he
| read it out loud perfectly, people might be very impressed too.
| That's GPT.
| maxdoop wrote:
| But what does it mean to "know" something?
|
| And when something gives the increasingly-accurate illusion
| of knowing, I fail to see how it matters (with regard to
| impact on society and overall utility).
|
| I'm not saying GPT-4 is this amazingly accurate, near perfect
| model. But if you extend the timeline a bit, it'll be able to
| become more and more accurate across a broader range of
| domains.
|
| Furthermore, how can we prove a human "knows" something?
| xwdv wrote:
| Ask anyone who has hired someone who says all the right
| things and seems intelligent, but has no experience or
| skills in what they actually talk about.
|
| When I write code, I don't just focus on solving the
| problem at hand, I think about things like, like: how will
| another human interpret this, how maintainable will this
| be, what are the pitfalls down the line, what are the
| consequences of this, any side effects, performance
| implications, costs, etc... things GPT does not know.
| maxdoop wrote:
| But still, what does it mean to know something?
|
| And your point about humans lying about knowledge only to
| be found inexperienced is quite the opposite of an LLM
| (albeit there is the hallucination problem, but GPT-4 is
| a massive improvement there):
|
| These models do have "experience" aka their training
| data. And I would argue with most every one of your
| examples of things that GPT doesn't know.
|
| You can ask it about performance implications, side
| effects, costs. It's quite good at all that right now
| even! Imagine the future just a few years out.
| xwdv wrote:
| When asked about performance implications, it gives
| fairly shallow generic explanations, it doesn't do true
| "deep dives", these are just built from training data of
| other explanations.
|
| There is no "getting better" from this. If you gave a
| monkey a type writer and it occasionally typed words
| randomly you wouldn't say "Wow this is just what it can
| do now, imagine several years out!"
| maxdoop wrote:
| Continue asking it to provide details and it can. Or ,
| prior to asking it about performance, ask it to respond
| with as much detail as it can and have it include details
| you specially want to see.
|
| Comparing GPT-4 to a monkey with a typewriter , and
| claiming the absolute of "there's no getting better from
| this" when we've literally seen dramatic progress in just
| months?
|
| I think you're missing out on some of the utility this
| stuff can actually provide .
| xwdv wrote:
| No, you see it needs to do these things on its own,
| unprompted. It has to consider multiple solutions to
| problems it encounters and choose the best one, not just
| the most probable one. It's not made to evaluate things
| that way, you can't hand it multiple implementations and
| ask it to weigh the pros and cons of the different
| approaches and recommend the best one for what you're
| trying to do. You can't hand it your code for code review
| and ask what you could improve and expect to get a
| response that isn't just fabricated from what other
| people have said in code reviews.
|
| And it will _never_ do those things, because it's an LLM
| and there are limits to what LLMs can do. There is no
| "getting better", it will only _sound_ better.
|
| If it's going to replace programming, the prompts simply
| cannot be more laborious than writing the damn code
| yourself in the first place.
| SanderNL wrote:
| Think 50 LLMs with different personalities and focus
| points talking to each other, mixed with stuff like
| Wolfram. You can instruct them to "invoke" tools. An
| outside system parses their "tool use" and injects
| results. You can get quite crazy with this.
|
| LLMs are just the part of a much larger looping system
| that can do these things you speak of. Be active and seek
| out stuff. Of course, it's all illusory, but I'm sorry I
| think it's no different with myself.
|
| By the way, it actually gives ok reviews on novel code,
| so I'm not sure what you mean. At some point nothing is
| truly novel, even innovation is composing existing
| "patterns" (at whatever abstraction level).
| richk449 wrote:
| > There is no "getting better" from this. If you gave a
| monkey a type writer and it occasionally typed words
| randomly you wouldn't say "Wow this is just what it can
| do now, imagine several years out!"
|
| So thinking that chatGTP could gain understanding is as
| crazy as the idea that primates could learn to use tools
| or type words?
| dTal wrote:
| What does it mean to "know" something, and why does GPT not
| fit the criteria?
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| I used to think this but now I'm fairly convinced that it
| "knows" somewhat less than someone who was locked in a tiny
| dark room with no input except the ability to read a lot of
| text from the internet would know if that was their whole
| life. I don't believe it has a sense of self or
| consciousness, just that it possesses whatever knowledge is
| embedded in written text. Maybe a better analogy would be if
| you could cut out someone's language centre and put that into
| a jar hooked up to text input and output. It's not a whole
| mind but it sure feels like it's a piece of a mind that can
| do mind-like stuff.
| xwdv wrote:
| That's just the illusion of LLM drawing you in deeper.
| Knowing the correct thing to say is not the same as knowing
| things.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Are you talking about the difference between memory and
| reasoning? It's a bit hard to understand what you mean by
| knowing the correct thing vs knowing things. Both mean
| you know things, correct or not.
| xwdv wrote:
| When you know something you know it in multiple different
| contexts and forms, not just how it relates in response
| to a stimulus, or a prompt.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Still not sure what you're talking about that's different
| from what GPT can do. It's very good at transferring from
| one context to another while retaining the same intent or
| meaning. Could you give an example of something you think
| it can't do?
| xwdv wrote:
| Innovation.
|
| Could GPT be given some screenshots of a game you want to
| play and then code it up?
|
| Could you run through a demo of some competitor's app and
| have it make something similar but better?
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| I'm using it right now to help write a game that I had an
| idea for. I'm writing in a programming language that
| isn't the same one I use daily and I'm using a graphics
| library that I've only used once before to make a small
| game and GPT has been a massive help with this. It's
| helped me solve some tricky problems like getting a
| shader to work the way I wanted it to and I've used it to
| create first drafts of all of the code so far. I guess
| that's not pure innovation but it sure as hell has a
| better grasp on a lot of the stuff it's writing then I
| did at first. It can't just look at a picture and produce
| the exact game you want but neither could I. I'd have to
| ask you a bunch of questions about what you wanted the
| gameplay to be like, if you wanted to release it for PC
| or console or both, I'd have to get an artist to create a
| whole bunch of concept art and then ask you to approve
| the ones you like and then I'd need to implement all the
| code and play test it with you and make changes etc. It's
| a bit unfair that you want this tool to do more than a
| single person could just to prove that it "knows
| something". Just because it isn't 100% autonomous doesn't
| mean it has 0 knowledge or ability.
| maxdoop wrote:
| And what is "knowing"?
|
| Everyone repeats the retort you gave, yet I've yet to see
| a clear definition of "knowing".
| copperx wrote:
| You can compare GPT-4's limitations to Hellen Keller's.
| Someone who is deaf and blind can still reason as well as
| someone with "all inputs enabled". Hellen Keller still had
| a "full mind."
| kvetching wrote:
| Read the Microsoft Research paper on GPT-4. Some extremely
| intelligent behavior emerged from just text that has nothing
| to do with the text it was trained on.
| rapiz wrote:
| > who are good at leaning into the latest innovations,
|
| maybe not true.
|
| There are many threads where new products got comments of
| "useless" and then launched. HN users are smart, picky, and not
| representative for crowds.
| tsurba wrote:
| Today I spent 2 hours cursing at GPT-4 for not being able to fix
| a stupid indexing mistake in the code it wrote. Just like code
| before.
|
| It's helpful and I wouldn't have the energy to work on this hobby
| project without GPT. But for now at least, at some point I have
| to understand every line of non-trivial code eventually.
| rybosworld wrote:
| "Historically, these sorts of disruptions lead to short-term
| issues, and long-term employment growth"
|
| I think the pace of AI advances may turn these disruptions into
| long-term issues and not lead to employment growth.
|
| Yes, ChatGPT can be a multiplier on human productivity. But
| that's assuming you can learn how to use it correctly. The author
| here seems to know how to scale the complexity of the prompts in
| such a way that they get meaningful output (a complete website).
| That sort of prompting is a skillset in itself.
|
| The problem as I see it is: how long is that skillset relevant
| before an even more advanced LLM comes along, forcing you to re-
| learn how to interact with it. Now consider that the next
| advancement need not come from an LLM, but some entirely
| different system that doesn't work via prompts. That skilled
| prompter needs a new skillset.
|
| Technological innovations of the past have always come slowly
| enough that people could learn and master them before something
| new came along. It seems like things are moving so quickly in the
| AI space that may no longer be true.
|
| With all that said, an example that gives me hope is chess. The
| rise of chess AI's has not killed chess in any sense. The players
| of the last few years are actually much stronger than pre-AI. Can
| the best players in the world beat Stockfish or Alpha-Go? Not
| even close. And so far that hasn't mattered. People still prefer
| to watch two human players.
| cyclotron3k wrote:
| I was thinking about the chess analogy too, and I don't think
| it holds. Chess is a pastime; people do it for fun. Once AI has
| consumed all our jobs, sure, you can manually tap out some code
| for fun, but no one is going to pay you for that.
| roca wrote:
| It's a very important point that the insanely rapid pace of
| change is itself a huge problem. We're still in the same
| (northern hemisphere) school year in which ChatGPT was
| released; teachers and students just started trying to
| understand its impact; and the underlying model has already
| been replaced with something much more powerful --- TWICE ---
| GPT4 and "tool-using" mode.
| mprovost wrote:
| We're just starting the first "performance cycle" at work
| since ChatGPT came out and I strongly suspect next year's
| won't be based on producing so many written documents (self
| reflection, peer feedback, etc).
| scandox wrote:
| When I was young I read a load of books and wrote a bunch of
| waffle about them (essays). The waffle wasn't much use to anyone
| except myself because the process of producing the waffle made me
| do some basic thinking.
|
| So much human activity is about structuring our own thoughts so
| we can ascend to a higher level of activity and insight.
|
| I mean everyone knows marketing plans are BS but they're part of
| a process of group thought.
|
| I am genuinely amazed at some of the chats I've had with AI but I
| hope the outcome will simply be a clarification of what we are
| all actually doing.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| A terse bullet list suffices to guide thought. A 5000 word
| essay is busy work.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Yes, we risk AI eating the low hanging fruit, meaning humans
| can't grow the skills to pick off the much harder to reach
| fruit. This could stilt human growth, whilst causing a large
| shift of wealth to those with the resources to train large ML-
| based systems.
|
| If we don't share the gains, then overall I see this as
| possibly being a loss for society.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Of course these aren't production worthy artifacts. But what if
| the marketing team sent in their context and the personalized
| context of the individual they are targeting. Multiplied by
| millions of people. Custom, on-brand marketing. This is what LLMs
| are actually good at.
| hohg wrote:
| How do you send the emails to willing recipients?
|
| I doubt AI can find these recipients and that's the most critical
| element.
| cowllin wrote:
| Ethan has been an excellent source for keeping up with the
| advances in AI on his twitter account, through the lens of both
| academia (he's a professor) and "industry" (he professors in an
| MBA program).
|
| I recommend him as a follow:
| https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1636454151272931337
| Damogran6 wrote:
| Things will improve, to be sure, and the volume of word vomit is
| impressive, but much like when laser printers democratized
| publishing, you're going to initially end up with memos using 24
| (all of the available) fonts.
|
| I turn on a 'certain kind' of Movie or TV show and it becomes
| apparent that the scriptwriter really isn't an FBI agent, or
| Doctor or IT person. They have a feature length story, with
| amazing CGI, lighting, 4k video and Dolby...but the writing isn't
| believable and the end product is shit.
|
| I'm wondering if this will allow more people do more things, but
| the things that are turned out will look average, and the people
| that dedicate the time learning and skill to %product% will still
| turn out things that stand out.
|
| I have a similar old man gripe about CGI and music...the end
| result is that many more people have the ability to do the thing,
| and the end result is that the thing becomes commonplace and
| loses some of the wonder as a result. You have more and more and
| more people turning out music, and as a result, more and more
| people can't make a living making music.
| [deleted]
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Finally the war has been won. This wunderwaffe will destroy the
| front-end developers once and for all.
|
| "ChatGPT, please update the website to the latest meme framework"
|
| And with that they were all obsolete
| 0xb0565e487 wrote:
| I'm not worried. There's much more to the job than pedantic
| code reorganizing. As a matter of fact, it seems to be good at
| what I'd like not to do as a frontend dev.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| The current state of AI is amazing and can be a time saver, no
| doubt.
|
| With respect to the ongoing argument about the social and
| economic disruption of this "tool," we need to remember this:
|
| Over short periods of time, we "feel" like the slope of change is
| relatively flat. But it's not. The slope of change is getting
| steeper and steeper ever day. Technology change and capability is
| exponential.
|
| I have seen a crazy amount of change in my lifetime, and it's
| accelerating.
| netnomad8 wrote:
| AI can filter through thousands of Legal case files and court
| documents to pinpoint exactly what cases are relevant to a
| current case that a lawyer may be advising on! It took me exactly
| 30 minutes to go through 428 case files... :)
| SCdF wrote:
| Did it? How do you know it didn't confidently miss important
| documents?
|
| My experience so far has just been asking chatgpt questions and
| then researching it myself to confirm what it says, so maybe
| I'm missing something. But, it has been confidently wrong on
| important details a large enough percentage (right now) to make
| it absolutely not a fire and forget tool.
|
| The worst part is the confidence: it's like having a coworker
| that just straight up lies to your face randomly. Even if it's
| only 5% of the time you basically can't trust anything they
| say, and so you need to double check all of it.
|
| This doesn't make it useless, but it means it lends itself to
| "hard to do but easy to verify" tasks. Which afaict your
| example is not: you can verify the documents it picked out are
| relevant, but not that the documents that it didn't, weren't.
| asah wrote:
| coworkers give me wrong answers a lot more than 5% of the
| time.
| hiq wrote:
| On the other hand I can usually come up with my own
| estimate of how trustworthy the answer is when a human gave
| it to me, e.g. thanks to:
|
| * their reputation with respect to the question domain (if
| I ask a basic C++ question to a C++ expert I'll trust them)
|
| * their own communicated confidence and how good they are
| at seeing their own shortcomings (if they say "but don't
| quote me on that, better ask this other person who knows
| more" it's fine)
|
| 5% of bad answers doesn't matter if 99% of these times I
| knew I should look further. ChatGPT and others are missing
| this confidence indicator, and they seem to answer just as
| confidently no matter what.
|
| To be clear I don't see a fundamental reason why LLMs
| couldn't compute some measure of confidence (which will
| itself be wrong from time to time but with less impact) so
| I expect this to be solved eventually.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Base gpt-4 already did this.(confidence about something
| directly correlated with ability to solve problem/answer
| questions correctly) You can read the technical paper.
| But the hammer of alignment(RLHF) took it away.
| Jabbles wrote:
| Can it? Or are you just imagining that it might be able to one
| day?
| bottled_poe wrote:
| How much better is this than a keyword search across the
| documents?
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Keyword search doesn't understand the context of what you're
| asking for.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| And when it's a probabilistic LLM instead of a keyword
| search, how do you know you didn't miss anything?
| wickoff wrote:
| Humans miss things all the time. It's okay to make
| mistakes.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| It's not replacing a human, it's replacing a keyword
| search.
| _puk wrote:
| As opposed to manually trawling through thousands of
| documents, based on a keyword that may, or may not, appear
| in the context of the case file?
|
| It's a huge boon, but nothing is perfect. If it's that
| important that absolutely nothing is missed, maybe try
| multiple approaches concurrently. Take this as a value add,
| not a replacement.
| ben_w wrote:
| If you don't already grok all the legal jargon, the LLM is
| probably better than a keyword search.
|
| I'm not a lawyer, so when I search British copyright law, I
| wonder why those forms of words don't result in the staff
| of search engines and social media sites being arrested and
| imprisoned:
|
| https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/intellectual-
| prop...
|
| Although, probably best to ask a lawyer for legal advice
| even if they end up using GPT-n themselves; they've
| probably got public liability insurance if they get
| something wrong.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| I've seen people use "code words" exactly to avoid them being
| find by regulatory keyword searches.
|
| AI can figure out from context, a keyword search will miss
| it. And no, you don't know the "code words".
| copperx wrote:
| How in the world did you feed GPT those 428 case files? There's
| nothing in the API to make it ingest that much info.
| fritzo wrote:
| I'm guessing the author is computing embeddings
| https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/embeddings
| nbzso wrote:
| So, congrats. You "created" something without any aesthetic or
| marketing value. Yes, LLM's help, but the idea that time to
| market in competitive reality will give the real value is
| laughable. And no, when the prompt designer/engineer has no taste
| or more than average skill, the results will not be mind-bending
| or guaranteed hit.
|
| Force multiplier is not equal to quality multiplier, and the
| availability of the tools will generate mediocre junk with the
| speed of the light. Soon we will have to add to our information
| journeys another blocker for the A.I. generated marketing
| content.
| theden wrote:
| The completed website looks really bad and generic though, I'd
| argue even with the time saved it's a net loss. Since the
| generated images and video look uncanny/fake, I'd assume it's a
| scam website.
|
| Not gonna lie, it's kinda fatiguing seeing people hype lazily
| generated AI content as really good, when it's more often than
| not mediocre. I don't know if it's because people are
| intentionally hyping their results, or if they have poor
| taste/standards.
|
| I think the real lesson here is less is more, and I'm afraid with
| generative AI there's gonna be so much churn of content, we'll
| all become fatigued.
| rybosworld wrote:
| I feel that misses the point. This is a demonstration of what
| these systems can potentially do.
|
| The website doesn't look great. The emails are a bit generic.
| But we are in the very early stages of these models. I think
| the fact that a website can be generated from text prompts is
| remarkable.
|
| I wouldn't scold my toddler for not walking very steadily.
| theden wrote:
| I agree, it's a cool proof of concept of what can be achieved
| right now. Maybe I'm being less charitable than you, but I
| think the author's main focus was on growth hacking and
| business productivity gains, which works in this case if you
| ignore/don't care about the nuances/quality of what you're
| generating
| e12e wrote:
| Could you do better in ~10 minutes?
|
| Sure all the content is mediocre - but it's enough to start,
| and you could choose where to invest your budget - video
| editing, artwork, web site - to improve on this stuff that is
| an actual poc - in half an hour?
| greesil wrote:
| Mediocre was probably better than the the guy's best effort in
| a domain he didn't understand given a couple of days. That's a
| net productivity boost for him.
| theden wrote:
| I personally wouldn't want to ship mediocre content that
| looks like that, so for me all he did was waste 30 minutes
| prompt generating marketing BS and weird looking images.
| Don't get me wrong, I think AI can definitely be a
| productivity and inspiration boost in the right hands, but
| it's going to be being abused so much, I don't know if in the
| future I'll be able to read a long paragraph on my screen
| without wondering if it was written by a human (or even read
| by one prior)
| greesil wrote:
| As per Nilay Patel's comments about SEO spam hustlers, the
| web is going to become a vast(er) ocean of shit.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/2/19063562/ai-text-
| generatio...
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/19/23562966/cnet-ai-
| written-...
| e12e wrote:
| Would you be better of working off of only the prompts, or
| the ai poc - if op sent it to you and asked you to improve
| it for ~ 5 000 or something?
| [deleted]
| thom wrote:
| Everyone seems to think their particular niche is going to be the
| last to be commoditised. Yes, you've saved some time marketing
| your product. But your product is just going to get replaced by
| equally lazy people who type "write a business simulation to
| teach my students leadership" into ChatGPT. And then those people
| are going to get replaced by students not going to business
| school and just asking ChatGPT for a business curriculum
| directly. Except those people aren't going to get jobs because
| all the actual businesses are using ChatGPT instead of employees.
| Except those businesses' products also just got commoditised so
| they can't pay their ChatGPT bill.
|
| ChatGPT is not a tool with which you can build a bigger moat.
| Huge amounts of money are going to be made in the short term, but
| in the long term, I think your work being amenable to aid or
| replacement by LLMs is an indication you should be looking for
| higher ground, even if it's just to survive some plausible AI
| Winter.
| 13years wrote:
| I agree, most are missing this aspect. If AI progresses as the
| proponents assume, continually exponential, then this is
| different than all prior disruptions.
|
| It is accelerating technological evolution. Meaning there is no
| island of stability on the other side. There is no adaption to
| change and then we move along for a while. It is continuous.
| What makes this disruption different than all others is AI is
| not a narrow disruption. It is a disruption for everything
| because at its core it is a machine for the replication of
| skill and technology. A concept that has never existed prior
| with any other technological disruption.
|
| I've described this somewhat as the shrinking innovation,
| disruption and adaption cycles that leave us completely unable
| to keep up.
|
| "Climbing the skill ladder is going to look more like running
| on a treadmill at the gym. No matter how fast you run, you
| aren't moving, AI is still right behind you learning everything
| that you can do."
|
| https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things
| voiper1 wrote:
| If you use ChatGPT as prescriptive, that it tells you what to
| do, then you're only as good as what you put in and how good
| ChatGPT is.
|
| But if you use it as a coach/consultant/pair-programmer/R&D
| exploration/ brainstorming session, then you have instant
| access to an "expert" in any field.
|
| That's something that can supercharge the productive output of
| any worker. And/or lead to dismissal of most of the team...
| satisfice wrote:
| Mediocrity has never been so easy to achieve!
| easeout wrote:
| Reading this I'm drawn to the idea that, if LLMs are so
| attractive to us as a productivity boost, and if they do that by
| synthesizing gobs of similar human output, then we have been
| asking humans too much for the same output as one another and
| we're still doing it. Finally, a tool: I no longer have to be the
| automaton. That's a blessing and an indictment.
|
| I don't know if I'll feel the same way tomorrow; just thought it
| was a perspective worth sharing.
| lp4vn wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, LLMs are pretty breathtaking. In my opinion,
| just the way that they parse natural language, "understand" it
| and can generate a meaningful response is absolutely impressive
| and would be considered out of reach just some years ago.
|
| But I feel underwhelmed everytime I see people coming up with
| examples about how LLMs are going to revolutionize the job
| market.
|
| Prototypes for sites are something very old, it's not that you
| have not been able to create a good looking mock site in record
| time in the last 10 years. The rest of the article is also
| underwhelming, AI for generating content for a marketing strategy
| is not impressing honestly, and I guess that similar tools
| already existed.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| > I gave myself 30 minutes, and tried to accomplish as much as I
| could during that time...
|
| Have you watched nerdforge? "I spent 1, 10 and 100 hours on X..."
|
| Excellent content. High rated. Highly successful.
|
| Here's the thing: yes. Spending 40 seconds clicking on the
| "generate image" button can indeed produce some random crap.
|
| ...but, I've already seen that. I've _done_ it. Here's a pro tip:
| any content that takes you 30 minutes to do is something almost
| no one is interested in.
|
| It's too trivial.
|
| So, here my challenge: ok, now go and spend 10 and 100 hours to
| see how far you can _actually_ take it if you devote _real_
| effort to using these tools to _actually do something_.
|
| It might get a few clicks today, but the barrier to spending 30
| minutes to generate this kind of stuff has become _so low_ that
| it's basically worthless.
|
| We get it. You can click on the generate content button.
|
| Does it scale? Can it generate prompts for itself when you don't
| have time to do it yourself? Can you refine the content so it's
| not so bland and generic?
|
| ...or is that a problem for GPT5?
| belter wrote:
| Particularly on the issue of coding with the help of these
| models, I am specially concerned with Kernighan's law: "Debugging
| is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
| Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you
| are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."
|
| After seeing Developers gainfully employed, justifying their
| horrible SQL as, "I dont know the ORM wrote it". Others
| mentioning they never heard about transaction isolation levels,
| the old mantra of "NodeJS never blocks" so your concurrency
| issues are gone. Even recently and incredibly, having to argue
| with somebody about a Cloud Architecture design where as
| surprisingly as it might seem, the argument from the other side
| at a moment was, "but ChatGPT says..."...Taking all this into
| account I strongly recommend you keep brushing your skills.
|
| I predict Consultants and Developers, able to fix the bugs in
| these ChatGPT Driven Development Applications, will be rewarded
| with hourly rates that will make FAANG salaries look like
| Monopoly money...
| serpix wrote:
| Experience in software projects plus AI gives a clever
| consultant a force multiplier that is unheard of. A person who
| knows how things are made but lacks time can leverage AI to
| boost their productivity by several multiples. What a time to
| be alive. It feels like I have been given a new career
| overnight.
| clocker wrote:
| Recently I used chatGPT to "improve" the introduction of my game
| http://www.squashbyte.com. I wrote the initial introduction and
| asked chatgpt to make it better. I can speak good English but I
| am not a native English speaker so I was impressed by the
| outcome. Also I was mind blown to see how chatGPT answered some
| questions I asked after feeding the initial text to it. But now I
| think should I keep using chatgpt to do things like this? Will it
| deteriorate my writing or thinking ability if I keep outsourcing
| it to AI?
| maxerickson wrote:
| Seems like the reliability of the output is a big factor. If it
| is highly reliable then you can learn from the changes and so
| on.
| daneel_w wrote:
| The bigger question is: what can you train it to do in 30
| minutes?
| truthsayer123 wrote:
| More like super spam generator.
|
| Humans are good at coming with good explanations.
|
| There is nothing super human about generating a lot of crap
| marketing noise in 30 minutes.
| replwoacause wrote:
| Yep, dead on.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > (Prompt#2) Pretend you are marketing genius. We are going to
| launch the Saturn Parable. You should give me a document that
| oulines an email marketing campaign and a single webpage to
| promote the game.
|
| Cool, so lets see what Bing spits out.
|
| > I'm sorry but I'm not able to create a document that outlines
| an email marketing campaign and a single webpage to promote the
| game. However, I can suggest some steps that you can follow to
| create an email marketing campaign and a single webpage to
| promote the game.
|
| > snip
|
| ---------
|
| What the hell is up with this? I copy/paste the prompts exactly
| as outlined in this blogpost, and I get completely different
| results.
|
| I know I'm not the only one having this issue. But it makes me
| extremely distrustful of these blog posts. If I can't replicate
| their prompts or how they work, how the hell am I supposed to
| believe them?
|
| And yes, I did start with: "Look up the business simulation
| market. Look up Wharton Interactive's Saturn Parable" as
| prompt#1, so that Bing/ChatGPT already had Saturn Parable "in its
| memory".
|
| -------
|
| EDIT: I tried these two prompts in "Creative Bing Chat mode". I
| got the first sentence out of Bing Chat, but the rest of it
| failed. There must have been a timeout of some kind, because Bing
| Chat just hangs and fails.
| andyp-kw wrote:
| I wonder if some kind of Blockchain proof of work could be used
| to verify chat results in the future.
|
| Especially if the models grow quicker with realtime data.
| Kiro wrote:
| 1000 people using the same prompt will get 1000 different
| results. LLMs are completely non-deterministic.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I repeated the experiment 3 or 4 times before posting under
| slightly different phrases and sentences.
|
| I know this thing isn't deterministic. But never have I even
| gotten past step 2 of this blog post.
|
| I dunno. Has anyone else gotten the prompts to work as the
| blog post alleges? If so, can you share your prompts?
| richk449 wrote:
| Why are they non deterministic? Is randomness intentionally
| injected? Or intrinsic to the approach?
| alfiopuglisi wrote:
| Actually, LLMs are completely deterministic. Their output
| is a list of possible word, ordered by probability. If you
| always choose the highest-ranked word for the next
| iteration, they will always generate the same sequence for
| the same prompt. In all current implementations, a small
| amount of randomness (called "temperature") is added. In
| practice, the higher the temperature, the more probable is
| that a word down the list is selected, rather than the top
| one.
| williamstein wrote:
| Check out the temperature docs in the API reference manual:
| https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-
| reference/completions/c...
| archgrove wrote:
| I'm not an AI skeptic (this stuff will change the world), but I'm
| not as impressed as the author.
|
| The primary problem, which seems common to LLMs asked to do this
| stuff, is "very high level output" - a content smoothie, with few
| features that are particularly specific to the prompt. The
| marketing campaign in the OP is so generic, you can `s/Saturn
| Parable/Any other educational product` and it's still "fine".
| Similarly the emails - there are 1 to 2 sentences that are
| product specific, and a bunch of fluff. If I paid a marketing
| agency for this, I'd be very disappointed.
|
| The LLM isn't demonstrating much more than "Generic templating
| ability over a large range of templates" in this instance. Whilst
| that's probably 50% of the jobs in the world, such jobs were
| already at risk of someone searching for "Basic X template" and
| expanding the placeholders themselves. I think I could do a
| similar job in 30 minutes by doing exactly that.
|
| LLM's main wins seem to be providing a single unified entry point
| to all the templates in the universe. It's a "Universal UI",
| rather than a "Content creator". I guess I shouldn't discount the
| value of such a thing, once we get the "Sometimes it just lies"
| problem under control.
|
| The most interesting immediate thing here is the image generation
| - that's pretty good, and a big saving over scraping through
| stock images. I suspect the demise of stock image providers to be
| the first palpable win for generative AIs, if the copyright
| question doesn't bog this whole field down.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| This. Let me know when AI can write sales emails that convert
| better than emails written by the world's best copywriters.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| But why? Most people don't need the bar set that high. Most
| people just need B+ writing with half decent conversions.
|
| If you can get 80% of what you want with a cheap or free tool
| vs 100% with a full-time salaried employee/expensive
| freelancers, well, most people are going to pick the former.
|
| I do this as a video editor all the time. If I have a fast
| turnaround often times I will just drop a LUT or use auto
| color correction in my in NLE. Of course I will sand down the
| edges afterwards, but it's not like I'm going to give every
| single video that crosses my desk the full color grading
| treatment. Not everything requires that.
| SergeAx wrote:
| I am, for one, is preparing for an era of mediocre content in
| every field ML can be applied to.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| You note that this will change the world, but then talk about
| GPT-4 specifically.
|
| The leap from GPT-2 to 3 was enormous. 3 to 4 was enormous, and
| we're not even using 32k context yet nor image input. 4 to 5
| will likely be as disruptive if not more.
|
| This isn't about 4. We're in the iPhone 1 era of LLMs. This is
| about what the world will look like in one or two decades. And
| there's a good chance this comment might age poorly.
|
| That's a scary thought. I was skeptical of AI, and still am.
| But it seems undeniable that the world is in for a big
| awakening. This might be as big of a transformation to society
| as the introduction of microprocessors.
| eternalban wrote:
| You are working under an assumption that this tech is an O(n)
| or better computational regime.
|
| Ask ChatGPT: "Assume the perspective of an expert in CS and
| Deep Learning. What are the scaling characteristic (use LLMs
| and Transformer models if you need to be specific) of deep
| learning ? Expect answer in terms of Big O notation. Tabulate
| results in two rows, respectively "training" and "inference".
| For columns, provide scaling characteristic for CPU, IO,
| Network, Disk Space, and time. "
|
| This should get you big Os for n being the size of input
| (i.e. context size). You can then ask for follow up with n
| being the model size.
|
| Spoiler, the best scaling number in that entire estimate set
| is quadratic. Be "scared" when a breakthrough in model
| architecture and pipeline gets near linear.
| jasmer wrote:
| Decreasing marginal returns though.
|
| We were a bit blown away with 'Siri' - I mean, it could
| understand what you said, and 'get the weather'.
|
| I think we're going to start feeling the limits of this soon.
|
| It will be pervasive though.
| ben_w wrote:
| I wasn't impressed or motivated by the original iPhone when
| it was new.
|
| I don't know about the future, but by analogy with the past I
| would say that GPT-3 was the original iPhone (neat tech demo
| but I didn't really care), ChatGPT is the iPhone 3G, and
| GPT-4 is the 3GS.
|
| Looking at the sales graphs on Wikipedia (Q1 2012) I think it
| took until the 4S to transition from "the next big thing" to
| "the big thing".
|
| Analogies only rhyme rather than replicate, so don't assume
| GPT needs exactly two more versions to do the same; might be
| more, might be less, and Uncanny Valley might trigger a
| Butlerian Jihad at the last possible moment before fully-
| general AGI.
| ghaff wrote:
| I would have said the 3GS but, yeah, sometime around then.
|
| Similarly, the original iPod was a not obviously remarkable
| pocket music player in a fairly crowded field.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| > one or two decades
|
| More like one or two years at this rate.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Remember the crypto hype cycle?
| eli wrote:
| chatgpt has already provided more value to users than all
| crypto combined
| ChatGTP wrote:
| not if you're a teenager who is into using banned
| substances on the weekend
| UncleEntity wrote:
| When I was a teenager, back in the 80s, it didn't take
| magic internet money to buy drugs.
|
| In fact, every drug buy I ever heard of (second hand, of
| course) involved fiat currencies.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Source?
| dpkirchner wrote:
| What sort of source are you looking for? What would
| satisfy your question?
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| A source that quantifies value with cited examples and
| statistics. I ask because the crypto crowd argue there's
| utility and value there too.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| And how is that going? Died down? It's really amusing
| when I encounter tech savvy individuals who think crypto
| is hype, little do they realize it's stronger than ever
| and central bankers are becoming increasingly concerned.
| [deleted]
| UncleEntity wrote:
| Concerned the scams and fraud might bleed over into the
| real economy.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/03/24/federal-
| reserve-s...
|
| I don't think that's what they are actually worried
| about. I would also like to point out that the biggest
| scams, FTX for example, are simply traditional Ponzi
| schemes with a crypto front, they have all been executed
| entirely using regular banking systems and due to the
| incompetence of those regulators. Bitcoin itself is rock
| solid and constantly gaining users and influence.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| I invoked the crypto hype cycle, not crypto itself. Don't
| conflate the two topics of discussion.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Understood. However I'd still argue there is a reason for
| the hype and I believe that is the case with the GPT LLMs
| also.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| Except crypto lacked utility for most people, even early
| on.
|
| I've spent the last couple of days creating python
| scripts to automate parts of my business. I'm not a
| developer (though technical enough to help point GPT in
| the right direction sometimes when it's getting stuck on
| problems) and have written <100 lines of python in my
| life.
|
| I'm using image generation AI regularly to create images
| for my marketing emails, and when I've got writer's block
| it helps with the text too.
|
| Right now the iPhone 1 is a great analogy - it was cool
| but it was really subpar for using a lot of the internet,
| because it wasn't mobile optimized. GPT takes some
| coaxing to get it where you want, like you had to do a
| lot of pinching to zoom in on websites on your phone. In
| a few generations, this is going to be as seamless to use
| as the iPhone 5 was compared to the first gen.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Yet the decades will come.
|
| I think progress is sigmoidal rather than exponential, and
| it's very hard to tell the difference in the early stages.
| But even sigmoidal progress with smartphones was enough to
| completely upend online society. We adapted, of course, but
| it looks nothing like it did in 2003. We're all still using
| the internet; that's basically it.
|
| Point is, it could slow down, assuming that AGI isn't
| waiting like a cat in a corner. But it'll still displace a
| tremendous amount of intellectual work.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _This isn't about 4. We're in the iPhone 1 era of LLMs._
|
| Well, on the other hand, iPhone 14 isn't that different. Same
| how a 60s car and a modern Tesla aren't that different.
| Evolutionary marginally better yes. More convenient, yes. But
| nothing life changing or necessary. Which is why some folks
| can even get by reverting to a dumb phone (whereas they
| wouldn't dream of going pre-electricity or pre-antibiotics).
|
| Also, we were hearing the same about VR in the early 90s, and
| again in the mid 2010s. Still crickets.
| 14 wrote:
| The first iPhone didn't even take video out of the box.
| That is how I learned about jailbreaking because my phone
| company sold me video messaging on my plan and the phone
| didn't take videos! Lol. But if you jailbroke the phone you
| could get cycorder from Cydia and take videos.
|
| Yes there were other "smart" phones at the time but it
| truly felt like social media blew up in size with the
| introduction of the iPhone. And that was revolutionary.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Huh? The iPhone 1 was a toy and lots of people laughed at
| the users. Today a modern phone is a requirement to be a
| member of society. It is how I pay for things. It is needed
| for most of my interactions with friends/family. It is the
| diary of my life, and the repository of my good memories
| with its near unlimited video/image storage at a quality
| only dreamed of when the iPhone 1 came out. Take away a
| person's iPhone1 and they weren't phased much, taking away
| a person's iPhone 14 is a LIFE CHANGING experience today.
| In 10 years taking away your AI will be on the same level,
| you will function but at a much more frustrating level.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Huh? The iPhone 1 was a toy and lots of people laughed
| at the users._
|
| Nothing "toy" about it, it was the most advanced phone on
| the market. The people who laughed were just the handful
| of idiots that would laugh because "Apple, har har har"
| and then go buy the same thing from another vendor. The
| same kind of Zune buying crowd.
|
| > _Today a modern phone is a requirement to be a member
| of society._
|
| You'd be surprised.
|
| > _It is how I pay for things. It is needed for most of
| my interactions with friends /family. It is the diary of
| my life, and the repository of my good memories with its
| near unlimited video/image storage at a quality only
| dreamed of when the iPhone 1 came out._
|
| None of those are essential, even for a 21st century
| level lifestyle, some of those are indulgent, others are
| detrimental. In any case, nothing revolutionary, except
| if one thinks "I can pay by taking out my phone and
| pointing it at the gizmo at the cashier" is something far
| great than "I can pay by getting out my credit card and
| pointint it at the gizmo at the cashier" (or, god forbid,
| giving cash and not being tracked).
| pmontra wrote:
| The first iPhone was 2G when Europe had 3G since 2003. It
| didn't have copy and paste. It did have a touchscreen
| that no other phone had. It was basically and iPod touch
| with a phone and a 2G modem. My Nokia N70 was a better
| phone. I waited 4 years to buy a phone with a
| touchscreen. Then I thought they were mature enough I
| bought a Samsung S2.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _It didn 't have copy and paste._
|
| Most people in 2006, just before the iPhone came out,
| didn't have copy and paste either. They still typed T9
| style like it was 1996.
| alt227 wrote:
| >Nothing "toy" about it, it was the most advanced phone
| on the market.
|
| In no way was the original iphone the most advanced phone
| on the market. Many other smartphones before it and at
| the time were way more advanced in features and what they
| could do. What the first iPhone did was make it easy and
| accessible to everybody, not just nerds. That was the
| killer feature which made it take over the world.
| coldtea wrote:
| There was no usable web browsing on a phone before the
| iPhone. It had the most advanced browser.
|
| There was no iPod level music players on a phone before
| the iPhone. There were crappy music players you can
| revisit and compare.
|
| Mail apps on phones were crap.
|
| Messaging was crap, in tiny little screens.
|
| Just a few things.
|
| People reviewing and getting the iPhone the time was
| wowed and think of it like magic. It's people not having
| it, and dismissing it outhand because it had a touch
| screen or because their unusable Windows ME phone had
| some crappy third party software that didn't get it. Of
| course all of those got either the iPhone or an Android
| clone of it very soon and never looked back.
| gcanyon wrote:
| I had a Sidekick, and it had a semi-reasonable browser.
| But clearly, the iPhone was much better.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| This is wrong. I waited in line for mine. It was quite
| clearly a toy. It was a cool but barely usable tech demo
| and it was completely outclassed in features and
| usefulness by contemporary devices like the Motorola Q.
|
| It showed the way forward, but it was a frustratingly
| limited device and everyone around at the time recognized
| that immediately.
| ghaff wrote:
| Both the iPhone and the iPod arguably took a few
| generations to really hit their stride. I had a fairly
| new Treo in 2007 and I just didn't see any compelling
| reason to upgrade until the 3GS. I had nothing against
| Apple (I owned a 4G iPod). I just didn't have a
| compelling reason to upgrade. Verizon also probably had a
| better network at the time around where I lived and
| traveled.
| californical wrote:
| I feel like my life would be less convenient without my
| phone, but I'd also probably be happier. So idk. There
| are easy alternatives, like using the website on a
| laptop, you just can't pay your bills on the train
| without a smartphone..
|
| I'm actually getting rid of the cell-phone plan on my
| iPhone, keeping it as WiFi only, and getting a dumb phone
| for calls. It may suck but I'm trying it as a 6 month
| experiment, so we'll see!
| 14 wrote:
| I used an iPad the same way for a couple years with no
| problems. I have internet with Shaw and they have city
| wide hot spots so I really could get internet access
| basically anywhere in town. Now there are lots of voip
| phone providers you can easily get a number and use it to
| talk with people.
| azov wrote:
| Exactly. iPhone was a toy, 20th century internet was a
| toy, electricity was a toy.
|
| On the other hand nuclear fusion, self-driving cars, and
| bitcoin were the things to change the world as we know it
| in the next decade or so.
|
| Things that change the world tend to be hard to recognize
| as such when we first see them.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| microprocessors? Geoffrey Hinton(I think that's his first
| name), the grandfather of ai recently said this is like the
| invention of the wheel, agriculture, or electricity.
|
| ie even more foundational for everything that's coming in the
| future. ai will be as essential as electricity.
| hattmall wrote:
| This sentiment pops up with most somewhat new technology, but
| in my experience the plateaus come quickly. Going with the
| iphone. The first was transformative, and it continued to
| improve but the functional difference between iPhone 4 to
| iPhone 14 is not that great. Think of the wow factor of
| showing one or the other to someone from 100 years ago.
| agent281 wrote:
| I think it's an open question how much better the LLMs will
| get. However, we should expect adoption and integration to
| radically transform their usage. Who knows what the Google
| Maps of LLMs will be.
| [deleted]
| thethimble wrote:
| The entrenchment of smartphones in society dramatically
| increased between iPhone 4 and 14. Technical capability is
| just one axis.
|
| Still, I think LLMs are different than phones in terms of
| scaling. Faster processor speeds don't necessarily result
| in more user value for phones, but scaling up LLMs seem to
| predictability improve performance/accuracy.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _scaling up LLMs seem to predictability improve
| performance /accuracy._
|
| Isn't this always the case before hitting diminishing
| returns?
| macrolime wrote:
| There are no signs of diminishing returns just yet
| though, and no one knows if that will be at GPT-5 or
| GPT-5000. I suspect the performance will keep increasing
| drastically at least until we have a model that's been
| trained with essentially all available text, video and
| audio data. Who knows what will happen after we have
| something that's been trained on all of YouTube. After
| this maybe we (or an AI) will have figured out how to
| keep improving without any more data.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _There are no signs of diminishing returns just yet
| though_
|
| Sure about that? GTP-4 doesn't seem 5 times better than
| 3, much less 10x. Despite having 5/10x the parameters.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| yeah it is, gpt3 scored in the 80th percentile for the
| bar, gpt4 scored top 20 percentile and is much better at
| math, plus having 4x the context alone gives it much more
| power.
|
| it's just it's different in capabilities. chatgpt
| delivers different results and both have unique
| characteristics.
|
| gpt4 being able to not only create images but also
| decipher what's in then is another huge advancement.
|
| Gen2 another ai can create amazing videos from a text
| prompt. Any director or film maker wannabe with more
| prowess on creating the story than filming it, can now
| just use ai to create the film from their vision.
|
| even more exciting is the speed that things are
| progressing. it was supposed to take 8 years to get
| chatGPT quality training down to 400k price instead of
| millions. Stanford did it in 6 weeks with llama and
| alpaca. it can run for under 600 or slower on home PCs.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >but scaling up LLMs seem to predictability improve
| performance/accuracy.
|
| what exactly is performance/accuracy in slogan
| generation?
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Analyzing thousands of trends, both industry/niche
| specific and society wide. Tracking campaigns that work
| by monitoring social media likes, references to past
| slogans, etc. Potentially dedicating thousands of years
| worth of brain power and analysis to the coffee shop down
| the street's new slogan.
| je42 wrote:
| gpt does a lot more than slogans...
|
| currently using it like driving a junior programmer.
|
| after gpt has written some functions to my specs in
| natural language. I can say for example: - "add unit
| tests". It writes for all functions tests. Not perfect
| but not bad for short instruction like this. - rewrite x
| to include y etc
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| the original post way back was talking about marketing,
| they were underwhelmed. I recently generated some
| slogans. They sucked.
|
| When someone mentioned predictability/accuracy how does
| that apply to marketing slogans. I know how it applies to
| writing unit tests. The unit tests writing comes pretty
| close to the original posters definition of GPT as
| filling out templates. The sucky slogans I got were also
| very template like.
|
| Would accuracy be if slogans did not suck?
|
| At any rate there seems to be a lot of things people want
| to use it for where the terms accuracy / predictability
| don't make much sense. So making claims based on those
| qualities naturally causes me to ask how do they apply to
| all these cases - such as slogan generation where
| accuracy predictability are not normally metrics that
| apply.
| clankyclanker wrote:
| It's interesting how well your description follows the
| Gartner Hype Cycle, but applied to products instead of hype
| itself:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
| bitwize wrote:
| I have a sinking suspicion we're not in the iPhone era of
| LLMs, we're in the "in mice" era of LLMs. I can't elucidate
| why, but this strikes me as the sort of thing that could
| either blow up (like the iPhone) or fizzle out (like
| Theranos), or blow up and _then_ fizzle out (like crypto).
| And it 's too early to know yet which it'll be. Hackernews is
| making lots of change-everything predictions, but Hackernews
| was like that about Theranos, crypto, and self-driving cars
| too.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > 3 to 4 was enormous... This isn't about 4. We're in the
| iPhone 1 era of LLMs.
|
| GPT3 is great, but I can't reasonably say that 4 is such a
| huge advance over 3 in my experience so far. Apparently it's
| better at some things according to the marketing, but for
| actual usage I can't qualitatively say 4 is an "enormous"
| advance over 3. It seems to face the same major shortcomings,
| and it produces qualitatively the same results.
|
| That brings me to the iPhone bit. Yes, the iPhone was a huge
| advance, but today looking at an iPhone 14, it largely has
| the same form/function/features as early iPhones. If you
| looked at the trajectory of iPhones in 2005, you'd conclude
| that in 2023 they would be 1mm think and transparent with a
| holodisplay or something. But instead, in the year 2023, my
| iPhone 14 looks and functions largely like my old iPhone 4. I
| mean, it does more stuff better, but I'm still using it to
| browse the net, text, take pictures, and use the maps app --
| the same stuff that made the original iPhone revolutionary.
| croes wrote:
| Wasn't the leap from GPT-2 to GPT-3 bigger than from GPT-3 to
| GPT-4?
|
| Like self driving cars, the leap were enormous until they hit
| a wall and we still don't have full self driving
| UncleEntity wrote:
| If someone were to ask me (which nobody ever does) GPT-4
| was more about cashing in on the hypetrain than pushing the
| boundaries.
|
| A little better but a lot "safer" to cut down on the
| articles on how it's trying to steal someone's man.
| macrolime wrote:
| The first few days I didn't think there was much
| difference, but after using GPT-4 a lot I think the leap is
| huge. For things where I would previously use Stack
| Overflow or some other Stack Exchange, I now use GPT-4 and
| get a working answer almost every single time, with GPT-3.5
| the frequency of working answers was much smaller.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _If I paid a marketing agency for this, I 'd be very
| disappointed._
|
| You'd be. Most people wouldn't even notice or care, whether
| it's the ones paying the marketing agency, or the ones being
| shown the content as potential customers.
| ozim wrote:
| I would like to follow up on "Universal UI" where with
| Microsoft including this stuff in Office 365 it will kill all
| kinds of apps/plugins.
|
| This is huge and as a software developer I am now not worried
| that GPT or AI will write code instead of me.
|
| Big change will be that big companies/small companies/average
| people won't need as many applications anymore. Software devs
| as I read various comments fixate on "AI writing code" too
| much, where real threat will be that lots of code will never be
| needed anymore.
| SanderNL wrote:
| Do not underestimate the enormous amount of dysfunctional
| logic in the non-dev population. You don"t code what they
| ask, you code what they need. That doesn't change with AI, it
| gets worse.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> real threat will be that lots of code will never be needed
| anymore._
|
| That's a very good point.
|
| Also, I am working in a very small team, developing a free
| app, for a nonprofit.
|
| I will be suggesting to our CEO, that he consider ways to use
| AI to multiply the various things we need to do, in order to
| polish and launch the app.
|
| We have a tiny, part-time team (except for Yours Truly), so
| there's a _ton_ of "polishing the fenders" stuff that takes
| forever. I will suggest that he consider using ChatGPT (or
| some of the other engines) to do some of this work.
| kfrzcode wrote:
| Why not just... Use ChatGPT and get the work done
| tmountain wrote:
| Go create a "system" with GPT. You're going to see a ton
| of, "I'm sorry, you're right, the SQL statement is
| referencing a column that doesn't exist." Etc...
|
| Right now, it's amazing for getting some boilerplate very
| quickly (so is create-react-app, etc).
|
| It's bad at context as the problem grows and very bad at
| subtle nuances.
|
| Working with GPT today is like having a super fast and
| somewhat sloppy developer sitting next to you.
|
| "Shipping" anything it creates means a LOT of review to
| make sure no false assumptions are present.
|
| I have been "writing code" with it nonstop for weeks now.
|
| Yes, it's incredible, but it also has serious limitations
| (at least for now).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Go create a "system" with GPT. You're going to see a
| ton of, "I'm sorry, you're right, the SQL statement is
| referencing a column that doesn't exist." Etc...
|
| So, you don't mean "create a 'system'", you mean use the
| UI to talk with ChatGPT about creating a system, rather
| than using the API and connecting it to tools so it can
| build the system, verify its behavior, and get feedback
| that way rather than through conversation with a human
| user?
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I wonder if there is a way to get chatgpt to check its
| own work. It has been useful as a method to find new
| literature for science, but the occasional completely
| made up references can be frustrating.
| curiousObject wrote:
| You can ask it to check its work, or to do the same task
| three times and compare them.
|
| But these error checks still have similar errors and
| hallucinations to the basic output, from my personal
| experience
|
| It's not obvious that this recycling refines the output
|
| Try this for yourself
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| If you think so. It seems many people think this.
|
| Time will tell, if this PoV is valid. I can tell you that
| a flashy, sexy demo, is _not_ the same thing as shipping
| code.
|
| A number of comments state that the quality of the output
| is fairly sparse, and amateurish, but this was also a
| very fast, thirty-minute demo of a marketing workflow,
| subjected to basic AI tools.
|
| This article was the equivalent of those "Write an app in
| two hours" seminar/bootcamps.
|
| Valid, but also constrained by the need to teach, and to
| get done within a certain amount of time. Very strict
| guardrails, and keep your hands inside the car at all
| times.
|
| I have taken many, many of these courses, and have given
| a few. I'm quite aware of the difference between what we
| produce in a class, and what I'd hand to a customer.
|
| What I think we'll be seeing, quite soon, is "one-person
| shops," acting as studios/agencies that will take on jobs
| normally done by large shops.
|
| Like bootcamp babes that go out, thinking that they can
| now deliver a full-fat app to customers, many will fail.
|
| But some will succeed. Lots of smart, hungry people, out
| there.
|
| We'll look at what can be done with these tools (which, I
| should add, are still very much in their infancy. You
| ain't seen nuthin', yet). I don't think they'll be able
| to write the deliverables, yet, but that's OK. I think we
| may be able to leverage them to make those deliverables
| much more polished and robust.
| kfrzcode wrote:
| I mean if the work could get done without ChatGPT then
| it's not getting done with ChatGPT any magnitude faster
| but it may help reduce the intervallic brain farts by
| being able to ask more than stack overflow has db results
| for
| belter wrote:
| Don't forget the CEO might ask who will fix the bugs in
| the app...
| broast wrote:
| Some people have made a career out of being good at
| reading, debugging, and fixing complex incoherent code
| that was written by other people. I imagine those will
| thrive in the near future.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I suspect that AI will become fairly good at bug-testing
| and fixing.
|
| I would not be surprised to see AI testing and
| diagnostics, integrated into IDEs.
|
| For example, UI testing. Right now, it's next to
| worthless, as it's basically scripting and screengrab
| analysis.
|
| An AI tester can do a _much_ better job of simulating a
| user, and analyzing the behavior of the app. Of course,
| it will be a real skill to set up the boundaries and
| heuristics for the testing, but it could be very cool.
|
| I suspect that AI will also find a place in security;
| both in hardening and red-team testing, and in blackhat
| probing.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| You're missing a huge market that just opened up. Writing
| "plugins" for ChatGPT. Given an API GPT-4 can now use it to
| complete various tasks. They've shown a demo of it using a
| search command and a calc command but there is no limit to
| what these could be. Better dust off those CLI skills since
| you'll mostly be dealing with text input and output.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Not sure CLI skills are relevant, seems like OpenAI is
| pushing for JSON rest apis. Maybe because that's what GPT-4
| has seen more of.
| thunky wrote:
| > OpenAI is pushing for JSON rest api
|
| Which is probably one of the easiest types of code to
| autogenerate.
|
| In fact we already have tools to generate apis from a
| model. And a model could be produced by ai given human
| (language) inputs.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| I mean you say that but this is the kind of shit work that 99%
| of the population does.
|
| Look at the reddit UI, do you really think that it's better
| than something GPT could toss out in 10 minutes?
| msm_ wrote:
| > Look at the reddit UI, do you really think that it's better
| than something GPT could toss out in 10 minutes?
|
| Is this some kind of a joke? I'm pretty sure whole Reddit's
| UI team can't be replaced by GPT.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Whether or not they could, I'm pretty sure they should.
| fooker wrote:
| These are different statements.
| hawski wrote:
| Isn't Reddit's UI hostile by design?
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| yes! I doubt chatgpt in it's current form can run A/B tests
| to make a design that meets reddit's goals
| pojzon wrote:
| Looking at their downtime manifesto from few days ago -
| chatgpt would probably spit out a better infra design in
| like 5m...
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| > The primary problem, which seems common to LLMs asked to do
| this stuff, is "very high level output" - a content smoothie,
| with few features that are particularly specific to the prompt.
| The marketing campaign in the OP is so generic, you can
| `s/Saturn Parable/Any other educational product` and it's still
| "fine". Similarly the emails - there are 1 to 2 sentences that
| are product specific, and a bunch of fluff. If I paid a
| marketing agency for this, I'd be very disappointed.
|
| a) no-one's telling you to just throw the AI output up on to a
| website unedited, b) does it not give you at least a bit of
| pause how quickly this is advancing right now?
| logifail wrote:
| > no-one's telling you to just throw the AI output up on to a
| website unedited
|
| Is there a genuine problem that we're solving here?
|
| "Quickly and cheaply create a large volume of mediocre
| content" will definitely appeal to certain entrepreneurial
| types, but were we actually short of mediocre content? What
| genuine problem are we solving?
|
| Apart from a further lowering of the bar for certain
| entrepreneurial types to get rich(er) faster, that is.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| [flagged]
| wokwokwok wrote:
| > The article you're commenting on is only a very surface
| level use of AI tools.
|
| This really is the problem.
|
| Where are the example of people spending actual
| considerable amounts of time using these tools to
| generate meaningful content? Why are articles like this
| one being upvoted instead?
|
| If what you say is true, shouldn't we be seeing a flood
| of amazing stuff created using this tech? Where is it
| all?
|
| Serious question. I can't find any.
|
| Where's "awesome made by gpt"?
|
| Every search result is this kind of low bar "I spent zero
| effort and got some kind of mediocre output and was
| amazed!"
|
| When the effort to create content like this drops to zero
| (and let's be real, spending _30 minutes_ using gpt and
| documenting the results is _really_ basically zero
| effort), I'm frankly pretty bummed to see this rising to
| the top of HN.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| When's the last time you built, shipped and wrote an
| article about an amazing product in less than 2 weeks? 4
| months? That's how new these technologies are and you'd
| have had to be using them and building a produce with
| them from day 1 for those timelines to pan out. Give it a
| year and there'll be so many articles you'll be using
| GPT-4 to summarize them so you can read them all.
| Jevon23 wrote:
| On the one hand, GPT-4 has only been out for two weeks.
| Give it time.
|
| On the other hand, if someone is going to claim that
| GPT-4 can make awesome things all by itself, instead of
| just toy demos and mediocre content - then they should be
| prepared to defend their claim with examples. Otherwise
| it's just speculation.
| josephg wrote:
| I think it might be like makeup and plastic surgery. When
| it's done well, you don't notice it.
|
| I was talking to someone the other day who maintains the
| social media presence for a motorbike repair shop. She's
| already using chatgpt to help her "simplify" the language
| she posts on Facebook to their customers. Another person
| I know is an academic. She just busted a dozen or so of
| her students for using chatgpt to cheat at a university
| assignment. (She caught students cheating by checking the
| references - chatgpt hallucinated a lot of fake papers).
|
| I wonder how much content from chatgpt we're already
| consuming regularly. How many comments here on HN or
| articles are written by it? When it's done well, how
| would you know?
| mattmanser wrote:
| This is just a get rich quick scheme advert, flagged.
| atonse wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. It's exactly what I was curious
| about, how to get in the head of a good prompt engineer.
|
| Because I've been playing with it and in some areas been
| blown away, and others (like help me organize my week)
| underwhelmed.
|
| But I know where ever I've been underwhelmed, it's
| extremely likely I just gave it insufficient input.
|
| Using this, I want to help it organize my day, week,
| month.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| quantity has a quality all its own.
| archgrove wrote:
| A fair sized pause, sure. But if the argument is "Don't throw
| it up unedited", and what it provides me is bare bones
| generic/junior stuff, I'm not sure of the huge win _at this
| point in time_. The world wasn't short of "Generic low grade
| copy" templates before LLMs. It just saves a few steps in the
| copy /paste.
|
| Of course, GPT5...
| barking_biscuit wrote:
| >Of course, GPT5...
|
| I'm not sure GPT5 will feel appreciably different on this
| type of task necessarily. GPT-4 feels a lot like GPT-3 for
| a pretty wide variety of things, but it's when you get
| higher complexity tasks that you start to see differences.
| pmontra wrote:
| > If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very
| disappointed.
|
| But you didn't. You paid only a few cents. You're probably not
| using it for a million dollars ad campaign but many people
| could use it to make their communications look better in less
| time. Same thing as using a stock PowerPoint template instead
| of paying an agency to create one. Good enough for most of us.
| rybosworld wrote:
| "I suspect the demise of stock image providers to be the first
| palpable win for generative AIs, if the copyright question
| doesn't bog this whole field down"
|
| I'm surprised the copyright issues aren't given more attention.
| It's technically not legal (in the US) to modify copyrighted
| images without the authors permission. I don't see how it's
| possible that systems like DALL-E haven't already done that.
| There's a near 0% chance that they aren't trained on at least
| one copyrighted image.
| Joeri wrote:
| Isn't it just fair use? Reading the four factor test for fair
| use it seems like these generative models should be able to
| pass the test, if each artwork contributes only a small part
| to a transformative model that generates novel output. The
| onus will be on demonstrating that the model does not
| reproduce works wholesale on demand, which currently they
| sometimes still do.
|
| Arguably also, the copy is achieved at generation time, not
| training time, so the copyright violation is not in making
| the model or distributing it, but in using it to create
| copies of artworks. The human artist is the same: in their
| brain is encoded the knowledge to create forbidden works, but
| it is only the act of creating the work which is illegal, not
| the ability. The model creators might still be liable for
| contributory infringement though.
|
| Anyway, I reject the notion that any use of unlicensed
| copyrighted works in training models is wrong. That to me
| seems like the homeopathic theory of copyright, it's just
| silly. If copyright works that way we might as well put a
| cross over AGI ever being legal.
| rybosworld wrote:
| Should the model be allowed to train on the copyrighted
| image in the first place? I think, the answer is no. If I'm
| an artist, I don't volunteer my art for you to do what you
| please.
|
| Now consider that these systems are already being used for
| profit, before this matter has even been settled.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Getty's case is active in the court system in multiple
| jurisdictions, until we get there outcome of that weren't not
| going to have a resolution of this. Unless countries
| legislate/decide to allow training on publicly accessible
| documents, eg as Fair Use/Fair Dealing or whatever.
|
| In short, the copyright issues appear to be given a lot of
| attention? Legal precedent takes time.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| This will take years for the courts to figure out. In the
| mean time, Adobe Firely has apparently not been trained on
| anything copyrighted, so people that are nervous about
| lawsuits will use that.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Humans photographers are also trained on copyrighted images.
|
| They look at countless numbers of them and learn what is the
| correct "professional style", etc. This is why you can
| instantly recognize most stock photos, because they all
| follow the "stock photo template".
| lukko wrote:
| This kind of 'training' is not at all equivalent. There's a
| reason copyright places value on the expression of an idea
| (i.e. taking the photo) - image-making is difficult and was
| a valuable skill, even for a stock photo.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Am I allowed to take an imagine and apply a lossy algorithm
| (say jpg) to it and then use it as my own for business
| purposes? Nope. You say learn, I say apply a lossy algo and
| then use the result for business purposes. Seems like clear
| copyright violation.
| rybosworld wrote:
| Copyright law doesn't work like that for photos. When you
| take a photo of something you become the owner of the
| image.
|
| In the context of AI, the issue is specifically with using
| a copyrighted image and creating something new based off of
| that. That is explicitly illegal for human artists.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| > something new based off of that
|
| But where do you draw the line? If AI imagines 3 people
| around a business table in front of a flip chart, is that
| copyright infringement on similar stock photos? Note that
| in the AI created image, the people are unique, they
| never existed, the business table is unique, the flip
| chart is unique, and in general you can't point to any
| existing photo it was trained over and say "it just
| copied this item here".
|
| If so, why isn't it also copyright infringement when a
| human photographer stages another similar shot?
| lancesells wrote:
| Why are you comparing a product that's powered by web
| scraping and GPUs and hundreds of millions of dollars to
| a human being? This is a product.
| lukko wrote:
| Then the AI is performing a sort of collage of
| copyrighted work and the AI / prompt writer would not own
| the copyright to the derivative work. If a photographer
| stages a photo based on an existing photo, and it shares
| enough features with the original work, it likely would
| be copyright infringement.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| The court has already ruled that you can't own the
| derivative work anyways, because copyright law requires
| an individual artist. If I ask bob to make a picture for
| me, bob actually owns the copyright to start (but can
| assign it to me). I don't automatically get given
| copyright because I 'prompted' bob with what I wanted
| drawn (draw me a mouse). Copyright is given to the artist
| on the artists specific output.
|
| If I ask an AI for a picture, there is no artist 'bob' to
| be assigned ownership under copyright law and therefor
| it's not copyrightable under existing law.
|
| Funny how originally all these pro-AI art people were
| anti-copyright law but I can see them sometime soon
| lobbying for MORE restrictive copyright law (granting it
| in a larger pool or circumstances hence making more
| things copyrighted) so that they can overcome this.
| rybosworld wrote:
| "But where do you draw the line"
|
| Well that's sort of the whole thing with copyright law.
| It's fairly arbitrary. Copyright specifically forbids
| derivative works: "A derivative work is a work based on
| or derived from one or more already exist- ing works."
|
| It's vague on purpose because copyright infringements
| generally need to be handled on a case by case basis.
|
| Now there are AI's trained on images that are
| copyrighted. If the image is copyrighted, should the AI
| have been allowed to train on it?
|
| The reason human training/inspiration isn't specifically
| forbidden is because it can't be. We are impressioned by
| things whether we like it or not. Regardless, we can't
| prove where someone's inspiration came from.
|
| But the act of training an AI on copyrighted images is
| deliberate. I feel that's a key difference.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > The reason human training/inspiration isn't
| specifically forbidden is because it can't be. We are
| impressioned by things whether we like it or not.
| Regardless, we can't prove where someone's inspiration
| came from.
|
| And there's plenty of cases that say if you're _too_
| inspired, that 's illegal and/or you own
| damagaes/royalties.
|
| https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/case-study/blurred-
| lines-...
| sgk284 wrote:
| It is not illegal for a human to look at something
| another human created and learn composition, strokes,
| lighting, etc... and then apply it to their own future
| creations. This is all the AI is doing.
| lukko wrote:
| It's hugely different - imagine the number of decisions a
| person makes when making an oil-painting - each stroke is
| somewhat influenced by past experience but also by the
| current state of the painting, their emotional state etc.
| The AI is just directly interpolating based on past
| input.
|
| Making the two processes equivalent is very reductive.
| rybosworld wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| Taking copyrighted images and dumping them into a machine
| learning model is deliberate usage. The AI isn't a
| person, so it doesn't draw on past experience by
| happenstance.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| Still AI is just a tool. It's like saying I could draw in
| the style of another author, but only if I do it in a
| parchment.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| AI is just a lossy form of storing the copyrighted work
| and using pieces of the copyrighted work for future
| output. It definitely requires licensing of the works
| stored (I mean 'trained on')used if used outside of
| 'personal use'. I can't just re-compress a tons of
| pictures into crappy jpg format and then use them however
| I'd like. I also can't just come up with a new format for
| machine storing copyrighted images to be used for
| creating derivative works, call it AI, and say it's
| 'different'. The AI company has to be able to prove in a
| court of law it could have generated the image if it
| hadn't been trained on my copyrighted work. We already
| covered this area of law with sampling in music. If you
| didn't want to continue over ownership of the work from
| the owner of the 'sample' you either license it or....
| don't use it.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Yes, it can be illegal. It happens plenty of time in
| music, where artists produce songs which are too similar
| to previously existing songs, and owe damages.
| lancesells wrote:
| The AI is a product created by a company. A vacuum
| sucking up the scraped remnants of the internet. Hundreds
| of millions of dollars are spent to pull this off. Stop
| acting like this is a human or anything resembling one.
| This is a product and not a person.
| miohtama wrote:
| It's explicitly allowed to create new based on
| photographs, assuming the resulting work is not similar
| with the original
|
| > For example: if they base their painting on an oft
| photographed or painted location, generic subject matter,
| or an image that has been taken by numerous photographers
| they would likely not be violating copyright law.
|
| > However: if they create their painting, illustration or
| other work of art from a specific photograph or if your
| photography is known for a particular unique style, and
| their images are readily identifiable with you as the
| photographer, and an artist copies one of your
| photographic compositions or incorporates your
| photographic style into their painting or illustration
| they may be liable for copyright infringement.
|
| https://www.thelawtog.com/blogs/news/what-do-i-do-if-
| someone...
|
| Because AI rarely recreates images 1:1 it is unlikely the
| violate any copyrights.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| "incorporates your photographic style into their painting
| or illustration"
|
| Seems pretty cut and paste to me. If it has trained on my
| images and then uses that trained dataset to generate new
| images those images are in violation. Using training sets
| that include unlicensed copyrighted works requires
| attribution and licensing. TO be legal otherwise the end
| user/AI company would have to be able to prove in a court
| of law that without training on my copyrighted work it
| would have still generated that specific image which I
| can't see the users/company being able to do.
| miohtama wrote:
| > Using training sets that include unlicensed copyrighted
| works requires attribution and licensing
|
| Is there a rulingn for this? This would be similar as
| using a school book requires attribution and licensing
| for your education.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| Style cannot be copyrighted. It's perfectly legal for my
| to draw something in the style of another author.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| The difference is that AI models so closely recapitulate
| specific features in copyrighted images that stock image
| company watermarks show through [0]. This is several levels
| beyond a human artist implicitly getting inspiration from
| copyrighted images, and more on the level of that artist
| explicitly copy/pasting specific pixels from them.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32573523
| kfrzcode wrote:
| Is more like human than copy paste. Read about how it
| works first please
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| The models are probabilistic, they replicate the most
| common features that they've seen. Guess what shows up in
| a lot of images?
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| That's exactly my point -- they replicate highly specific
| features in images with such fidelity that their training
| is not analogous to humans' artistic inspiration.
| vanviegen wrote:
| How is the ai supposed to know these watermarks aren't a
| style element? They're present in tens of thousands of
| input images, after all. Therefore, I'd say this is a bad
| example of an AI literally copying from one specific
| source. It's similar to it using Arial letters: they're
| everywhere in the source data.
| kgwgk wrote:
| > How is the ai supposed to know these watermarks aren't
| a style element?
|
| Because of the "i".
| literalAardvark wrote:
| The i stands for imagination/ignorance at the moment.
| Intelligence (or something indistinguishable from it)
| doesn't seem too far away but isn't here yet.
|
| So all we have is a dumb bot that can appropriate styles
| and ideas. Revolutionary, but not quite to the extent
| needed to sue it for copyright.
| gcanyon wrote:
| I don't think "templates" is a good descriptor to use here,
| since the number of required templates is beyond any reasonable
| number. Just taking 10,000 words, there are 10^40 possible ten-
| word sentences. A ridiculous percentage of those are nonsense,
| but even if that fraction is 0.000000000000000001%, that leaves
| 10^20 sentences to template for, which no modern computer can
| accommodate for.
|
| I'm not sure what a better metaphor is; each thing I consider
| ends up defaulting back to what a ML model actually is, without
| really "metaphoring" at all. But not templates.
| bgroat wrote:
| This is where I landed too.
|
| GPT generated "ideas" strike as wanting to use a swipe file.
| Only instead of it being full of persuasive, high-performing
| marketing materials.. it's just fast and prolific
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The most immediate practical result might be that online
| product reviews written by AI will be indistinguishable from
| those written by humans, essentially making online reviews
| useless to consumers as a source of reliably independent
| information about various products and services.
|
| On the other hand, perhaps AI could help with due diligence
| types of inquiries from an independent standpoint? A real-time
| online AI research assistant with web scraping capabilities
| would be interesting.
| theK wrote:
| That's not completely correct. The review world is roughly
| splittable in two broad categories, the "expert person"
| variant (think fro-knows-photo) and marketplace reviews (the
| reviews you can find on amazon, etc).
|
| Marketplace reviews are well guardable in terms of that you
| need to have an account there that purchased the same sku.*
|
| Expert person reviews are based on trust. There is a
| destructive correlations between spaming Ai reviews and
| creating a valuable brand as an expert person. So you cannot
| really do a hard play on ai here, maybe a soft one but that
| would arguably be just "going with the times".
|
| * Some might ask "why does amazon still have issues with
| review spam?" Answer is that amazon actually has a pretty
| firm grip on it, nonetheless the marketplace's incentives
| seem to be such that some slippage is acceptable/helpful for
| them.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| One little wrinkle I will add to your point, which is a very
| good one just so we're clear, is that with chat GPT it does
| away with needing to know how to ask your questions, where to
| find your answers, how to implement them, etc.
|
| I can literally tell it "write me basic code to do 'x,' now
| explain how to add it to my squarespace site." In many cases it
| will just spit out exactly what to do. As we all know, part of
| knowing how to do your job well is knowing how to find answers.
| In some ways chat GPT makes that step even easier. At least in
| the use cases I have found so far.
| naasking wrote:
| > If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very
| disappointed.
|
| A marketing agency would have spent at least a few weeks
| gathering specific information about your company, the article
| allotted two minutes.
|
| How many more minutes would you need to devote to giving
| ChatGPT more specific information before it could match the
| marketing agency's output? Not weeks surely. What's the cost
| difference in both time and money? Multiple orders of
| magnitude.
| vharuck wrote:
| >I guess I shouldn't discount the value of such a thing, once
| we get the "Sometimes it just lies" problem under control.
|
| Considering the model doesn't "think" or understand abstract
| concepts, could we ever expect this?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The model does think but only when you tell it to think out
| loud.
|
| This is less a weird quirk of the training data or a One
| Weird Trick That Makes Your Matricies Sentient, and more a
| limitation of the model architecture. Neural networks do not
| have the capability to implement 'for loops', the only
| looping construct is the process that runs the model
| repeatedly on each token. When you tell the model to "think
| out loud", you're telling it to use prior tokens as for loop
| state.
|
| Another limitation is that the model can't backtrack. That
| is, if it says something wrong, that lie is now set in stone
| and it can't jump back and correct it, so you get confidently
| wrong behavior. I have to wonder if you could just tell the
| model to pretend it has a backspace button, so that it could
| still see the wrong data and avoid the pitfalls it dropped
| into before.
| dTal wrote:
| I have yet to hear a definition of "think" or "understand"
| for which this is true.
| rmahan wrote:
| More training data and token lengths seem to help, given how
| GPT-4 scores better on a lot of standardized tests than 3 and
| 3.5 do.
|
| We don't necessarily need to teach it not to lie, but just to
| improve accuracy through better training and training data.
| It (probably) won't ever be 100% reliable, but what is?
| Google searches can be inaccurate, same with Wikipedia and
| other encyclopedias.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| LinkedIn has started pushing generated content it would like me
| to edit, I think they said they use ChatGPT. All of the content
| is "okay" but there's no depth, out of the handful of articles
| I read they both had a section that repeated an earlier idea
| but with different buzzwords.
|
| I agree, it's impressive how it can generate readable text that
| provides an overview of an idea. But the overview misses key
| points, or highlights things that aren't really central. For a
| lot of things, doing something simple like reading a Wikipedia
| page is likely more productive.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's pretty much what I've found when I'used it to try
| writing articles. They're mostly not wrong. But they lack
| nuance, examples, links, research references, quotes, depth,
| etc. They're generally shallow and formulaic. Might I
| consider using one as a stub to get me started? Sure. On the
| other hand, that means I need to deliberately break out from
| the formula. I'm not sure how much time it would save me at
| the end of the day but I may give it a try on something real
| one of these days.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I'm looking forward to people being hired to edit ChatGPT
| output... and watching them prompt ChatGPT itself, or another
| AI model, to do their work for them.
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