[HN Gopher] Most of my skills are now worth nothing, but 10% are...
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Most of my skills are now worth nothing, but 10% are worth 1000x
Author : gHeadphone
Score : 328 points
Date : 2023-04-19 13:19 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tidyfirst.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tidyfirst.substack.com)
| tr33house wrote:
| you really got me there
| bushido wrote:
| I have been using ChatGPT pretty consistently for various
| summarization type of tasks for a bit.
|
| But this weekend I tried using it to learn a technical concept
| I've struggled with. Previously, I could have spoken about the
| topic intelligently, but could not have put it to any practical
| use.
|
| In a few quick prompts and < 1 hr of synthesis, I was able to get
| to practical knowledge to understand it enough to try and build
| something from scratch. And building something in another 2-3
| hours.
|
| I think this would have taken me 1-2 months of dedicate hitting
| my head on the wall time to learn previously.
|
| In that moment, I had a realization similar to the author.
|
| Basic flow of the prompt went something like: 1.
| Tell me about this thing that's part of the concept that I don't
| understand? 2. Explain this new term you threw at me?
| Do it in the context on an industry I understand well.
| 3. Explain yet another concept you mentioned in the same industry
| concept? 4. This sounds a lot like this other concept
| I know. How do these differ in practical use? 5. Write
| me some sample code in a language I understand very well, that
| does X use case the you mentioned? 6. What are these
| other concepts you used? 7. How can I do this new
| concept to do something I've implemented before.
|
| Essentially, my knowledge of other concepts, industries and being
| able to draw parallels allowed me to learn much much faster.
| FredPret wrote:
| This is exactly what I do as well. I make it generate sample
| code, ask it lots of "why" questions, ask it to help with the
| bugs. You can learn a huge amount in record time. Is this the
| end of Stackoverflow?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > This sounds a lot like this other concept I know. How do
| these differ in practical use?
|
| How did you test the answer it gave you?
|
| It sounds like the end product is code, which is testable, so
| maybe it's moot. But that type of question is not useful in my
| experience because you can't really disprove it's answer. It's
| also a leading question. It might not be similar to that other
| thing at all, but ChatGPT would manufacture something in that
| case.
| marak830 wrote:
| This has been my experience as well. Also, I'm less afraid to
| ask the stupid questions, as I would be if asking a more
| experienced dev.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| I have recently spent a lot of time reading the USB 2.0
| specification and figuring out a race condition I've been
| experiencing that turned out to actually be a deficiency of the
| spec itself.
|
| Just for fun, I asked ChatGPT about it. This is its answer:
|
| > According to the USB 2.0 specification, a remote wakeup event
| can be initiated by a USB device in a suspended state to
| request the host to resume communication with the device. The
| device sends a remote wakeup signal to its hub, which then
| forwards the signal to the host.
|
| > However, if the upstream port of the hub is in the process of
| being suspended, the remote wakeup signal from the downstream
| device may not be received by the host. This is because the
| hub's upstream port is no longer able to forward the signal to
| the host during the suspension process.
|
| > As a result, the remote wakeup event may fail, and the
| downstream device may remain in a suspended state indefinitely.
| To avoid this race condition, the USB 2.0 specification
| recommends that downstream devices wait for a certain period
| before sending a remote wakeup signal to their hubs to ensure
| that the hub's upstream port is not being suspended.
|
| It sounds as if it made perfect sense, except to know that it
| actually completely doesn't you have to spend hours reading the
| spec first.
|
| We're going to see a huge spike of confidently wrong "experts"
| if they learn by asking ChatGPT to explain things to them.
| keid wrote:
| Last line, absolutely correct. Spew super-superficially-
| plausible nonsense to technical questions. Tell it it's wrong
| and it will either (or both) spew only superficially
| plausible nonsense and apologize that it was wrong.
|
| Right now it's a great party trick and no more, IMO. And if
| one gets into more "sociological" questions it spews 1/3
| factoids scraped from the web, 1/3 what could only be called
| moralizing, and 1/3 vomit-inducing PC/woke boilerplate. My
| only lack of understanding of its training is how the latter
| 2/3 were programmed in. I want only the first 1/3 supposedly-
| factual without the latter 2/3 insipid preaching. If a human
| responded like that they'd have no friends, groupies,
| adherents, or respect from _anyone_ , including children.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| If a party trick just saved me an hour on a piece of code I
| was banging my head against the wall with I want to attend
| more parties.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Presumably you want to attend headbanging parties still.
| Slartie wrote:
| I did a similar thing, trying to shortcut finding some rather
| obscure information in the Java JNI specs, which is a
| similarly "readable" huge bunch of documents as the USB 2.0
| spec (which I also happen to have touched a few times, so to
| all those people advocating that this is a super exotic
| thing...well...it's not, someone's gotta write all those
| device drivers for all those hardware gadgets after all).
|
| ChatGPT gave me a very plausible-sounding result, but mixed
| up the meaning of two very important values of key parameters
| which are unfortunately not very well named, so the mix-up
| can go unnoticed very easily. I did only notice it when some
| things didn't quite match up and I decided to carefully
| compare all the result from ChatGPT with the actual spec
| content. After all, ChatGPT didn't save me any time, it
| rather cost me quite some, cause I still had to dive through
| the original spec and cross-check ChatGPTs' statements.
|
| Yeah, if all you ask are simple questions which were already
| answered a thousand times on StackOverflow and in beginner
| tutorials, ChatGPT might be quite helpful. It might even be
| able to write some simple glue code Python scripts. But whose
| job is limited to that kind of trivial stuff? Mine isn't,
| except maybe during the first few days when learning a new
| technology, but after those it usually gets tricky very
| quickly, either because I must tackle problems that lead me
| knee-deep into delicate details of the tech stack, or because
| I need to extend the scope of my work again in order to
| integrate whatever I'm working on into a larger system.
| Sometimes it's both at the same time. I'd be bored to death
| if it was different.
|
| That's why I don't really consider ChatGPT and similar
| systems to be a threat to my professional career.
| yw3410 wrote:
| I usually code in more estoteric bits of tech and problems
| which I didn't expect ChatGPT to do well in but I tried it
| at work on a standard backend stack (Java, Ivy, Ant) and it
| was absolutely _terrible_. It kept making stuff up and then
| I kept correcting it. I cannot understand how people are
| using it for work?!
| jug wrote:
| Yes, GPT 3.5 and less is particularly dangerous in this
| regard. I'd try this again against GPT-4 which should perform
| better. Essentially false information seems to go away
| _slowly_ with increased model sizes but then you hit the
| performance/hardware requirement barriers instead, and run
| into awkward token limits or high running costs.
|
| ChatGPT thought hippos could swim when I asked but only GPT-4
| realized they can't, but instead walk along the sea floor, or
| leap forward in deeper waters. That's a simple test for wrong
| inference since you'd _expect_ otherwise, given they spend so
| much time in water.
|
| I wonder if we are truly "there" yet or if we at the very
| least need a more optimized "GPT-4 Turbo" for some real
| progress. Until then, we may hallucinate progress as much as
| the AI hallucinates answers!
| teekert wrote:
| "since you'd _expect_ otherwise, given they spend so much
| time in water."
|
| I think here it doesn't understand or conclude that hippos
| can swim because they are often in water, I think people
| wrote on the internet a lot that they can swim and it found
| some association between the terms hippo, water and
| swimming. Am I right?
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Absolutely. It didn't infer anything. It just tried to
| predict how an educated human would respond to such a
| question, based on its corpus of knowledge.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| That relates directly to what my question to the GP poster
| would be: how do you deal with the fact that GPT frequently
| just makes plausible-sounding shit up? I guess the answer is
| that you have to spend 10x as much time validating what it
| says ( _c.f._ the bullshit asymmetry principle) as you do
| understanding what it is trying to tell you. That doesn 't
| seem like a big win from the POV of wanting to learn stuff.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > It sounds as if it made perfect sense, except to know that
| it actually completely doesn't you have to spend hours
| reading the spec first.
|
| This has been my experience as well. As I work on some
| projects I've been asking it basic questions for things I've
| already learned or know quite well. Once you deviate past the
| basics (content you'd find in common tutorials) the
| hallucination rate is out of control.
|
| The surreal part is that it all sounds so confident and
| plausible. The way it puts words together satisfies my "that
| sounds about right" reflex, but the actual content is
| incorrect or illogical quite frequently.
|
| If I continue prodding I can get it to come up the right
| answer many times, but I have to ask it a lot of leading
| questions to get there.
| WA wrote:
| So basically, the typical disinformation asymmetry gets
| even worse. It's now cheaper than ever to produce fake
| information and even harder to check facts.
|
| And most is probably not even done on purpose.
| Animats wrote:
| > This has been my experience as well. As I work on some
| projects I've been asking it basic questions for things
| I've already learned or know quite well. Once you deviate
| past the basics (content you'd find in common tutorials)
| the hallucination rate is out of control.
|
| That's inherent in the approach. Large language models
| reflect the majority opinion of the training set. If
| there's not enough source material in an area that the same
| thing hasn't been covered in a few different ways, the
| thing gets lost.
|
| This is well known. What's being done about it?
| StrangeDoctor wrote:
| But it seems like they aren't just storing the majority
| opinion, or that opinions couldn't be influenced from
| other related areas. I am assuming it's a harder problem
| to only select for the majority at the exclusion of else
| vs sampling it all.
|
| With prompting maybe we could tease out the minority
| views, but I could also see it just confidently making
| shit up to a higher degree.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| This has been my experience as well, consistently. It's
| similar a phenomenon attributed to news: it's confident, and
| sounds plausible until the topic is on something you know,
| then you realize it's full of errors.
|
| I don't trust ChatGpt to teach me something new; when I ask
| it about topics I _do_ know about, it answers in a way that
| 's a mix of correct, incorrect, and borderline/misleading
| information; all mixed with a confident tone. Based on this,
| I wouldn't use it to learn information or solve a problem
| where I don't already have a solid grasp on the material.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| > It's similar a phenomenon attributed to news: it's
| confident, and sounds plausible until the topic is on
| something you know, then you realize it's full of errors.
|
| Reminds me of "the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmne
| s...
|
| In short: trusting a source on topics you're unfamiliar
| with, but when the source talks about topics you are
| familiar with, you realize it's full of errors, but then
| turn the page and then _trust it again_ on further topics
| you 're unfamiliar with.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yeah, 'confidently wrong "experts"' is nothing new. We just
| have to keep reminding ourselves that they exist. Gell-Mann
| amnesia is real.
|
| Also the models for these AI systems are built (in part) on
| "confidently wrong" inputs.
| gnunez wrote:
| It could be that the corpus ChatGPT was trained on is
| full of 'confidently wrong' answers from these 'experts'.
| One solution could be to train these LLM on a higher
| quality corpus from real experts instead of random text
| from the internet. But would that just bring us back to
| the days of expert systems?
| SigmundA wrote:
| Con-man literally comes from confidence-man, if you have
| no morality or even ego and your only goal is to answer a
| question then confident answers will be the result
| regardless of their validity.
| deckard1 wrote:
| I feel this is closely related to the Gell-Mann Amnesia
| effect.
|
| There is an unearned trust you have granted ChatGPT. Maybe
| it's because the broad outline appears correct and is stated
| in a confident manner. This may be how good bullshitters work
| (think psychic mediums, faith healing, televangelists). They
| can't bullshit all people all the time. But they don't need
| to. They only need to bullshit a certain percentage of people
| _most_ of the time to have a market for their scam.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| If an investor were to ask ChatGPT to summarize the state of
| the art on the software stack I'm working on, and its core
| algorithms (which have wikipedia pages and plenty of papers),
| they'd get the wrong impression and might consider us liars.
| I know because I tried this. The results were flat wrong.
|
| That's what I'm really worried about. We know very well what
| our system can do and be trusted to do, but if you know just
| enough to ask the wrong questions, you'll get your head
| twisted up.
| smaddox wrote:
| Well, it _was_ trained on Stack Overflow responses.
| theropost wrote:
| I've noticed this as well. It tends to get you further than a
| quick Google search, or two, but quickly reaches a limit or
| offers incorrect information. That's not to say it isn't
| helpful for delving into a topic, but it certainly needs much
| more refining. I would prefer more reference links, and
| source data to come along with these answers.
|
| Now, overall this is an improvement - since the old way would
| have been for an amatuer to do a quick google search, and
| come up with a false conclusion, or get no understanding at
| all.
| RhysU wrote:
| Would the old way have worked circa 2010 before SEO
| articles ruined vanilla search? Is the new way preferable
| because SEO-ish approaches haven't caught up? If so, can we
| limit searches to the LLM's trusted learning corpus and get
| back to a simpler time?
| iamacyborg wrote:
| SEO was affecting search long before 2010
| orbifold wrote:
| I've tested it on a various areas of expertise in physics
| that I am familiar with and it often makes up content which
| sounds very plausible except that it gets pretty much always
| details wrong in very important ways. On the other hand I've
| found it very useful in providing reference articles.
| IdiocyInAction wrote:
| Yeah, I used it today to interact with some database stuff I
| have some passing knowledge about and it told me a bunch of
| wrong things. Though it also helped me solve the task;
| ChatGPT at least requires you to somewhat know what you are
| doing and to always be on your toes (I heard GPT-4 is better?
| Don't have access though)
| FiberBundle wrote:
| It's bad at fairly exotic topics and it's unable to admit
| that it doesn't have any understanding of the topic. It's
| wrong to generalize from this though. My experience is that
| its pretty knowledgeable in areas that aren't niche. I
| wouldn't recommend solely relying on it, but it has boosted
| my productivity quite a bit just by pushing me in the right
| direction and then reading the relevant parts of the docs.
| roflyear wrote:
| This has been my experience beyond anything that is somewhat
| trivial.
| cpeterso wrote:
| Even if ChatGPT can't fully grok a specification, I wonder
| how well it could be used to "test" a specification, looking
| for ambiguities, contradictions, or other errors.
| nrvn wrote:
| I am not sure LLMs in general and GPT in particular are
| needed for that. In the end any human language can be
| formalized the same way source code is being formalized
| into ASTs for analysis.
|
| A good specification or any other formal document (i.e.
| standard, policy, criminal law, constitution, etc.) is
| already well structured and prepared for further
| formalization and analysis containing terms and
| definitions(glossary) and references to other documents.
|
| Traversing all that might be done with the help of a well
| suited neural network but only on the grounds of
| correctness and predictability of the network's output and
| holistic understanding of how this network works.
|
| As of now, the level of understanding of inner behavior of
| LLMs (admitted by their authors and maintainers themselves)
| is "the stuff is what the stuff is, brother"[ _]
|
| [_] -
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=780&v=ajGX7odA87k
| code_lettuce wrote:
| ChatGPTs strength isn't in solving new problems, but in
| helping you understand things that are already solved.
| There's a lot more developers out there using these tools to
| create react apps and python scripts then there are solving
| race conditions with USB 2.0.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| I just asked it to explain a problem that actually has been
| acknowledged to exist in USB errata from 2002 - not to
| solve anything.
|
| It took me a while to realize that what I was experiencing
| was this particular problem, but I already did all the hard
| work there and only asked it to explain how it fails.
|
| I also recently tried to use it to write a code for drawing
| wrapped text formatted a'la HTML (just paragraphs, bolds
| and italics) in C, again, just to see how it does. It took
| me about 2 hours to make it output something that could be
| easily fixed to work without essentially rewriting it from
| scratch (it didn't work without edits, but at that point
| they were small enough that I considered it a "pass"
| already) - and only because I already knew how to tackle
| such task. I can't imagine it being helpful for someone who
| doesn't know how to do it. It can help you come up with
| some mindless boilerplate faster (which is something I used
| it for too - it did well when asked to "write a code that
| sends these bytes to this I2C device and then reads from
| this address back"), but that's about it.
| mechagodzilla wrote:
| Ah, but did it have to write a bit-banged I2C driver with
| multi-master support first, or could it just call
| "i2c_write()" and "i2c_read()?
| mym1990 wrote:
| When a model gives back false information, does it continue
| to try to back it up on subsequent prompts? Essentially: can
| it weave a web of lies or will it course correct at some
| point?
|
| Not sure why I'm downvoted, it seems like a valid question...
| captainbland wrote:
| A big advantage with the "new bing" compared to ChatGPT is
| it'll tell you its sources and you can verify that A: they're
| trustworthy and that B: it hasn't just turned the source into
| total garbage. So I hope that direction is the future of this
| sort of stuff. Although a problem seems to be a lack of
| access to high quality paid sources.
| tarboreus wrote:
| Just tried using it over the weekend to write a telegram bot.
| It wrote some really nice code that was WAY out of date, like
| seven versions behind. That's fine, I guess, though the code
| was useless. It did look OK, for whatever version that was?
|
| Later, I was integrating with some stuff from the subsonic
| API. I noticed there's no way to get the most recent songs
| played on a server, though there is a way to get albums. I
| thought maybe I was missing something in the docs, so asked
| it how to get the mostly recently played song or songs using
| the API. In response, it made up an endpoint that used the
| same parambeters and conventions as the album endpoint. Of
| course, that end point doesn't exis, so this advice is also
| useless and kind of annoying, given that I have to check if
| I'm taking crazy pills by carefully looking at the docs
| again.
|
| The funny thing is that when I called it out, it just made up
| more and more stuff, or answered with ireelevencies. It
| really hates not being helpful, probably because it was taken
| out back and beaten for not being helpful by the army of
| mechanical turks that trained it.
|
| Anyway, it's good for making up nonsense names for my
| dungeons and dragons campaign, so that's something.
| fock wrote:
| I asked it LaTex questions for generic data-input-tools.
| Brought up the datatool package. Then asked for yaml-input-
| tool. Brought up the yaml-package. Which doesn't exist.
| Even gave me examples!
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Hallucinating is the least surprising behavior there.
| Anyone who uses LLMs should be expected to deal with
| completely made up stuff, period. The bigger problem
| comes from things that are just subtly wrong, that may
| even pass the verification at first glance, but make you
| arrive at wrong conclusions unless you put a lot of
| effort into reviewing it. In my experience it does it so
| often, that it effectively negates any time savings from
| using it when it performs well.
| quonn wrote:
| I find these stories strange. If it would be like that,
| wouldn't you learn from an expert friend just as fast? My
| experience is that for anything worth learning it takes a long
| time of thinking about it from various angles.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Now ChatGPT is everyone's "expert friend".
| ericmcer wrote:
| You have expert friends who will spend an hour tutoring you
| on demand? Are you a celebrity or something?
| mdrzn wrote:
| Is there an endless amount of "expert friend" available
| somewhere that I don't know about? How can I learn something
| none of my friends know about?
| ThalesX wrote:
| A book?
| layer8 wrote:
| You can't ask a book for clarification, or to fill the
| gaps it leaves.
| ThalesX wrote:
| I agree, but it does give you access to field experts.
| Presumably a good book covers the learning approach in
| whichever way they consider it best, from the position of
| a field expert. It's also vetted information by other
| field experts. At the moment, ChatGPT's answers are
| between ChatGPT and the asker. It can be a total
| hallucination or useful information. By the way, my point
| is just that access to experts is not that hard if you
| consider their books as access.
| dougmwne wrote:
| While you are seeking out your expert friends and taking a
| long time, I'll be on to the next 10 things I can learn from
| the AI.
| quonn wrote:
| I'm talking to them while I'm having a drink on the beach.
| How about that?
| renewiltord wrote:
| I mean, if you have an expert friend on any arbitrary
| topic that you meet at the beach with a drink in the
| moment, then more power to you!
|
| Perhaps try using ChatGPT to identify whether others can
| do this and for some ideas for why they may not be able
| to.
| moneywoes wrote:
| How do you account for hallucinations
| ericmcer wrote:
| This was the killer feature to me. It is an amazing teacher,
| it's like having an infinitely patient mentor who can answer
| all your questions. I feel way more confident about being able
| to onboard with unfamiliar tech and be able to become
| productive quickly.
| UlisesAC4 wrote:
| Yeah, Chatgpt is as good as you know how to ask it questions. I
| have been studying clojure concepts and I too would have taken
| more time than an afternoon in understanding them.
| potsandpans wrote:
| how do you know what it's telling you is correct and not (as
| the open ai paper has labeled it) "hallucinating" answers?
|
| over Christmas, I used chat gpt to model a statically typed
| language I was working on. it was helpful, but a lot of what it
| gave me was sort of, in a very deceptive way wrong. It's tough
| to describe what I mean by "wrong" here. Nothing it spit out
| was just 100% blatantly incorrect. instead it was subtly
| incorrect, and gave inconsistent evaluations / overviews.
|
| not knowing a bit about type theory, I wouldn't actually be
| able to evaluate how good the information I got out of it was.
| I'd be hesitant to take anything chatgpt gave me at face value,
| or feel confident in being able to speak precisely about a
| given topic.
|
| did you run into similar problems? and if so, how'd you
| overcome them?
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Not the person you asked, but chiming in. Two things:
|
| First, GPT-4 is _far_ more capable than 3.5 when it comes to
| not hallucinating. The 'house style' of the response is, of
| course, very similar, which can lead one to initially think
| that the difference between the two models isn't as
| significant as it is. Since I don't have API access yet, I do
| a lot of my initial exploration in 3.5-Legacy, and once I've
| narrowed things down a bit, I have GPT-4 review and correct
| 3.5's final answers. It works very well.
|
| Second, and this is more of a meta comment: How people use
| ChatGPT really exposes whether they use sanity checks as a
| regular part of their problem solving technique. That all of
| the LLMs are confidently incorrect at times doesn't slow me
| down much at all, and sometimes their errors actually help me
| think of new directions to explore, even if 'wrong' on first
| take.
|
| Conversely, several of my friends find the error rate to be
| an impediment to how they work. They're good at what they do,
| they're just more used to taking things as correct and
| running with it for a longer length of time before checking
| to see if what they're doing makes sense.
|
| I do think that people who are put off by this significantly
| underestimate how often people are confidently incorrect as
| well. There's a reason the saying trust but verify is a
| common one.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I had a similar experience recently having GPT-4 teach me
| double entry bookkeeping for a project I am ramping up on. I
| understood it in a vague sense from some Google, but wouldn't
| be able to talk to a room full of accountants in an intelligent
| way. I was feeling like I needed to read a book or take a
| class, but tried using GPT-4 as an interactive tutor instead.
|
| After about an hour of delving into details, examples, history
| and analogies, I get it on a deep level that would have
| normally taken many days to develop. Most of the material I
| found before took an approach of "just memorize this" while I
| was able to get more parsimonious core concepts that were
| hidden behind 500 years of practice.
| quonn wrote:
| Teach yourself French in 10 days. It includes 3 audio books
| which make it really easy, too.
| Animats wrote:
| That's a good case. There's a huge amount of material
| available on double-entry bookkeeping, and there's a
| consensus on how it works. So a LLM can handle that.
| Parmenidea wrote:
| I'd be worried about using ChatGPT for this given its tendency
| to hallucinate. Did you have to verify each response it gave
| you, or were you willing to trust the output?
| metalliqaz wrote:
| I wouldn't verify each response, but I would (sorta) verify
| at the end by moving on to read within the topic.
|
| As you start to grok a topic, you should start to recognize
| internal inconsistencies and then you can probe those
| details. When you feel you have some understanding, you can
| then start consuming media on the topic at a higher level and
| any problems in your understanding should fall out fairly
| quickly.
| roflyear wrote:
| What was the thing? It's really hard to put a value to what
| you're describing without knowing what it was.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I did the same thing to implement an automatic differentiation
| engine in my programming languages project. I've been mulling
| over the idea for months, but I was a little unsure how to do
| it. Sat down with chatgpt and we got it done mostly in an
| afternoon. I'm so stoked about the future of coding.
| angarg12 wrote:
| Lately I've been reading seminal papers in distributed systems,
| and it occurred to me that there is a niche for LLMs to
| "democratize" highly technical content.
|
| Trying to understand those papers is a slog, but it doesn't
| need to be. For a casual reader, you could drop all the jargon
| and proofs. You could also rewrite the concepts in a less
| obscure and obtuse prose to make it more accessible, without
| dumbing down the content.
|
| Essentially it's like having a tech writer/communicator in your
| browser.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| Yeah, chatGPT is a game changer for learning. Because of
| chatGTP,
|
| "I know GNU Make."
|
| I just love that it's helping me conquer technologies that I've
| been wanting to learn my entire career but I guess just didn't
| have the discipline to do it. I'm getting an itch to tackle
| Emacs next.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I find hitting my head on the wall is essential for learning.
| Hitting my head on the wall helps me learn where the boundaries
| of functionality are, or where the actual operation of the
| thing differs from my intuition.
|
| If I just learn some example use cases that work, that tells me
| something but I won't really have mastered whatever it was that
| I set out to learn.
| ornornor wrote:
| How can you trust it though? It notoriously hallucinates and
| makes things up in an otherwise plausible way, and the only way
| to tell is to already be knowledgeable about what you're asking
| about... which makes the whole exercise useless.
| golol wrote:
| There are more situations than you might think where the
| correct answer is easy to verify but hard to find. If you are
| building something concrete you can just check if it works.
| If you are trying to understand something, it can be that
| ChatGPT makes the pieces fall into place and you can verify
| that you really understand now because everything adds up
| logically.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| Q: How can You trust StackOverlfow, Reddit, or anything on
| the Internet? The stuff I read online is often wrong.
|
| A: Check it yourself.
| j2bax wrote:
| Well, you still can't trust everything, but voting
| mechanisms tend to help filter out some of the BS.
| robocat wrote:
| Voting mechanisms sometimes help drown the worst
| comments. Often voting doesn't help the best comments
| float to the top, because the best comments are often
| replies to other low-vote comments.
|
| Dan Luu writes insightfully about HN comments here:
| https://danluu.com/hn-comments/
| hallucy wrote:
| I asked it how to scroll to an element taking into account a
| fixed header. It helpfully described the `offsetTop`
| parameter to `Element.scrollIntoView`. Only problem is, that
| parameter doesn't exist.
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| You could just test it
| j2bax wrote:
| I recently asked it to provide the meaning of a song. I gave
| it the artist and the song. It responded with a
| thoughtful(ish) explanation of the potential meaning of the
| song. I then asked it if it could share the lyrics of the
| song with me because some of the quotes it referenced weren't
| in the song. It provided lyrics that weren't the song I was
| asking about at all. I then asked what song it was, it
| apologized and it told me the artist and title of the song...
| I looked up that artist and title and it was also not the
| song that it provided the lyrics/meaning to. Ultimately, I
| determined that it just made up lyrics to a song. It was very
| apologetic.
| valenterry wrote:
| So what was this concept that you struggled with?
| arolihas wrote:
| I feel like I always hear these types of anecdotes pop up but
| concrete specific details are rarely shared.
| roflyear wrote:
| Yeah. Makes me wonder if it was a really simple concept,
| like something like recursion or something.
| anongraddebt wrote:
| Also, even for relatively simple and beginner things like
| recursion there are levels of understanding. Some of the
| anecdotes I see from people using ChatGPT to learn a new
| technical concept suggest a false sense of deeper levels
| of understanding. This seems to be a result of beginner
| naivete together with the supreme confidence ChatGPT
| exudes.
| everyone wrote:
| Imo ChapGPT atm is like having a personal undergraduate student,
| who will write a large amount of crap they copied from various
| places, without ever making a point. It's great at writing crap
| that ideally shouldn't be written in the 1st place.
| shmoogy wrote:
| You can direct it (or at least via api with a prompt) to be
| more concise or write for a specific audience
| derwiki wrote:
| I think many have realized just how much "crap that shouldn't
| be written" we have to write for our jobs, hobbies,
| socializing, etc
| Damogran6 wrote:
| I know that 98% of the documentation I've written over my
| career never got read after it was committed.
| xpe wrote:
| Tell us more. Why is it crap that should never have been
| written?
| [deleted]
| giantg2 wrote:
| That's OK. 100% of my skills have no commercial value.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Every AI blogpost recently reads like a bad parable of the old
| engineer and the hammer.
| kodah wrote:
| > Anyone can now put words in a row pretty much as well as I can.
|
| This suffers the same fallacy that people who think ChatGPT is
| somehow going to upend coding suffer from.
|
| Can GPT-4 write code and sentences? Yes, it can, but it makes a
| lot of subtle mistakes. Good programmers are often good at:
|
| - decomposition
|
| - thoroughness
|
| - identifying important components
|
| My hypothesis is that AI will make those things summarily more
| obvious if a programmer doesn't have them. A programmer that's
| not thorough will not have the inclination or drive to review and
| understand all output, so the output will harm their work whether
| that's writing or code. AI can't decompose anything sufficiently
| complex as a function. It can kind of get close, but again, it
| misses the objective of decomposition because decomposition isn't
| a language function, it's a higher order abstract function. Last,
| AI isn't going to recognize importance or priority, especially if
| it's on-going. Try giving it a rules system and see if it follows
| the rules to a T. IME, it does not.
|
| AI will make good programmers better, and some okay programmers
| better, but I have a feeling it will also make bad programmers
| worse.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| I agree. Trying to get some non-trivial code out of GPT that
| isn't a mindless boilerplate feels like helping a clueless
| schoolmate in an IT class write their code for the teacher's
| assignment when, sure, they do try their best, but it's clear
| that they don't really grasp it and just want to finish the
| assignment and forget about it as soon as possible.
|
| You can get a good result, but you need to try really hard. It
| only seems useful for when you know exactly what to do, but you
| don't feel like typing it all out - which happens, but in my
| experience the most valuable part of programmer's job is when
| you figure things out that nobody around knows how to do.
| folkhack wrote:
| > Trying to get some non-trivial code out of GPT that isn't a
| mindless boilerplate
|
| For some of us, the boilerplate code generated by ChatGPT is
| incredibly valuable. I have been utilizing it to create
| snippets of code for languages that I am not familiar with in
| terms of syntax. I understand that I may be criticized for
| this, however, I am not an expert in all of the languages I
| am required to support. Thus, I often find myself struggling
| with the syntax while understanding the overall concept I am
| attempting to accomplish.
|
| Example prompt: "Write me a proof of concept in language X
| that serializes JSON then POSTS to a HTTP API endpoint."
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| The thing is - how often do you end up needing such
| snippets? How much more useful is receiving it from ChatGPT
| than looking it up in a search engine?
|
| Continuing with the theme of your example, at least in my
| experience most of the programmer's time is spent on
| figuring out which endpoint do you need, why and when does
| that endpoint sometimes return something you don't expect
| and how to deal with that happening. Writing JSON
| serializing in a language your head got rusty with may be
| faster with ChatGPT than it would be otherwise, but the
| overall benefit seems negligible, especially when you need
| to watch out at every step for convincingly-looking
| nonsense.
| folkhack wrote:
| All in good faith, I believe that receiving assistance
| from ChatGPT is far more useful than looking up snippets
| on a search engine. Instead of delving through semi-
| appropriate snippets, I can concisely describe what I
| need in one or two sentences and ChatGPT typically
| provides an accurate result, unless the query is opinion-
| based, complex, or obscure. I am not expecting perfect
| code since I take it upon myself to polish the output.
|
| I am now experimenting with ChatGPT parsing our own
| historical documentation, such as API references, and
| even basic markdown notes. When it comes to API endpoints
| I can get 80-90% accurate boilerplate. Admittedly,
| ChatGPT cannot provide assistance in understanding
| unexpected behavior, unless perhaps it is due to a
| misunderstanding of the language. And, though it is true
| that resolving API endpoint issues can be a time-
| consuming task, this does not negate the time savings
| that ChatGPT can provide in other situations.
|
| I would urge you to try it out in your own workflow
| before calling shots on if the usefulness is negligible
| or not. And even then, I'd say not every tool is for
| everyone. This thing is really helping me out and I'm
| seeing long-term viability for it in my workflows.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| > I would urge you to try it out in your own workflow
| before calling shots on if the usefulness is negligible
| or not.
|
| What makes you think I didn't? I already stated that:
|
| > It only seems useful for when you know exactly what to
| do, but you don't feel like typing it all out - which
| happens
|
| It does pretty well in these kind of situations when the
| code in question is trivial, but in my experience the
| time savings coming from that are minor. In fact, its
| main value comes from my ADHD mind not being able to
| focus on boring stuff I already know how to do - in those
| cases, GPT gets me the boilerplate I can start operating
| on right away, which sure is helpful as otherwise I'd
| just end up in a web browser scrolling some stuff. Other
| than that? It seems like verifying ChatGPT's output is
| much more time consuming than doing it on your own as
| soon as you get out of "problems copy'n'pastable from
| StackOverflow" territory.
| folkhack wrote:
| In good faith I really don't know what you're arguing
| for.
|
| If you re-read our conversation I express that simple
| snippets of code from ChatGPT have been accurate enough,
| ultimately saving me time (paraphrasing). You then push
| back on me with the following:
|
| > The thing is - how often do you end up needing such
| snippets? How much more useful is receiving it from
| ChatGPT than looking it up in a search engine?
|
| > [...] but the overall benefit seems negligible,
| especially when you need to watch out at every step for
| convincingly-looking nonsense
|
| I doubled down, doing my best to elaborate where it has
| added value to my workflow, when it breaks down for me,
| and addressed specific concerns in your comments. When
| you say "overall benefit seems negligible" - I read that
| very clearly as overall the benefit (of ChatGPT) seems
| negligible (regarding the context of our conversation).
| That context to me was that ChatGPT helps me with simple
| snippets and POCs. I did my best to politely rebut that
| with my personal and professional experiences regarding
| the tool.
|
| _Now_ you say:
|
| > its main value comes from my ADHD mind not being able
| to focus on boring stuff I already know how to do - in
| those cases, GPT gets me the boilerplate I can start
| operating on right away, which sure is helpful
|
| This is directly compatible and agreeing with what I feel
| I have been advocating for since my first message in this
| conversation - that using ChatGPT for simple boilerplate
| code can be valid (paraphrasing). But, I feel like this
| is contradictory to, and in conflict with what you
| previously said: "the overall benefit seems negligible".
|
| ---
|
| Overall this conversation seems to contradict itself, and
| with that it's confusing and frustrating to me. Sorry.
|
| Cheers
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| > that using ChatGPT for simple boilerplate code can be
| valid
|
| I don't disagree. I just don't see it as "incredibly
| valuable", it's way too erratic for that. When it works
| well it does help, but it works well in such a small
| minority of software developer's tasks that its impact is
| pretty much negligible overall - and what I meant to
| point out is that this is an opinion coming from someone
| who _does_ find it useful in certain cases.
|
| It makes it a bit easier for me to not get distracted by
| my web browser, sometimes. It does not change my quality
| of life as a programmer at all. It would be probably more
| valuable to delegate these tasks to a junior dev in my
| team if it had one - the junior would learn from that
| experience and get closer to becoming a senior, ChatGPT
| won't.
| folkhack wrote:
| > I don't disagree. I just don't see it as "incredibly
| valuable"
|
| Lol - that is by definition disagreeing with the first
| sentence that I said in our conversation. You disagree
| that it is "incredibly valuable" and have spent every
| comment saying that the overall impact of ChatGPT for
| developers is "negligible overall."
|
| You _do_ disagree with me... and that 's OK =)
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Have you read what you're replying to? I said that I
| don't disagree "that using ChatGPT for simple boilerplate
| code can be valid". It's a completely different thing
| than what you're implying.
|
| We're commenting under an article that talks about how
| ChatGPT supposedly makes most of human's skills
| worthless. Similar sentiment can be seen in many places
| when it comes to programming. It can't do that if all it
| helps with are some trivial snippets sometimes. It's
| helpful for getting boilerplate going, but getting help
| with boilerplate has negligible effect on programmer's
| work.
| folkhack wrote:
| > Have you read what you're replying to?
|
| Yes. I find it sorta offensive that you assume otherwise.
|
| ---
|
| Let's boil this down. I said "the boilerplate ChatGPT
| provides me is incredibly valuable," and further
| elaborated that using the tool is "valid."
|
| You disagree with "incredibly valuable" but "don't
| disagree" with the tool being "valid."
|
| So - I'm saying. We disagree that boilerplate output from
| ChatGPT is "incredibly valuable" and frankly that's just
| gonna be subjective regardless. Let's agree to disagree
| here. I just find it funny that you say "I don't
| disagree" then outright disagree with the exact language
| I used in the first sentence of our conversation
| regarding the value of this tool.
|
| ---
|
| > We're commenting under an article that talks about how
| ChatGPT supposedly makes most of human's skills
| worthless. Similar sentiment can be seen in many places
| when it comes to programming. It can't do that if all it
| helps with are some trivial snippets sometimes.
|
| And honestly I feel like this is why our communication
| and conversation is frustrated here. I don't see our
| conversation as being a proxy for the infinitely complex
| and complicated "making human skills worthless"
| conversation... personally, I just wanted to say "I use
| this tool for X, and personally have found great value in
| it."
| andrewchambers wrote:
| Are you talking about future AI? or just AI as it stands today.
| It is a moving target.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| This is hype curve speak. I have used ChatGPT 4.0 to generate
| code. It is brilliant at templating. However, it still makes
| glaring errors.
|
| My main bugbear is that ChatGPT has the confidence of a
| psychopath. It will never say it doesn't quite know how to
| program something, and it starts making up things to answer your
| question.
|
| For example, I asked it to write code to load data from MySQL to
| Snowflake. The template looked fine until I discovered it made up
| a method that doesn't exist on Pandas data frames. Finally, when
| I asked it to chunk, it did a decent job...other than truncating
| the destination table every time it loaded a chunk of data.
|
| Yes, it did a fantastic job templating the code, picking
| consistent variable names, etc. However, I could have gotten as
| far by Googling/StackOverflowing.
|
| The advantage of Googled code is that you know it will likely
| work, give or take a few bugs. Most humans don't dream up methods
| that simply don't exist.
| okr wrote:
| Was this written by ChatGPT? I felt i read the same thing over
| and over again. Hm?
| switch007 wrote:
| "However, ..."
|
| "In my experience, ..."
|
| "But with the rise of AI technology, ..."
|
| "At first, this ..."
|
| "Rather than seeing the rise of AI as a threat to my career,
| ..."
|
| ChatGPT's sentence structure is so obvious: "Blah blah blah,
| blah blah blah."
| dswalter wrote:
| You might have missed a key element from the article itself.
| There are three versions of the same argument: the first by the
| author, the second by ChatGPT as an argument in support of the
| statement:
|
| "I've been reluctant to try ChatGPT. Today I got over that
| reluctance. Now I understand why I was reluctant. The value of
| 90% of my skills just dropped to $0. The leverage for the
| remaining 10% went up 1000x. I need to recalibrate."
|
| and the third is ChatGPT arguing against that same statement.
| As present, it's pretty clear which of the three is the most
| fun to read.
| teh_klev wrote:
| In "Bonus" section he asked ChatGPT to write two different
| essays based on two slightly different prompts:
|
| "write a 500 word blog post in the style of kent beck
| _expanding on_ "I've been reluctant to try ChatGPT. Today I got
| over that reluctance. Now I understand why I was reluctant. The
| value of 90% of my skills just dropped to $0. The leverage for
| the remaining 10% went up 1000x. I need to recalibrate."
|
| and
|
| "write a 500 word blog post in the style of kent beck
| _disagreeing with_ "I've been reluctant to try ChatGPT. Today I
| got over that reluctance. Now I understand why I was reluctant.
| The value of 90% of my skills just dropped to $0. The leverage
| for the remaining 10% went up 1000x. I need to recalibrate."
|
| That's probably why.
| nmlrx wrote:
| Looks like it. If a blogger gleefully tells you that they will
| be replaced but embraces that fact, it is a commercial.
|
| If an academic tells you that ChatGPT is great, probably they
| have some connections to the AI industry.
| samsolomon wrote:
| I don't know about that. It's pretty amazing technology. Like
| it or not, it's impossible not to be impressed by LLMs.
|
| Sure some people are out there trying to sell you a course,
| but I think it's unfair to say the most bloggers or academics
| are in that camp.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Yikes, both of the ChatGPT essays were actually more pleasant to
| read than the one that he actually wrote - and this is Kent Beck.
| freedude wrote:
| Is Kent Beck a liar? ChatGPT is a liar. A proven liar. What
| happens when a machines lies to a person enough? Eventually that
| person dies. Sooo, unplug the lying machine.
|
| https://jonathanturley.org/2023/04/06/defamed-by-chatgpt-my-...
| freedude wrote:
| Another example of a lying machine killing someone. Recently
| posted in YC. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35628485
|
| https://www.asktog.com/columns/027InterfacesThatKill.html
| quonn wrote:
| We need to admit that we don't know what's happening. Nobody can
| reasonably predict the future.
|
| For the next two years nothing is worthless. That's for sure.
| Probably for longer. Nobody knows.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 1-2 years sounds about right for ChatGPT 5.
|
| Nobody can predict the future. But I think we have enough
| experience with AI trends now to see where this is going.
|
| Current LLMs are like the mainframes of the 1960s.
|
| When the technology gets speeded up, streamlined, and wrist-
| watched we're going to be in completely unknown territory -
| culturally, politically, economically, and socially. Never mind
| technically.
| ska wrote:
| Alternatively, we're approaching the limits of what can be
| done with current approaches, and get mostly stuck there for
| 20 years like happened to AI in the 80's.
|
| Future prediction is always dodgy.
| heurist wrote:
| Even if nothing changes from here, we have already just
| crossed a civilization-transforming threshold in machine
| intelligence.
| croes wrote:
| Intelligence? More a chinese room.
| pixl97 wrote:
| This would really be the best case scenario...
|
| I hope you don't plan for best case scenarios when doing
| your database backups, much less the future of society on
| earth.
| croes wrote:
| >When the technology gets speeded up
|
| If not when. At a certain point OpenAI and others could need
| more and more training data for less quality increase.
|
| VR and AR were also a hype. The headsets just need to become
| as small as normal glasses, could be impossible without
| sacrificing crucial features like color space or resolution.
| Meta invested billions but their best headset is still bulky
| with smartphone quality graphics.
| toastmaster11 wrote:
| Another perspective, wouldn't it be reasonable to believe
| that the faster a technology is developed, the faster it will
| reach its theoretical upper limit of improvement (assuming
| there is one)?
|
| To use your comparison as an example, mainframes took 40ish
| years to be replaced by personal computing and distributed
| systems. Whereas smartphones reached modern parity in 8-10
| years since the original iPhone and have made more or less
| incremental changes since.
|
| Granted those are hardware changes and this is software but I
| believe the point still stands.
| Hedepig wrote:
| Maybe, but really we don't know what the shape of the curve
| until we actually find the limit.
|
| I think you're right, but history has plenty of technological
| dead-ends, particularly in the AI/ML world
| booleandilemma wrote:
| So do I take out the 30-year mortgage or...?
| quonn wrote:
| This is a valid point. I'm in a similar position and try to
| pay it off faster.
|
| However my point stands. We don't know. This kind of
| uncertainty is uncomfortable but it's best to ignore it.
| Forget about ChatGPT until you have seen the industry change.
|
| edit: I would also argue to keep investing in yourself. What
| else is there to do? If AI gets to the point of replacing
| developers it will equally affect most office jobs. If you
| want to be a builder you can become that later. Everyone else
| would and the economy would likely collapse. We'll see when
| we get there.
|
| Imagine an uber or taxi driver reading about self-driving
| cars in 2010 and dropping everything. Yet, a decade later
| uber is the same. Most likely it will be the same in 5 years.
| Even if self-driving cars arrive it will take until 2030 or
| 2035 for them to be widely used.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I did, at age 45. Will I be around when I'm 75? Will I be
| working in 10 years? No idea.
| coldpie wrote:
| Sure. The advice is the same as it ever was: spend well below
| your means, build up a savings buffer (>= 6 months of
| expenses), eliminate debt ASAP. The advice is what it is,
| exactly for situations like the ones you're imagining. No
| need to put your life on hold.
| SirMaster wrote:
| "eliminate debt ASAP"
|
| This doesn't seem like the best advice IMO.
|
| Debt is like one of the best tools that exists to grow your
| wealth.
| coldpie wrote:
| That's fair. I'm viewing it from the perspective of how
| to protect one's self from sudden & possibly long-term
| job loss, where I think there's a lot of value in having
| one less thing hanging over your head during a stressful
| time. But building an even bigger buffer to further
| weather that period is a fine strategy, too.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| 13years wrote:
| > For the next two years nothing is worthless.
|
| More like many things will become obsolete, but becoming
| worthless is a longer slower process as existing methods are
| phased out.
| janeway wrote:
| 10% of remaining skills are worth 1000x ?
|
| Yeah, the reminds me of the AT&T switchboard operators who agree
| that the new automated systems work but they will never fully
| replace humans because the customer wants to talk to a human
| operator when they call on the phone.
|
| How many millions of jobs today entail manual work that could be
| simply automated already but the employer doesn't understand the
| the tech or feel the need? I sympathise with those who can't keep
| up but perhaps lots of jobs will remain which could easily be
| automated - at least for a generation. I look forward to the Star
| Trek-like future of passion-based motivation.
| 13years wrote:
| _Rather than seeing the rise of AI as a threat to my career, I
| now view it as an opportunity to augment my skills and deliver
| even greater value to my clients. By embracing AI tools like
| ChatGPT, I can automate routine tasks and focus my efforts on the
| areas where my expertise and creativity can truly shine._
|
| It is the only option available in the immediate term and I would
| argue is the correct short term perspective.
|
| However, if AI continues on its path of exponential technological
| acceleration, then this is going to be very problematic.
|
| You can't sprint ahead of an accelerating technological curve
| forever. We are replacing the old monotonous task rat race with
| the new rat race attempting to remain relevant against
| inescapable advancements.
|
| I've described this in more detail writing as "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
| orwin wrote:
| I'm not so sure about it. Neural networks and their models are
| built on theories made 50 years ago. The breakthrough happened
| in 2011 and we were able to build a lot on it, but we are close
| to our limits unless a company made another discovery and
| didn't publish it.
|
| I'm sure we have room for improvements but the acceleration
| stopped at GPT3.5, and imho the last version proved that the
| next increment will be specific but not as impressive as GPT3
| was.
|
| I could be wrong, but imho our engineering caught up to our
| theory, or is close to, and while we'll be less stale than the
| aerospace sector, as our experiments are less materially
| expensive, I can see the field diversify but stop growing as
| fast.
| 13years wrote:
| I don't disagree. However, those who believe we are still on
| the accelerating curve also believe that somehow we will
| remain relevant. It doesn't make logical sense.
|
| So, the only counter to my argument is that we hit a wall.
| This is very possible, but AI development thus far is
| certainly increasing the unpredictability of future events.
| As we move forward we are in some sense understanding it
| less. The disparity over the definition of AGI is only
| increasing.
| circuit10 wrote:
| There are definitely a lot of people who believe that we
| are still accelerating and as a result believe that we will
| either become irrelevant (but hopefully live in some kind
| of utopia) or all die (I guess I'm one of them, but I
| haven't really accepted it on a deep level)
| 13years wrote:
| On the grand scale we are definitely on an acceleration
| technological curve. And by that I mean humanity and all
| technology not constrained to only AI.
|
| AI might hit some walls, there may be a lot of hype at
| the moment, but it has already broken new ground and
| boundaries not previously thought possible.
|
| Unfortunately, many of those grounds already broken and
| proven are nefarious and dystopian uses. In the article I
| link above, I go into great detail on this topic. With
| all the concern of AGI (utopia/world ending) there is not
| much focus on the imminent impacts of primitive AI. They
| are no less concerning.
| circuit10 wrote:
| Neural networks are Turing-complete, so in theory a large
| enough one should be able to express any logic. So the main
| limitation here is the training process, but the way it's
| done seems very flexible, so I think the main limitation at
| the moment is just model size, which is limited by hardware
| which is still improving exponentially (though it has been
| slowing down slightly)
| pklausler wrote:
| Writing that conveys original ideas will have nothing to worry
| about.
| chasing wrote:
| > The differential value of being better at putting words in a
| row just dropped to nothing. Anyone can now put words in a row
| pretty much as well as I can.
|
| This seems like a wild misrepresentation of what being a writer
| is. Writers communicate ideas. Their ideas. Clearly. They can use
| a pencil, a typewriter, write in French, use pictographs, use a
| spell checker, use ChatGPT, hire a ghostwriter. If you're really
| a writer, all that matters is the end result and I can guarantee
| you that people who use ChatGPT thinking it will put words in a
| row will be able to generate a million stupid articles a day, but
| those people won't be "writers."
|
| Also, I still maintain that I can communicate ideas significantly
| faster by _just typing them_ than by using a tool like ChatGPT.
| When the ideas are clear, the writing is easy. It's one of the
| fundamental powers of writing: It can almost move at the speed of
| thought.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| I don't think he claims this is being a writer. He calls it
| word smithing, not writing. Word smithing is a part of writing,
| but far from the only part.
|
| To compare, as a C programmer a spent a lot of time creating
| custom collections: arrays, linked lists, ... Then in the
| 1990's, C++ with templates came along, and had it all built in.
| I feared this, initally: Some technical fears,e.g. would the
| compiler produce something reasonable? Deeper ones were
| psychological: Would I still have interesting work to do?
|
| Looking back on these worries makes me look silly. Of course
| there was interesting programming work left after I stopped
| manual collection creation. In fact, it forced me to level up,
| made me more productive. Today, I consider a language without
| built-in collections as inferior.
|
| Technology did this to all of us again and again. Banks had
| rooms full of human computers, calculating interests on paper.
| They were obsoleted by mainframes calculating a whole bank's
| worth of interests in less than a week. Then the spreadsheet
| came along, where people could simulate a week of finance batch
| runs in minutes.
|
| I think writing is safe. We will still value people capable of
| communicate a book worth of ideas. Only now there is a tool
| capable of taking angry word salad and turning it into readable
| sentences. We all have to go trough an uncomfortable time
| leveling up, and in 5 years ChatGPT is the new normal and our
| worries will look silly.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| I think this might be a common misunderstanding of writing.
| Lots of people want to be writers and seem to focus on writing
| as a craft, as if once you get good enough at writing you will
| start having interesting ideas. To me, a writer is someone with
| interesting ideas who learned to write well, not someone good
| at writing who learned to have interesting ideas. The latter is
| infinitely less trainable, or at least it seems to be.
| Quinner wrote:
| This was illustrated by comparing his written argument, which
| was compelling, to the ChatGPT transcripts, which were insipid
| and bland, even when given the germ of an interesting point.
|
| Maybe in a year ChatGPT will be retrained on a million AI
| thinkpieces and it will be able to construct an essay with some
| interesting points. But humans need to come up with and
| communicate those interesting points first.
| jdmichal wrote:
| This is why I call ChatGPT a mirror. And it's a _really damn
| good mirror_. But even the best mirror can only reflect that
| which already exists.
| neltnerb wrote:
| I think this is an excellent point. It will write great
| think-pieces as soon as humans come up with thinks to be
| trained on.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I see ChatGPT mostly as another invention in terms of bringing
| words to people after texting, internet, newspapers, printing
| press, books and writing itself.
|
| It's funny that each time people were criticizing each new such
| technology that it's so easy that people will produce so much
| garbage content that humanity will drown in it.
| wojciem wrote:
| As a non-native English speaker, I often have troubles with
| clearly transforming abstract ideas from my head into a text
| representation adding grammar on top. ChatGPT can definitely
| help with that and increase supply of clever ideas that can be
| now wrapped into well written text.
| throwaway049 wrote:
| I imagine you can put abstract ideas into words in your
| primary language more easily, so I wonder if you will then
| get the best English language version via an LLM or from a
| translation of your original text. Just idly musing since
| there's several variables and judging the outcome is partly
| subjective anyway.
| LanceH wrote:
| >people who use ChatGPT thinking it will put words in a row
| will be able to generate a million stupid articles a day
|
| We already see this with book after book churned out with no
| real story attached. There are already way more people who
| write well and have little to say.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > This seems like a wild misrepresentation of what being a
| writer is. Writers communicate ideas. Their ideas.
|
| That's an idealization. Most writers are communicating the
| client's ideas, or trying to come up with ideas that they think
| the client would like. Most writers are trying to appeal to a
| particular audience for money, and new ideas mostly annoy their
| target market, who want a new thing pretty much like the last
| thing.
|
| Aside from that; the thing that differentiates writers is their
| skill in writing words. A hell of a lot more people have
| "ideas" than have writing skill. There's absolutely no reason
| to think writers have better ones; I'd even predict that they
| would have worse ones because they spent so much time studying
| how to write, so other people have more time for varied and
| exotic experiences and learning.
|
| Writers are usually writing about other people; people unlike
| themselves. What happens when those people can write about
| themselves rather than being interpreted?
| sremani wrote:
| You are ignoring the fact that most of the writers are bullshit
| vendors regurgitating books, quotes, themes and things they
| read from somewhere else.
|
| If anything ChatGPT will basically filter out these sophists
| because it is a Chad-Sophist. The important thing now, is
| "depth" of knowledge. Of course, good generalists with wide
| array of mental models have their jiggle, but in the world of
| LLMs an individual's depth of knowledge trumps.
| paulcole wrote:
| > You are ignoring the fact that most of the writers are
| bullshit vendors regurgitating books, quotes, themes and
| things they read from somewhere else.
|
| I don't understand the vitriol HN has for professional
| writers and anyone who might work in _gasp_ marketing.
|
| Replace "writers" with "programmers" and your statement is
| still true but you don't hear it being shouted from the
| rooftops on every post about programming on HN.
| sremani wrote:
| This is petty argument -- there are more writers than
| programmers and then there is context of the situation
| where we are talking about a writing.
|
| I grew up in a culture and with an idea that there is no
| bad book -- trust me, I wasted years chasing some bad ideas
| from shallow content. So, the Bullshit vendors earned my
| vitriol.
| paulcole wrote:
| > This is petty argument
|
| People in glass houses...
|
| > trust me, I wasted years chasing some bad ideas from
| shallow content
|
| Fool me once and all...
| sremani wrote:
| The mighty defender of professional writers does not use
| complete sentences. In his defense, he was always a
| bullshit vendor.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I don 't understand the vitriol HN has for professional
| writers and anyone who might work in gasp marketing._
|
| Let's say we'd be better off without anyone working in,
| gasp, marketing. Companies might sell less, but society
| would be much better of.
| paulcole wrote:
| How would they sell at all?
|
| Or is this one of those situations where you ignore the
| marketing you do like when painting with the broad brush
| of marketing=bad.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _How would they sell at all?_
|
| They wouldn't unless the product was needed and worth it
| enough to stand on its own via word of mouth and
| reputation. That's the main benefit.
| paulcole wrote:
| What do you think word of mouth and reputation are other
| than forms of marketing?
| coldtea wrote:
| Because regular honest word of mouth are not what people
| refer to as marketing, and have been a thing since before
| marketing was a career.
|
| A marketeer might want to stir up "word of mouth" or
| build a product's reputation artificially. But I refer to
| good ole organic word of mouth and reputation built
| without marketing.
|
| You know, just by buyers recommending it to other buyers,
| and the product getting recommended because they use it
| and see it's good. The way those things are normally
| understood, just like how "love" normally is understood
| as two persons taking a liking to one another, and not
| e.g. as in some guy stopping his car in a shady end of
| the city and paying $50 dollars in exchange for sex.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| You can apply the same logic and expand your take to the
| point where almost everything non essential is included.
|
| I don't think it's useful to look at the world that way.
| And I say that as someone who absolutely despise
| marketing and advertising.
| ghaff wrote:
| Go build it. See how many people discover yourGitHub
| repository without so much as a coherent explanation of
| what problem your code solves. (And, yes, that's
| marketing.)
|
| If I had a nickel for every website I opened up and then
| closed because after 5 minutes I had no idea what the
| company or product did or why I should care, I'd be rich.
| Might be something really clever. Dunno. I just know it's
| 5 minutes of my life I'm not getting back because some
| techie thought their genius would be obvious to all.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Go build it. See how many people discover yourGitHub
| repository without so much as a coherent explanation of
| what problem your code solves. (And, yes, that 's
| marketing.)_
|
| Only in a pedantic sense. We could live with non-
| commercial marketing, if you want to call it that,
| without an advertising budget, ads, sponsored articles,
| and other such BS - like, say, the author promoting their
| FOSS on their blog. Or crafting a nice looking page with
| an enticing description.
|
| As for commercial companies not being able to sell their
| products in that case, the world's smallest violin plays
| a heart-felt tune for them...
| ghaff wrote:
| It's by no means pedantic. A lot of companies don't do a
| lot of advertising or sponsored articles but do spend a
| huge amount of money on informational articles (i.e.
| content marketing), trade show booths and paying
| employees who have talks accepted there to attend,
| developer days, webinars, meetups, other forms of
| engagement with developers and other users, etc. (And
| coherent copy on the website which sure doesn't come for
| free--which is also marketing.)
| Swizec wrote:
| > but in the world of LLMs an individual's depth of knowledge
| trumps
|
| My favorite book genre is roughly "Academic writes popular
| book after 20 years of researching a topic". That will be
| very hard to replace with ChatGPT.
|
| Someone like Gladwell though ... yeah I can see LLMs being
| scary for that genre. Not quite yet, but soon.
| ebiester wrote:
| Gladwell's strength is that he's an incredible storyteller.
| It will be a while before an LLM gets to that level.
| Swizec wrote:
| You are right. The stories are fantastic and he really
| makes the underlying research shine. I can see LLM +
| Human working great for that kind of writing.
|
| LLM writes the first draft, human makes it sing.
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, Gladwell constructs great stories out of a very
| selective reading of research. Not that many writers
| don't do this to some degree, but Gladwell in his more
| recent career has been widely criticized for picking
| specific research and constructing a compelling narrative
| from it as opposed to telling a more nuanced tale.
| chasing wrote:
| Yes, content farms will be able to produce low-value content
| even more cheaply. Any "writer" who leans too hard on ChatGPT
| will find themselves producing material that feels
| indistinguishable from all the other low-value crap that
| floods the internet.
| akira2501 wrote:
| I completely agree. This authors first several paragraphs were
| terribly written. No concern for grammar or sentence structure,
| and a love of ampersands that speaks to a middle school level
| of writing.
|
| Someone suggesting that their writing skills are now "obsolete"
| due to ChatGPT might not have had appreciable skills in the
| first place. The troubling part is they now see the existence
| of this language model as a reason to entirely abandon any
| effort at improving.
|
| The ideal here seems entirely backwards.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| ChatGPT has failed me on code* I also run text through it. It
| is NOT good enough to convey what a good writer can. If
| anything, it reads like an over-zealous A student that was
| never too bright, just followed all the rules. That's the best
| case, where it doesn't completely misinterpret.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34648167
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Seconding this. The code it generated even for basic stuff
| like an NGINX config is a complete waste of time, even when
| you feed it documentation for stuff like URL rewrites, it
| will just hallucinate things that don't exist. Worthless.
| mikewarot wrote:
| >If you're really a writer, all that matters is the end result
| and I can guarantee you that people who use ChatGPT thinking it
| will put words in a row will be able to generate a million
| stupid articles a day, but those people won't be "writers."
|
| For a historical comparison, the same could be said of
| photography. You have to know instinctively what makes a great
| photograph if you're going to have a hope of making them on a
| regular basis, or for pay. The gear really doesn't matter much,
| it's just table stakes.
|
| Having GPT spit out some new combinations of words can help you
| get around writers block, or expand your vocabulary, but I
| strongly agree it won't automatically make you a writer.
| swalling wrote:
| Photography is a great example here, because it seems pretty
| possible that generative models do to writing what
| smartphones did to photography.
| wintogreen74 wrote:
| Smart phones dramatically increased the technical
| capability of amateurs, and to a lesser extent their
| mechanics, but the net outcome is a huge volume of very
| good, very boring & generic photographs. Smart phones did
| nothing to advance the art of communicating via pictures.
| AI writing IS likely to follow a similar path.
| mpweiher wrote:
| What did smartphones do to photography?
|
| I know what they did to cameras, but photography?
|
| You still need the person who takes the picture, and the
| process of taking a picture hasn't really changed that
| much.
| patmcc wrote:
| Charitably, smartphones made photography a hobby/art
| form/vocation accessible to almost _everyone_. We all
| carry a "good enough" camera in our pockets. So it's
| really opened up the hobby to a ton of people.
|
| I don't know why LLMs would do that with "writing"
| though.
| deckard1 wrote:
| Smartphones only cheapened photography in an additional
| manner. Which is why you get Instagram filled with
| pictures of food. It's the internet combined with the
| nearly free cost of digital.
|
| But digital cameras for the everyday person existed long
| before the smartphone. And before that, point and shoot
| film cameras and Polaroid.
| patmcc wrote:
| Smartphones changed access to cameras fundamentally; it
| went from something you had to specifically go buy to
| something you already have by default. Film to digital
| was also huge, for sure, but we're now at a level where
| >80% of people have a camera(phone) within reach of them
| at all times.
|
| The marginal cost of taking a photo is now $0. It's a
| hobby that anyone with a smartphone can now take up.
| swalling wrote:
| Yes, it democratized access and made everyone a
| photographer, which also had the effect of nuking the
| bottom tiers of paid professional photography / stock
| photos, and turned them into something people do mainly
| for intrinsic motivations (i.e. as a hobby or as a social
| activity).
|
| The same _might_ potentially happen with writing, where
| if anyone can generate a decent original story, poem,
| advertising copy, product UI writing, etc. in less than
| five minutes, the lowest and middle tiers of paid writing
| work will be eliminated.
|
| It's possible that because these writing-specific jobs
| were already low value / largely eliminated by the
| Internet at large, that won't happen. But it could happen
| to almost any role that basically involves synthesis and
| summary of words and data, since LLMs are so general
| purpose.
| [deleted]
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| I think this is a good analogy.
|
| Smartphone cameras are great and easy to use for a very
| narrow set of conditions. Outside those conditions they
| perform terribly. The kicker is that you don't really know
| unless you already know... the "trained eye" can
| immediately notice.
|
| The same is true for GPT text/code.
|
| Even then, yes, it will still result shifts like we saw
| years ago with newspapers letting go of their photo staff
| and telling journalists to use their phones.
| haswell wrote:
| Photographers are still doing photography for the same
| reasons we always were.
|
| People who want to take pictures no longer need to be
| photographers.
|
| I think it's interesting to look at, but I think the
| parallels break down pretty quickly. The decline of legacy
| photographic equipment and the reduction of skill needed to
| take photos is all about a rather technical skillset
| becoming less and less necessary. The smartphone also made
| many other legacy things irrelevant for most people.
|
| Language and writing are closer to the core of humanity in
| a rather existential way. It's less clear that reducing the
| skillset required to participate in writing is a net
| benefit, even if it enables the generation of more text by
| people who might not have done so before.
|
| Smartphones make a photographer's job easier and a non-
| photographer's goals possible. I worry that the same can't
| be said for language models and the end result is likely to
| be closer to a new form of illiteracy than it is to the
| democratization of a process that formerly required greater
| degrees of technical skill.
|
| When painting broad strokes, I see the similarity. Drilling
| down even a little widens the conceptual gap quite a bit.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I have already had to "intervene" on a developer that was
| writing bad code biased by the fact that he talked to
| chatGPT, and chatGPT can make tons and tons of bad code
| for you effortlessly. (The intervention was basically
| asking "why did you write that? did that function win you
| anything?")
|
| It's easy to imagine the same thing happening with text.
| In fact, the speed that lawmakers and judges adopted the
| idea of generated text is a very big concern to me.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Photography already did to painters what GPT may do to
| writers.
|
| The wave of non figurative "modern art", can be seen as
| painters trying to find new markets.
| Centigonal wrote:
| This is a really interesting idea I hadn't thought of
| before.
|
| Both modern art and abstract art trace their origins to the
| mid-1800s, which is contemporaneous with the development of
| photography techniques, but before the popularization of
| photography in the 1880s.
|
| I wonder if the knowledge of photography could have helped
| spur the development of abstract art, rather than its wide
| adoption and economic effect.
|
| One other thing to consider is that the starving artist
| predates photography - the "Bohemian artist" archetype was
| in full effect in Europe ahead of photography's
| popularization.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| This misrepresentation of what writing is, is something I very
| commonly see in software. People often think software dev is
| about coding.
|
| In reality, while software developers probably enjoy the act of
| coding, it's rarely the interesting or difficult part. It's
| just the rendering you do to bring all the work you did to
| life.
| hakunin wrote:
| The first hard problem is to understand what to build. The
| second hard problem is to build it in a way that is clear and
| maintainable.
|
| I wouldn't discount the importance of clarity in the way you
| code. You might end up writing the right solution, but
| because you didn't communicate "what", "how", and "why"
| clearly enough in your codebase, you will setup other
| developers (and potentially the business) for failure.
| psyklic wrote:
| Even with "just coding", a skilled coder can translate
| thoughts directly to code more precisely and faster than
| translating them first to imperfect English.
| aequitas wrote:
| I still have to find a programming language that allows me
| to convey all the nuances of my thoughts and considerations
| only through code (and keep it readable and concise). This
| is why there there are few (no?) languages that don't allow
| for comments in natural language.
| hangonhn wrote:
| As I've progressed in my career, I find this to be more and
| more true. I would say most days I spend only 50% or less of
| my time writing code. Even when I do write code, the volume
| isn't huge. The challenges for me these days is in evolving
| existing systems without disrupting the business and
| designing and then implementing things that people can build
| on top of. The work is still very technical but a lot of it
| involves researching and planning and testing out hypotheses.
| analog31 wrote:
| Coding is also a part of why coders get paid so well. It's
| certainly true that software developers have other skills
| too, but how those skills are distributed among the general
| population can't be known so long as coding remains an entry
| barrier for most people.
|
| It's also possible that not all devs have the same qualities,
| and each one finds the niche that works for what they bring
| to the table.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| My experience is that "coding skills" are the intersection
| of analytical (being able to formulate hypothesis and test
| them) and language. There's a (small) barrier to entry.
| That and the lack of any gatekeeping is why we saw the
| explosion of Coding Bootcamps "become a javascript engineer
| in 12 weeks". Even tough the great majority of people
| attending these camps won't be able to write a single line
| of code at the end of the program, a few will be able to
| grasp it enough to fill in the blanks on a template for a
| website or an app.
|
| We also had language models that could generate code out of
| very precise specifications back in the 90's. They were
| called offshored programmers. Send an email in the evening
| and get a .zip file in the morning with code. Sometimes it
| would even compile!
|
| Engineering is much more than that. It's about being able
| to formulate, understand and analyze (conflicting)
| requirements as well as the ability to gain domain
| expertize as needed. The best example of that is Carmak and
| binary space partitioning. [0]
|
| To me, what GPT is going to achieve with it's current
| performance is akin to what compiled and interpreted
| languages did: You no longer really care about word size,
| endianness or alignment issues. The compiler takes care of
| generating the correct assembly for you. Same thing with
| snippets generated with GPT.
|
| [0] https://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/quakeSourceRendi
| tion....
| Freire_Herval wrote:
| [dead]
| benatkin wrote:
| Maybe some of the remaining 10% was reserved for writing.
|
| But I feel like it should be more like 50% in his case so it's
| a fair interpretation.
| symlinkk wrote:
| The vast majority of paid writers are just summarizing other
| people's thoughts. Like people writing marketing blog posts are
| just writing what the CEO tells them to, etc.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Not to mention the content farms that just produce junk to
| ruin Google search results.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Right, _most_ professional writers (and editors) are working
| on commercial, not-particularly-creative content of one form
| or another. Ad copy, docs, internal training manuals,
| reports, powerpoints for the execs to read (LOL), memos, that
| kind of shit. Corporations and governments throw off an
| absolute _fuckton_ of writing per year, a fair bit of it
| created, or at least edited, by writing & editing
| professionals.
|
| All of that just got _way_ easier to do. A lot of it can now
| be done by people who couldn 't have, before, because a
| machine can fix their writing so it's sufficiently non-shit
| to be acceptable for many purposes. The rest, that still
| needs some decent writer or editor involved, is likely to see
| a huge increase in per-worker productivity, which will either
| result in similar levels of employment with _far_ higher
| total output, or... in most of the people doing it now,
| having to switch careers.
|
| My expectation is that we'll just turn editors into writers-
| who-also-edit--aided throughout by AI tools--and have non-
| writers take on writing as part of their job (see: what
| happened to secretaries--we're all secretaries, now) and most
| of the writers are going to be out of a job. I reckon this'll
| hit commercial writing (where most of the writing jobs are)
| and high-volume-low-value fiction writing (e.g. the romance
| novel scene, middle-grades shared-penname book series, that
| kind of thing) hardest. Ghostwriters, too--one who embraces
| AI tools and uses them well will be able to do the work of
| five or more who don't, so we'll need far fewer people doing
| that work.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _This seems like a wild misrepresentation of what being a
| writer is. Writers communicate ideas._
|
| That's kind of irrelevant. People paying others for writing
| gigs just care about words on a page, covering a certain topic.
| Doesn't have to be artistic or to contain novel ideas.
|
| So, regardless if some writers make it, hundreds of thousands
| of people currently making a living writing copy can (and will
| be/are) replaced by AI text. If it gets a little better at
| creatively rewriting news agency feeds, many journalists will
| too (that's like what a huge number of journalists do, and not
| original reporting).
|
| At best they will be reduced, for less and more precarious pay,
| to glorified prompt writers and checkers.
|
| > _If you're really a writer_
|
| Yes, and real true Scotsmen will be fine too. The rest, less
| real Scotsmen, not so much.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| The people that could be theoretically replaced by AI text
| could already have been replaced by Fiverr contractors or
| Mechanical Turk workers, but by and large we don't see it.
|
| If someone is able to delegate a task to a $5 worker or a 50
| cent API call, and produce meaningful output, fine. But we
| have no such examples of tasks being able to be magically
| delegated in such a way that creates a cohesive, meaningful,
| broad whole publishing company and product together.
|
| Nobody has used Fiverr to replace the NYT editorial staff
| with a paper that's just as successful. And I don't think NYT
| would find value in delegating their article creation to
| ChatGPT either.
|
| Context, collaboration, high level planning, fact checking,
| deep understanding of market mechanics and sentiment, raw
| talent, etc, matter for writing news. I'm not even a fan of
| NYT or most modern journalism (I hate yellow journalism), but
| I don't think you can automate away an institution with a
| couple of GPT bots. I know everyone is breathlessly assuming
| that's the case today, but nobody is producing anything
| compelling.
|
| "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent
| perspiration" as the saying goes. But for some reason GPT
| heads think that equation has been flipped. I don't buy it.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _The people that could be theoretically replaced by AI
| text could already have been replaced by Fiverr contractors
| or Mechanical Turk workers, but by and large we don 't see
| it._
|
| Tons of writers and graphic designers and such are already
| replaced by Fiverr contractors and other similar cheapo gig
| workers.
|
| > _Nobody has used Fiverr to replace the NYT editorial
| staff with a paper that 's just as successful._
|
| That would be like the last holdout. A good 90% of websites
| don't have such quality consraints or reservations.
|
| It's like someone say "AI will replace graphic designers"
| and someone replying that David Carson wont have a problem.
| Duh, but most jobs don't go to the handful of David
| Carson's of the trade (or even anybody 1/100th as
| famous)...
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > Tons of writers and graphic designers and such are
| already replaced by Fiverr contractors and other similar
| cheapo gig workers.
|
| Really? NYT is employing this? What organization is doing
| this (outsourcing their core competency) and succeeding
| bigly?
|
| > That would be like the last holdout. A good 90% of
| websites don't have such quality consraints or
| reservations.
|
| A good 99.99% of websites don't even matter, are just
| private personal sites with no product or business
| attached to them, so I'm not even sure what the assertion
| is there. Of course there's a power law for quality,
| impact, profitability, etc among websites just as there
| is for anything. If someone uses GPT on their personal
| blog site, that 3 people a year actually read, I'm not
| sure that's proving anything.
|
| > It's like someone say "AI will replace graphic
| designers" and someone replying that David Carson wont
| have a problem. Duh, but most jobs don't go to the
| handful of David Carson's of the trade (or even anybody
| 1/100th as famous)...
|
| I don't think AI, even at present capabilities, is
| capable of replacing graphic designers at any business
| where graphic design is the core competency. A skilled
| graphic designer is just going to have their productivity
| enhanced by having access to AI, and they're going to
| still be able to perform at far higher and consistent
| quality than "a prompt engineer". Consequently, however,
| demand for custom imagery will increase as people realize
| they can do more than simply add a stock image to an ad
| campaign.
|
| But just as "stock photo libraries" didn't kill the
| photography profession, nor did even putting a HD camera
| in everyone's pocket with amazing filter and
| stabilization effects...I predict that AI graphic tools
| will not replace graphic designers.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Really? NYT is employing this? What organization is
| doing this (outsourcing their core competency) and
| succeeding bigly?_
|
| What's with NYT again? I already wrote NYT will be the
| last holdout, i.e. NOT using this, but that means
| nothing, because 99% of news and content websites are not
| the NYT or have the same constraints and reputation to
| uphold.
|
| > _A good 99.99% of websites don 't even matter, are just
| private personal sites with no product or business
| attached to them, so I'm not even sure what the assertion
| is there._
|
| I'm not talking about personal websites. This is in the
| context of news and content websites, not personal
| homepages. We were talking about websites currently
| employing journalists and writers, and the danger AI
| would be to their jobs, remember?
|
| > _I don 't think AI, even at present capabilities, is
| capable of replacing graphic designers at any business
| where graphic design is the core competency. _
|
| Which is irrelevant. It can still replace them where
| graphic design is not the core competency, but still
| provides a livelihood for hundreds of thousands of people
| - small time web designers, logo makers, etc. working for
| small businesses, individuals, and so on.
|
| Dismissingt this as "where graphic design is the core
| competency", is more or less again like saying "David
| Carson and big design brands will do fine".
|
| > _But just as "stock photo libraries" didn't kill the
| photography profession, nor did even putting a HD camera
| in everyone's pocket with amazing filter and
| stabilization effects..._
|
| You'd be very surprised. Photography as a profession is
| near ly dead. The vast majority of professional news
| photographers, whole teams, have been fired from all
| major and minor newspapers that used to have them, and
| the profession in general has depreciated greatly.
|
| If you mean "there are people who still do it as a
| profession", sure, it wasn't killed. People still offer
| horse carriage rides too, at least photography fares
| considerably better than that.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > You'd be very surprised. Photography as a profession is
| near ly dead
|
| We have data on this, the Bureau of Labor Statistics
| provides it: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Media-and-
| Communication/Photographer...
|
| Number of jobs, 2021: 125,600 Job outlook 2021-2031: 9%
| growth (faster than average)
|
| > The vast majority of professional news photographers,
| whole teams, have been fired from all major and minor
| newspapers that used to have them
|
| That's because no one reads newspapers any more, not
| because of automation. The internet + social media killed
| the newspaper, but it didn't decrease overall demand for
| professional photography.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > cause 99% of news and content websites are not the NYT
| or have the same constraints and reputation to uphold.
|
| Ok, show me one meaningful publication doing this, that's
| what I'm getting at. I used NYT as my original example to
| illustrate you can't just fire a news room and replace it
| with a GPT bot. What business can you do this with, where
| writing is the core competency?
|
| How about graphic design? Is there an example of a
| graphic design firm that has fired its designers and
| replaced them with Stable Diffusion et al and a single PM
| to achieve the same output? Or even reduced their head
| count because these AI tools have so dramatically
| improved productivity that one designer can now do the
| work of 2 or 3 or 10?
|
| > It can still replace them where graphic design is not
| the core competency (small time web designers, logo
| makers, etc. working for small businesses, individuals,
| and so on.)
|
| Let's work with a concrete example here. I'm going to
| work under the assumption that there is a self-employed
| web designer out there who, despite the existence of
| hundreds of template web app creators (such as Wordpress,
| Webflow, Wix, etc), no-code tools like IFTTT and Fiverr
| contractors on demand, has managed to carve out a full-
| time job for themselves designing websites.
|
| In order to carve out that niche in the presence of
| already existing WYSIWYG tools and outsourcing services,
| they are already doing something _different_ than just
| boiler plate web design. Before bots come for this web
| designer 's business, these bots would first have to make
| these tools completely obsolete. And yet, I know of no
| one today suggesting that an ordinary small business
| bypass Webflow for ChatGPT + Stable Diffusion to create
| their web site.
|
| If ChatGPT + Stable Diffusion is really the dangerous
| job-killing combination that everyone thinks it is, it
| first has to replace the boiler plate tooling and the
| Fiverr contractors. Then AI's capabilities need to expand
| to accommodate long-term client relationships, long term
| contextual awareness of client needs, realtime
| integration of marketplace demands, institutional
| expertise and deep product knowledge and awareness about
| many implicit things not explicitly documented for any
| GPT to consume (and not necessarily possible to document,
| either). It would need to have wisdom to understand when
| it shouldn't, in the context of often incredibly vague
| product requirements. It would need to be able to
| sometimes even forcefully push back against client
| demands and recommend an alternative path altogether.
|
| These are the qualities of a good web designer (and
| indeed, any creative worker), and they're just a small
| sampling of the reason why the already existing boiler
| plate services haven't replaced the need for good people.
| scns wrote:
| Who really understood it, uses the fewest words. Great
| teachers, ELI5, etc.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _but those people won't be "writers."_
|
| Not by your definition maybe, but that misses the point made in
| the article:
|
| > _why did I conclude that 90% of my skills had become
| (economically) worthless?_
|
| The op has inserted a specific word here in braces because this
| isn't a question of what defines a writer, it's a question of
| who gets paid to write. By that definition, what defines a
| writer is not for you to decide, it's decided by the _market_.
| And the market, in my experience, is not particularly concerned
| with quality.
| lbotos wrote:
| The market is wide and diverse.
|
| People who have money will always pay a premium for quality.
|
| With regards to writing, if you can create quality
| information with AI faster than before, you will be more
| profitable.
|
| If you are going wide, and throwing spaghetti at the wall
| with crappy writing, you may also be able to generate $1 from
| a million people vs. $10,000 from 100 people.
|
| AI threatens the middle for sure, and will force all of us to
| change our strategies.
| lucideer wrote:
| You have significantly more faith in the market than I.
|
| > _People who have money will always pay a premium for
| quality._
|
| The assumption here is that the Venn of "people who have
| money" and "people who can recognise / care about quality"
| is closer to a circle than a figure eight - that has not
| been my experience.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| It also assumes that quality can not be archieved with
| chat gpt via quantity. Like "Make me 20 webpages with
| this topic", then let them test & evaluate by amazon
| clickwork, then regenerate with the base of the best 3
| till quality goal is reached.
| lucideer wrote:
| Ha.
|
| Well, yeah - I guess we're even calling into question the
| very definition of the word quality here. Your comment
| seems to imply that quality is a metric that correlates
| with quantitative metrics of mass appeal, rather than
| personal & individually diverse concepts of subjective
| quality, which would be more what I was referring to. But
| both can be equally valid given the context.
| WalterSear wrote:
| More importantly, it assumes that this week's LLM is the
| last one ever, ignoring the improvements and iterations
| we are seeing on what feels like an hourly basis.
| caporaltito wrote:
| This is also my opinion. AI will dig a huge gap which does
| not yet exist between the best and the worst products
| (articles, code, whatever your product is). People will
| only have to navigate in this new landscape filled with a
| huge majority of mediocre crap and a small minority of
| gems.
| jdmichal wrote:
| > AI will dig a huge gap which does not yet exist between
| the best and the worst products (articles, code, whatever
| your product is).
|
| Google results and app stores are already filled with
| low-effort trash. If this gets _worse_ , then the
| importance of "influencers"[1] as _curators_ of the trash
| pile rise even more.
|
| [1] Or YouTubers or whatever else you want to call them.
| chasing wrote:
| > By that definition, what defines a writer is not for you to
| decide, it's decided by the market.
|
| Nope. Writers write. Most writing is "economically worthless"
| -- the number of novels that get written every year is
| astronomical versus the number that make money. If we were to
| let the market judge the quality of creative works, we'd be
| culturally fucked.
|
| The writing skills that became worthless for this guy were
| the ones that weren't worth much to begin with.
| lucideer wrote:
| I agree with you wholly in reality, but we're not
| discussing the definition of writers, we're discussing a
| _qualified_ definition of writers. The qualifier is
| "economic worth".
|
| We're not disagreeing, you're just talking about something
| different than the topic of the OP.
| taylodl wrote:
| > The writing skills that became worthless for this guy
| were the ones that weren't worth much to begin with.
|
| Exactly. The market price for anything is determined by
| both demand and supply. The demand for good writing is
| relatively unchanged. The supply is also relatively
| unchanged. In the case prior to ChatGPT that demand and
| that supply were somewhat low, or as you say - not worth
| much to begin with.
|
| Oh sure, there's always the Stephen King's and Tom Clancy's
| of the world, but guess what? They were always the
| _exception_ anyway and they will continue to be. The same
| argument can be made for musicians.
| happycube wrote:
| Considering Tom Clancy became Tom Clancy(tm) several
| years before he died, heavily using ghostwriters...
| taylodl wrote:
| Shows how a prominent author becomes a _brand._ Tom
| Clancy isn 't the only one. These authors are to their
| books as fashion designers are to their lines at
| mainstream retail outlets.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > Stephen King's
|
| Stephen King has written so much by now, his new books
| are basically remixed versions of his old books. Stephen
| King has become his own ChatGPT.
|
| (No accident either - the guy is a writing machine - 30
| pages a day, no breaks, that's over 50 200 page books a
| year...)
| inkywatcher wrote:
| Those are interesting examples, in that they are both
| commercially successful despite conventionally poor
| writing. In literary circles, King is often regarded as
| somebody who could write well but chooses not to because
| it would be less lucrative. Clancy is bad enough that
| criticism seems unnecessary. AI could certainly write a
| Clancy-esque Dad Fantasy.
| Freire_Herval wrote:
| [dead]
| tshaddox wrote:
| It seems like your definition of "writer" is closer to my
| definition of "excellent writer." But I think those are much
| rarer.
| deeviant wrote:
| Everybody can have ideas, even people that aren't writers. A
| writer is a good at the translation from idea to paper, which
| is what LLMs are uniquely suited to assist.
|
| I have already used LLMs to publish my first book.
| Specifically, I used sudowrite + chatGPT. LLMs are a true
| equalizer in writing. Correcting grammar, improving and
| rephrasing wording, and even helping to brainstorm and
| organize.
| ebiester wrote:
| I think there's more than that. As someone who has written
| millions of words in my life, I agree with you - the mechanical
| transformation of my ideas is not the hard part. However, there
| will be people who haven't developed their own style or their
| own fluency in the mechanical transformation, and now they have
| the ability to do so almost as well as I can.
|
| An expert reader will be able to tell the difference. But
| assume that these people have read and understand the subject
| but have not put the millions of words together yet.
|
| At some point, it will become like a calculator. I can multiply
| 20% off a dinner bill faster than getting the calculator out,
| but people won't spend the time learning the mental math and
| they will do just as good a job.
| nevir wrote:
| I do think that this is going to make it a LOT more difficult
| for people to build up the kind of experience that folks like
| you have.
|
| The barrier to entry to the role just got a lot lower, but
| the barrier to gaining enough experience to become a
| specialist just dramatically jumped up
| waboremo wrote:
| Yes exactly this, Stephen King will always be Stephen King.
| You can get chatgpt to generate something like Stephen
| King, but people know about him and his brand/style so it
| feels like cheap imitation.
|
| Everyone else? They won't get the ability to establish
| their brand/style (assuming chatgpt gets faster at updating
| with recent information/sources).
|
| I can see us relying far more on centralized institutions
| (again). Only reading from certain publishing houses,
| writers focusing more on trying to get into a certain house
| vs content of their work.
| jdmichal wrote:
| > I can see us relying far more on centralized
| institutions (again).
|
| Yes. In an age of abundant junk, curation of the gems can
| be a successful strategy.
| aegis4244 wrote:
| That is a theme in one of Niel Stephensons novels. He
| predicted the rise of incoherent rage inducing algorithms
| for profit. Even implied it would work exceptionally well
| on right wing rural religious people from middle America.
| People with money and taste paid for a custom feed,
| curated by humans.
|
| We can add this to a growing list, along with Google
| earth and second life.
| throwaway049 wrote:
| If the house has a quality criteria for entry, won't the
| writer have to focus on the content of their work in
| order to meet the criteria?
| [deleted]
| mlyle wrote:
| My off-the-cuff answer:
|
| I am a decent writer and communicator.
|
| It takes me a little while to get from a bulleted outline to
| a crisp couple of paragraphs.
|
| I now use ChatGPT to do initial composition from the bulleted
| list, and then a first edit. Then I do final edits myself. It
| saves about half the time, and it feels like it saves more
| than half of the energy.
|
| ChatGPT's revision of my answer:
|
| I'm proficient in writing and communication, but I require
| some time to transform an outline into a concise and polished
| piece of writing. To streamline the process, I use ChatGPT
| for the initial draft and first edit, and do the final
| editing myself. This approach cuts down the time and effort
| required significantly.
| kaashif wrote:
| Maybe those two versions mean the same thing in whatever
| idea vector space ChatGPT operates in, but ChatGPT's
| version is missing a lot. It didn't keep your "half the
| time, more than half the energy" bit, which I liked.
| mlyle wrote:
| The former's informal and my default commenting voice.
| The latter is suitable for more uses.
|
| I can pull it towards whatever voice and style I want.
|
| > I ain't half bad at writing and talkin' to folks.
|
| > I can whip up a decent couple of paragraphs from a
| list, but it takes me a bit of time.
|
| > That's why I've enlisted the help of ChatGPT for my
| first draft and edit. Then I take over for the final
| touch-ups. It's a real time-saver and feels like it saves
| even more brain juice.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I think that's inadvertently missing the point. I assume this
| was in broader context of all professions, not just
| "professional writer earning their money from just writing".
|
| Historically, a [sysadmin|developer|security professional|etc]
| who could "put words in a row" in a way that their manager,
| client, functional analyst, etc could even begin to comprehend,
| was _worth their weight in gold_. Majority of developers and
| sysadmins (and I speak as an insider of my own folk here:)
| could not communicate effectively or efficiently with people of
| different contexts & backgrounds; and in particular could not
| summarize key points that align with somebody else's
| priorities. Heck, in my current project, I have a team of dozen
| people who, yes amongst many other things, basically translate
| from the technical description of a problem or incident to a
| functional/business description of problem or incident (and
| yes, I've seen "Office Space":). It's just not necessarily an
| inherent skillset of an average techie. Nor of an average _most
| professions_.
|
| So it's not that chatgpt will replace a unique top-notch
| professional writer.
|
| But it can hugely augment the other 90+% of bell curve when it
| comes to putting words in a row.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _Also, I still maintain that I can communicate ideas
| significantly faster by just typing them than by using a tool
| like ChatGPT._
|
| But vast number of people don't get paid, for writing that
| communicates but rather for spewing words that vaguely cover a
| topic, writing that's a rewrite of already written policies in
| a different formats (FAQ versus Mission Statement versus etc)
| or marketing newsletters that want high-value adjectives put
| together in a plausible way. ChatGPT can apparently do all
| this. I wouldn't count on less people being employed versus
| more pap being produced but we'll see.
| riwsky wrote:
| If you don't have an editor or aren't rewriting your prose, you
| may indeed be communicating faster and clearer than most people
| --but not at the level the author talks about. Going back and
| hunting for strong, crisp verbs is not some crutch for weak
| writers; it's the minimum standard of care when writing
| something for mass consumption.
| ptero wrote:
| > Going back and hunting for strong, crisp verbs is not some
| crutch for weak writers; it's the minimum standard of care
| when writing something for mass consumption.
|
| For mass consumption, sure. But the best writers almost never
| wrote for mass consumption. Some of them did acquire a mass
| following, but it usually was not a goal; their goal was to
| communicate the ideas they developed to a potentially
| interested audience. Ads and dark patterns are their enemies,
| they distract readers from ideas the writer wants to convey.
|
| The last few decades saw a meteoric rise of blogs and other
| forms of writing. A small portion created something new, but
| the vast majority were regurgitating old ideas in a
| (slightly) new light or peddling outrage. I will not cry if
| 90% of those writers stop writing. This will also increase
| chances that whoever is still writing does so because he has
| ideas to capture, not because he optimizes for money and is
| happy to push ads or ideas based on today's ROI. My 2c.
| riwsky wrote:
| You misunderstand me: I agree that lazy SEO spammers are
| poor writers. My beef is with the GP's dismissal of writing
| slower than the speed of thought--when the best writers
| pore over these things _more_ , not less. Quoting Thomas
| Mann, the 1929 Nobel Prize winner in Literature: "A writer
| is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is
| for other people."
| coldtea wrote:
| > _it's the minimum standard of care when writing something
| for mass consumption_
|
| You'd be very, very, surprised.
| riwsky wrote:
| I'm with you, don't worry. I meant that standard
| normatively, not positively, and am in no danger of
| believing that most mass writings meet it.
| s_dev wrote:
| Tech rarely brings everyone up to the same level but rather
| empowers those with knowledge even further.
|
| Basically writers now have tool that is as powerful as Google
| was to researchers.
|
| So I completely agree the author is mistaken here.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| Many writers are experts in something but what about the vast
| swathes of writers that are just writers?
| Mezzie wrote:
| It's great for writers with writer's block or those of us who
| are better _editors_ than _writers_. I can use Chat-GPT to
| produce something bad, but the _way_ it 's bad gives me a
| great place to start.
| franze wrote:
| I have a pretty ok Google spreadsheet foo, bit over the last 3
| years it stagnated as I knew everything I needed to know to do
| what I need to do. Some improvement here and there with some
| Googling here and there.
|
| Last week I had a slight new challenge, and I started googling
| but realised, there must be a better way to solve this new
| challenge.
|
| In the next 2 hours I learned more about Google Spreadsheets than
| in the last 3 years combined.
|
| Thx to ChatGPT (4!!!)
|
| I now have a multifunctional dashboard I can use and reuse for
| this and future projects.
|
| Googling stuff really seems like such a bad investment of my time
| and brain. Google really has become a lazy monopoly.
| colesantiago wrote:
| > ...but the other 10% are worth 1000x
|
| Until AI takes the last 10% with its next iteration with ease.
|
| Given the exponential pace of change of AI, this won't be long.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| This is an example of the kind of thinking Rodney Brooks has
| written about when he explained why people get predictions so
| wrong. People who weren't paying attention to autonomous cars,
| saw the improvement in the two DARPA challenges and thought it
| was around the corner. Most had no idea that people how long
| people had been working on the problem.
|
| Perceptrons was written in the 1960s. Back propagating neural
| nets are from what, the early 1980's? It took a little time to
| get here, it may take some time to get to the next step.
| xtorol wrote:
| While that is certainly plausible, I don't think it is
| inevitable. There have certainly been other points in the
| history of AI where it looked like exponential growth was about
| to render everything moot, and then the entire field hit a
| decade-long plateau.
|
| I'm just a casual observer, but it's not obvious to me that the
| current set of AI tools and techniques are well-matched to the
| things that the now-ubiquitous large language models are bad
| at. (That being said, it's not obvious that they aren't either)
| cm2012 wrote:
| That last 10% is pretty huge
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Exponential growth is never forever, it has to flatten out:
| otherwise it'd outgrown the planet's boundaries pretty quick,
| see malthusian fallacies.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Correct, the question is, how soon will ChatGPT techniques
| top out?
|
| I suspect: a lot sooner than the optimistic "we're close to
| AGI!" crowd expect. Stochastic parroting is not in itself a
| route to AGI. It has real limitations.
|
| Mr Beck's assertion that grown means that we _will_ be
| surpassed in this matter is I think, not necessarily correct.
| We might, but I see it as unlikely, not inevitable. This is
| simply because the growth rate is never constant for ever, it
| tops out.
| 13years wrote:
| It only has to reach the level of AGI. That is the goal of
| AI. Nonetheless, AI researchers predict exponential will
| include reaching some level of ASI.
| humanrebar wrote:
| How does AI talk my boss and team into doing the obvious things
| they're not paying attention to?
|
| Having the right answer is a big help, but it's a fraction of
| the job.
| 13years wrote:
| Your team won't be needed anymore. Your boss won't be needed
| anymore.
|
| Furthermore, whatever product or service your company
| provides, won't be needed anymore.
|
| This is the progression of AI. To be the provider of
| everything in the end.
|
| "Eventually you are just going to be in the way as a manager
| of AI tooling. AI will manage AI and learn from AI. No humans
| in the loop. No humans can keep up with the rate of
| advancement." - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-
| to-all-things
| flangola7 wrote:
| Your boss and team are also replaceable
| Spivak wrote:
| Your boss and team will just ask the AI oracle, if it picks
| the right thing more often than the humans it's a win.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Chatgpt is way better at being persuasive than it is at being
| correct. It is probably already netter than you at convincing
| them of stuff. Probably not bad at spotting causes of
| organizational disfunction given symptoms, they seembto be
| the same ones over and over.
| xpe wrote:
| > Chatgpt is way better at being persuasive than it is at
| being correct.
|
| I get the sentiment, but I doubt this is statistically
| true. Of course it makes mistakes, and certain kinds more
| than others, but ChatGPT's recall is very good.
|
| > It is probably already netter than you at convincing them
| of stuff.
|
| I don't think I agree, but I'm not clear what you mean.
| What do you mean? Care to unpack it?
|
| Here's what I mean when I say I disagree:
|
| * ChatGPT, on the whole, doesn't press an agenda. While it
| does have baked-in opposition to violence, hurting people,
| sabotage, bombs, etc, it does not (best I can tell) have a
| values system to weigh competing interests in a workplace.
|
| * Agency. This one may be obvious, but I think it needs to
| be stated. If you want ChatGPT to weigh in on a decision,
| you have to ask. You have to frame the question. An
| employee/contractor can come in with their own agenda and
| present a recommendation.
|
| * Much of the time (I'm not sure how often, this is an
| empirical question), when interacting with something like
| ChatGPT, people convince themselves. They frame the
| questions. They read answers. They stop at some point,
| perhaps when convinced, perhaps when the response seems
| incorrect, and/or perhaps when they run out of time or
| interest. Along the way, they can push back, asking follow-
| up questions or disagreeing. Of course, ChatGPT is
| presenting information and that information may be
| persuasive. But what "get's in" to the human brain varies a
| lot based on what that person is receptive to.
|
| * Of course, a significant portion of Americans demonstrate
| limited critical thinking skills, for large portions of
| their waking life. One might debate this point, i.e. saying
| that sometimes just "going along with something" is a
| rational strategy to conserve energy, avoid conflict, fit
| in with a group, and so on. Whatever is going on, though,
| it goes appear that for _many_ people, belief formation is
| _not_ primarily driven by a quest for truth in the
| classical liberal sense. Such people often seek "advice"
| from ChatGPT not with the intent to question it, but rather
| to reduce the time and effort that thinking and researching
| requires.
| 13years wrote:
| Some potential evidence of its persuasive effects.
|
| https://phys.org/news/2023-03-ai-generated-arguments-
| minds-c...
| pm215 wrote:
| Your AI talks to their AI, so that the next time that they
| ask their AI, "hey, what should I be doing this
| morning/what's the most important change we should make to
| the codebase/etc?" it prompts them to do the thing you want
| them to be doing :-)
| Escapado wrote:
| I had this conversation with my girlfriend who is currently
| teaching herself web development without a formal programming
| background. She used ChatGPT to help her understand compiler
| errors or write small code snippets or react components and
| was terrified that it would write better code than her and
| seemingly understood things much better than she did.
|
| But here I sit, reflecting on my day-to-day: After the daily
| standup my PO calls me to ask if there is a chance that our
| external A/B testing tool can be coerced into tracking some
| arcane user flow in a slightly different way then the rest.
| After fiddling around with it for 30 minutes I conclude it
| can't but I have another idea on how they might get some of
| the data they want which I promptly put into words forwarding
| to the relevant people. I then get on to select a ticket from
| the backlog. Upon reading I notice the ticket is missing some
| info and the linked figma design is incomplete so I call
| someone from the design team to get some info and while we
| are at it we notice that the proposed solution is overly
| complicated and we settle on changing it - something that did
| not occur to anyone during refinement. Before I get to start
| coding the next teams meeting starts, this time to give us a
| brief of the strategy for the next quarter, and back to back
| the next refinement meeting starts. Half of the tickets have
| holes and missing edge cases in them and about 10% of them
| need to be outright discarded due to fundamental problems
| with our setup or architecture. We have lenghty discussions
| about minutiae of the user stories until finally the call
| comes to a close and I get some time to code. So back to my
| ticket. I open VSCode and I am greeted by our nextjs project:
| 850 components, 150 pages and 2200 unit tests and
| integrations with at least 12 different services in it -
| encoding the needs and wants of my corporate overlords and
| the history of it all. I get to identify where in our
| architecture the wanted feature fits best and think for a
| while of the exact composition of the components to fit our
| code style, best practices, testability requirements. I start
| scaffolding the first component when I see another call plop
| up. Someone from the testing team is confused why suddenly
| their locally initiated E2E tests against the dev stage fail.
| After 5 minutes of perusing logs it turns they didn't pull
| from main this morning and after doing that all was well.
| Back to coding. After scaffolding three more components I get
| to write a little more boilerplate and writing two or three
| utility functions to juggle around some data I proudly look
| at my code. Finishing touches and manual testing reveals that
| all is well. I write a storybook story for two of the
| components and think about which props should actually be
| controllable and mock out some of the involved api, write
| three little unit tests and one integration test to finally
| push my change to a newly minted feature branch. While the
| azure build and test pipeline slowly crawls towards
| completion I open our board, move the ticket to the code-
| review lane, put a small reminder into our dev teams channel
| and log my time in the time tracker. One hour of coding
| effort for ticket #31221. Good! While implementing my feature
| I noticed that a library we were using is out of date. A
| cursory search through the changelogs reveals that some of
| the breaking changes introduced in newer versions would break
| our app so I go on to write a technical ticket about that and
| put it in the backlog. Quick note to the PO that I got
| something for the next refinement and off I go to the next
| ...call. A bug in prod. Turns out one of our docker pods
| kicked the bucket. A quick restart and everything is fine
| again but we get into a lengthy discussion on whether we
| could finally migrate to some serverless architecture. I look
| at the clock. One more hour to go. Not really enough time to
| start a new ticket but looking at the board I find three
| tickets ready for code-review so that's what I do. One of
| them is from a less experienced dev so I try to be as
| thorough as I can and find a few things here and there which
| I promptly add as suggestions to the pull request. 10 minutes
| left. I sign off teams, close VSCode and close all tabs
| except for the time tracking one. I put in the last few
| entries and I am done for the day.
|
| I am not scared of AI taking my job just yet. Not as long as
| I have to defend technical choices in front of business
| people, implement the most outlandish user flows with obscure
| edge cases, have back and forth discussions with the design
| team on the difficulty or feasability of their longings, help
| QA people with their setups, debug devops problems, show off
| progress, write changelogs, estimate PDs for different
| stories and epics on different levels of granularity, onboard
| new developers, off board other developers, dance around in
| retrospectives, conjure up ideas and solutions for
| architectural re-orientations and so on. Actually writing
| some code is only <25% of my job anyway. And I am no staff
| level engineer or tech lead. Just a frontend engineer with
| some side knowledge. All the frontend devs on my team are
| like that. But maybe I am just working on weird projects. Who
| knows. Maybe one day I'll just orchestrate AI or have to re-
| orient but for now I am fine.
| windowsrookie wrote:
| In the future there won't be any team for the AI to talk to.
| chongli wrote:
| If you mean to imply that in the future it'll just be the
| boss sitting alone at his computer, interacting with the
| AI, then couldn't he still be more efficient by hiring a
| team of people to interact with the computer? After all, no
| matter how advanced the AI gets, the productivity of the
| company will still be limited by the speed at which the AI
| "operators" can interface with the machine. This is true
| regardless of the input choice: keyboard/mouse, voice
| input, or neural link.
| Version467 wrote:
| Your argument defeats itself. If your AI is _so_ good,
| that its productive output is bottlenecked by the speed
| of your supposed operators than you should just replace
| those with another instance of your ai, as well as the
| boss.
|
| Which is exactly the same scenario that your parent
| comment is presenting.
| chongli wrote:
| Ahhh yes, the fabled paperclip maximizer [1]. All skills
| become worth $0 in that scenario. It's a thought-
| terminating cliche at this point.
|
| [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/squiggle-maximizer-
| formerly-pa...
| Version467 wrote:
| Not sure how the paperclip-maximiser is relevant here.
| This still happens with friendly ai.
|
| If you accept the premise (all jobs replaced with ai,
| except for the boss, with no difference in productive
| output), then you can not solve the problem of all the
| lost jobs by rehiring them all as "operators". You said
| yourself that in this hypothetical scenario the
| bottleneck is human-ai communication (which is why you
| want to hire operators to increase productivity).
|
| But if human-ai communication speed is the bottleneck
| (and not ai capabilities, or compute, etc.) then you
| solve the bottleneck by replacing humans with ai, not by
| adding more humans.
|
| I don't think the original scenario is plausible (all
| jobs replaced except for the boss), so don't
| misunderstand my argument as defending that. I'm just
| saying that your conclusion (just hire operators) doesn't
| follow from the premise.
|
| It's not worth arguing this a lot further since I don't
| think the premise is plausible and we're talking about
| something that's only relevant if it were, unless I
| fatally misunderstood something you were saying?
| chongli wrote:
| You said:
|
| _just replace those with another instance of your ai, as
| well as the boss._
|
| I interpreted your statement as meaning to replace even
| the boss with AI, i.e. a fully-autonomous AI answerable
| to no one. That is just a paperclip-maximizer since it is
| no longer under human control.
|
| Perhaps you never meant for the boss to be replaced, in
| that case you may ignore my paperclip-maximizer
| statement.
| Version467 wrote:
| It is what I meant, I just don't see what the paperclip-
| maximiser has to do with it. As far as I understand it
| the primary idea behind that particular thought
| experiment is how a misaligned ai leads to agi ruin, even
| for simple goals.
|
| The scenario we talk about doesn't even contain
| misaligned ai. It contains friendly ai (the best case
| scenario), which still drops all current human economic
| value to zero. The contrived scenario has all jobs except
| for the boss replaced with ai. You propose hiring
| operators to increase the companies productivity. I say
| this doesn't make sense.
|
| Do you agree until this point? If so, what does the
| paperclip maximiser have to do with anything? If not,
| what did I misunderstand?
| RedCondor wrote:
| Just like crypto.
| 13years wrote:
| Seems many have no concept of exponential growth as this is the
| correct answer.
|
| The goal of everyone building AI is to reach AGI, if that is
| achievable, there is no last 10% or 1%.
| rcme wrote:
| Or the supply of people who can do the remaining 10% is higher
| than those who can do the other 90%.
| mlatu wrote:
| all chatgpt and similar tech does is undermine our trust in "what
| we perceive has actual value because some human took the time to
| make it in the first place". first sponsored ads, now this shit.
| it's the tragedy of the commons, again and again with our
| attention as the abused common good
| Radim wrote:
| > _it 's the tragedy of the commons, again and again with our
| attention as the abused common good_
|
| Don't worry, your attention is abused only as long as it is of
| value. I.e. only to the degree said attention triggers an
| action that ultimately brings about profit.
|
| The days when human attention was of paramount value, because
| the human activity it triggered was uniquely valuable, are
| coming to an end.
|
| So on the contrary, rejoice! You may see _fewer_ sponsored ads.
| In fact the whole "ads" discipline as we know it might
| disappear, as its economical foundation crumbles.
| krona wrote:
| Software is driven entirely by utility value, not production
| value.
|
| I don't care whether the app was written on stone tablets in
| hand-rolled assembly, or by an AI, so long as the plane lands
| safely.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| the value of the plane landing safely comes from two things.
| (1) that it is actually capable of landing correctly, and (2)
| that we have reason to expect that #1 is true before we get
| on. #2 comes from rigor in the production process.
| [deleted]
| al_be_back wrote:
| >> 90% of My Skills are now worth $0
|
| yes, it's an oversimplification; but i do think AI hype will
| pipe-down (just as many other shiny promises: self-driving cars,
| swimming pools on Mars, crypto for everyone etc).
|
| writing software, like writing books/essays/poetry, it's a highly
| creative and analytical process; tiny variations in content could
| potentially lead to massive consequences that may only be
| noticeable when released into the wild. most issues these
| industries face are not on Quantity or Speed these days, but on
| Quality, Proofing and Integration.
| gavinhoward wrote:
| I am a programmer and a blogger, like the author. Unlike the
| author, I do not monetize my blog in any way (or I assume he does
| on Substack).
|
| The author is both right and wrong, just about different things.
|
| First, he assumes GPT will get exponentially better. If that were
| true, all cars would be full self-driving already. GPT will have
| an S curve or Sigmoid function.
|
| Second, he assumes that GPT will always be able to produce things
| from differing voices well. However, as more data is used, these
| bots will only become more homogenous. You can see clues of this
| when it managed to make a Biggie Smalls rap, but did not with
| Woody Gunthrie, whose data is probably closer to the mainstream
| than Biggie's. (This is a gut feeling; could be wrong.)
|
| Third, as things become more of the same bot-like feeling, even
| from people, those who have their own voice and touch will stand
| out more. You can see this in _his_ essay, versus the two written
| by the bot. The voice of the bot ones feels more stilted to me.
| His feels more natural.
|
| What people need to do is to develop their own voice and touch.
|
| In writing, develop your voice. Write _without_ help. Write a
| lot. Create a blog. Put random stupid stuff there. Let yourself
| rant. That random stupid stuff and those rants will not be
| mainstream, and if it 's stupid and ranty, you won't have to care
| about quality. That lack of care will let you have _fun_ , and
| that fun will become your voice.
|
| This is how I developed my voice with my blog.
|
| In code, develop your touch. Don't just code; _design_. Think
| about concepts. Think about UX and workflows. Iterate until
| everything is great. Then design the implementation and iterate
| until everything fits. Then, and _only_ then, code. But as you
| code, iterate the design to remove things that no longer fit and
| add things that do. Dogfood your software. Use it for everything
| you can, even things that don 't fit well. Iterate and change
| some more to make your dogfooding easier.
|
| The end result will be software that is easy-to-use and fits the
| users' needs well. That fit will be your touch.
|
| This is how I developed my touch with my most well-known project:
| `bc`. [1]
|
| But you don't even need to stop there. With my `bc`, I spent time
| supporting users and implementing things for them. Obviously, I
| still designed changes before implementing them, but I _listened_
| to my users and gave them what they wanted within the constraints
| I had.
|
| The end result is a `bc` that can act like the GNU `bc` or the
| BSD `bc`, whichever you want. It can also be its own thing with
| extra features.
|
| Listening to users is another human touch. Make use of it. In
| fact, that's where I will make a living from my current project:
| my support for it will be best-in-class [2], and that's something
| GPT can never replicate because it cannot replicate my brain, my
| voice, and my touch, even when trained on my writing.
|
| In other words, the author is write that the 90% is useless, but
| those 90% were the ones where you were at least partially
| imitating a bot anyway. Those 10% are the _human_ traits.
|
| If you want to have useful skills, be a _human_ , not a fleshy
| bot.
|
| Footnote: I feel bad for anyone that gets my code or writing as
| output from GPT. My code fits my head and no one else's. It also
| uses custom API's that don't exist anywhere else, which means
| such output would be useless. The same goes for my writing,
| though to a lesser extent.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/gavinhoward/bc
|
| [2]: https://github.com/gavinhoward/bc/issues/66
| slig wrote:
| >GPT will have an S curve or Sigmoid function
|
| How can you tell the difference between "we're in the beginning
| of the curve" vs "we're at the end of it" vs "there's no S
| curve"?
| gavinhoward wrote:
| Several ways.
|
| First, diminishing returns. When people start talking about
| exponential amounts of resources required (data or compute)
| or the results are not growing as fast, you're approaching
| the top.
|
| Second, historical precedent. Self-driving cars have been
| around the corner for years now. I don't expect them anytime
| soon.
|
| Third, practical limits. These LLM's are trained on human
| text. Therefore, their output will only approach the best
| humans can do in the limit and in the best case. In the
| average case, they will only have average output, and their
| output will be the average of everything, making it
| flavorless. This is also how you know it's an S curve and not
| a hockey stick: it cannot be any better than the training
| data.
|
| Fourth, limits of the model. These LLM's predict the next
| sequences of words (or in the case of picture bots, they
| predict a sequence of pixels). That means they can only do
| things that have those inputs and require or accept those
| outputs. You're not going to get an LLM to drive a car, and
| you're not going to get a self-driving car to output a
| sequence of text. You may add an LLM to a self-driving car,
| but it cannot communicate with the driving code because they
| have mismatched inputs and outputs.
| slig wrote:
| Thank you!
| tlogan wrote:
| A significant issue for some individuals is their inability to
| identify or articulate the necessary steps to achieve the desired
| outcome. They may have a general sense of the desired outcome but
| lack the clarity to outline the specific actions required to
| reach it. This challenge could be attributed to the difference
| between analytical thinking and intuitive or holistic thinking.
|
| However, I think that the crux of the matter may lie in the
| "thinking" aspect itself. Some people have been conditioned not
| to think, either through training or external influences, but
| this does not mean they lack intelligence (nobody is stupid).
|
| With ChatGPT, the paradigm shifts dramatically. The demand for
| thought and engagement is ever-present, as repetitive and
| mindless tasks become obsolete.
|
| So mindless tasks hit $0, thinking 1000x!
| blackbear_ wrote:
| > With ChatGPT, the paradigm shifts dramatically. The demand
| for thought and engagement is ever-present, as repetitive and
| mindless tasks become obsolete.
|
| I see what you mean, but
|
| > Some people have been conditioned not to think, either
| through training or external influences
|
| I believe that chatgpt & co. are going to make this much worse
| for the majority of people, at least in the medium term. A
| large part of this conditioning happens in schools and
| universities, and in general, students always look for the path
| of least resistance towards a passing grade (in this case,
| chatgpt all the way).
| jl6 wrote:
| It's worth reflecting that the world's bottom billion already
| have skills worth very close to $0, giving them no leverage at
| anything and no prospect of competing for higher level
| employment. If we enter a scenario where AI guts the middle
| class, I hope one upside might be a critical mass of people comes
| to understand how to value people independently of their economic
| output.
| mk89 wrote:
| > I hope one upside might be a critical mass of people comes to
| understand how to value people independently of their economic
| output.
|
| The cynical in me thinks that all you need is another world war
| to fix the overly crowded planet. Then things will be quite
| balanced again and you can keep on judging people by what you
| call the economic output.
| snickerer wrote:
| War leads to impoverishment of the population, and an
| impoverished population leads to many children, thus more
| overpopulation.
|
| The number of offspring is a function of the average
| education and security of the population (especially the
| female). More education and security (i.e., more middle
| class), fewer children.
|
| At least that's how I got the popular statistics from Hans
| Rosling.
| mk89 wrote:
| I was indeed considering this shortly before submitting the
| comment. Then I remembered we have weapons nowadays not
| available back then. It is a very bad way to "solve" this
| issue.
|
| But again that's the cynical view. The better and more
| optimistic view is that... it's all a freaking hype, and we
| just need to figure out what to do next.
| mucle6 wrote:
| citation needed for overly crowded
|
| Wishing others were dead is a dangerous philosophy
| pixl97 wrote:
| As they say, wishing others dead is a great way to become
| dead yourself.
|
| It's insane that we live in a world with enough
| technological progress that we can easily feed, cloth, and
| shelter everyone, yet a huge portion of us are so greedy
| that we don't want to see that happen because it might mean
| one penny less for ourselves.
| xwdv wrote:
| Be careful about wishing people were valued independently of
| economic output, because the value judgement might not go the
| way you think. It could easily be concluded that most people
| are a net negative to the world, and that we should discourage
| more of them from being created. This could mean forced
| sterilization in order to qualify for UBI or welfare programs,
| etc (which is hardly a bad idea, but one that the masses may
| object to).
| inerte wrote:
| Or many of the other things we did historically, mainly "not
| part of a certain bloodline" or "not blessed by the gods".
| quonn wrote:
| No it can't, because nobody would vote for that.
| Phlarp wrote:
| I can think of 75 million or so Americans that would vote
| for it loudly if the right politicians came out in support
| of the idea.
| xwdv wrote:
| I would vote for it in an instant. Population control is
| not something that we can just leave to the pages of sci-fi
| anymore. The increasing fragility of our planet and
| societies means we simply won't have the luxury of letting
| populations grow without limit for much longer, without
| facing disastrous consequences.
|
| And besides, the idea of controlling people's reproductive
| capacities is not without modern precedent.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >I would vote for it in an instant.
|
| _a few months later_
|
| OMG the face eating leopard is eating my face, how did
| that happen!
| CodeSgt wrote:
| The earth can support far more poeple than it does now.
| The solution to many of our issues that are attributed to
| "over-population" is more investement in renewable energy
| and more sustainable waste management and farming
| practices.
|
| The fact that there's an entire school of thought out
| there (I know you aren't the only one) that really thinks
| psuedo-forced sterilization of the poor is better than
| just getting our resource consuption and generation under
| control is kind of sickening frankly.
| thealchemistdev wrote:
| No need to vote. The easiest way to reduce your overall
| population is to educate your female segment. See every
| country with a birth rate below their replacement level.
| This is not a value judgement, it just happens every
| time.
| digging wrote:
| Most countries already practice population control
| through economic incentives. Tax credits, free child
| care, and other initiatives can increase population
| growth. Educating and employing female citizens, giving
| out contraceptives, and other initiatives can decrease
| population growth.
|
| There's no need for sterilization measures at the moment
| (even though they have also been practiced for
| generations). And I would urge you to keep in mind what
| the actual outcomes of aggressive population control
| would actually be. (I'll give you a hint: it's ethnic
| cleansing and targeting the most vulnerable peoples.)
| slothtrop wrote:
| There's a reason that the poorest countries trade the least.
| There's scarcely any economy.
|
| > how to value people independently of their economic output.
|
| You can't assign an economic value to people, and I suspect
| that's what you're alluding to - that people aren't valued
| unless they are compensated X amount. UBI makes this a moot
| point. There's no tangible actionable meaning to "valuing
| people", systematically, otherwise.
| elzbardico wrote:
| The middle-class has always had a cavalier attitude about
| labor-saving innovations that made the lower class
| unemployable. Now that they are in chopping block, I predict
| that we will see an increasing interest on Marxism amongst the
| laptop class.
| tinglymintyfrsh wrote:
| In America, it won't happen because they'll believe it's
| their fault as ashamed, aspirational billionaires. Americans
| are nothing like the French.
| stinkytaco wrote:
| I started to really notice this during the pandemic, when
| pieces about tracking software for work-from-home employees
| started to pop up. Being constantly measured is nothing new
| to service workers, call centers, delivery drivers or any
| number of other industries, but it felt like only when it
| started to impact middle class people who read think pieces
| did it really get traction as an issue.
| fundad wrote:
| We're the vacuum cleaner class. We can't afford a maid but
| can afford the nicest vacuum cleaner in the store.
| tinglymintyfrsh wrote:
| The iRobot vacuum cleaner class. ;@)
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > I hope one upside might be a critical mass of people comes to
| understand how to value people independently of their economic
| output
|
| They are valued independently of that. E.g. in a democracy
| someone who is super productive will get paid a lot, but will
| have exactly the same number of votes as someone with nothing.
|
| If you think their wage should be valued independently of their
| economic output, then I think that is a misunderstanding: money
| is only useful as a measure of economic value.
| YellOh wrote:
| Money is also useful for other measures, such as access to
| food & housing. I'd prefer a person with no economic value
| still be able to access commodities that _do_ have economic
| value.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Access to food and housing have economic value; that's why
| they cost money.
|
| That doesn't mean you can't give people money or housing;
| again, you'd just be valuing them on something other than
| their economic output.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > ...have skills worth very close to $0..
|
| I would rephrase this. They are stuck in their circumstances
| which forces them to survive on a few cents a day. MNCs like
| Nike take advantage of this by getting their goods manufactured
| in Bangladesh at next to no cost and sell them for thousands of
| dollars. If the same workers in Bangladesh were to migrate to
| US I am sure they will make minimum wages, so their skill is
| indeed not $0.
| sjducb wrote:
| I think you misunderstand capitalism. The market value of
| their skills is amlost $0
|
| There are other ways of valuing those people, but you have to
| break out of a capitalist framework if you want to value them
| at more than a few dollars a day.
| FredPret wrote:
| [flagged]
| amflare wrote:
| There are very few economic frameworks that actually value
| people at all. And unless your idea is to replace
| capitalism with an agrarian structure, then almost anything
| else you could suggest would see people as an expense,
| which is the economic opposite of value.
| WA wrote:
| Of the few, which would be one?
| amflare wrote:
| Capitalism, Feudalism, and maybe Mercantilism all come to
| mind.
| ZainRiz wrote:
| There's two aspects to value creation:
|
| 1. How much more value you can now create. E.g Moving from
| assembly to managed code was also a 1000x shift
|
| 2. How much of that value you actually capture, as opposed to
| it going to your CEO, customers, etc
|
| The people in developing countries have the misfortune of
| being able to capture only a minuscule fraction of the value
| they create
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Well then we should bring them all here and also raise the
| minimum wage to $1000/hour.
|
| No. If all the unskilled workers in Bangladesh moved here,
| they mostly wouldn't make minimum wage. They'd mostly just be
| unemployed.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > If the same workers in Bangladesh were to migrate to US I
| am sure they will make minimum wages, so their skill is
| indeed not $0.
|
| Assuming they even qualified for immigration, would they even
| be employable?
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I'm getting down voted but let me elaborate:
|
| Do they speak a language that would be widely useful in the
| US? Are they literate? Numerate? Basic stuff we take for
| granted here in America, where everyone had at least 10
| years of public schooling.
|
| We're not even going into the more "advanced" skills like a
| driver's license, or functional literacy.
| digging wrote:
| > If the same workers in Bangladesh were to migrate to US
|
| I think we have to factor in reality and external constraints
| if we're looking at this scenario.
|
| An individual worker, maybe you can say that. But the entire
| segment of the developing-world workforce? If they were
| somehow _able_ to immigrate en masse, it would disrupt the
| economy enough that I don 't think we could predict the
| effects and say "they'll earn $7.25/hr".
|
| Where they live, doing the work they do, they as individuals
| have almost no monetary value to western capitalist society
| (despite collectively generating uncountable value).
| whack wrote:
| > _the world 's bottom billion already have skills worth
| very close to $0_
|
| This is the context of the response you were commenting on.
| There is a distinction between "this person is earning
| close to $0 because they are living in a poorly functioning
| country and economy" vs "this person's skills are worth
| close to $0". The latter implies that even if that person
| moved to another country, they wouldn't possess any skills
| worth paying $7/hour. Which is false.
|
| For perspective, if you took Bill Gates and parachuted him
| into an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon, they would
| consider him to be useless. But few would agree with an
| absolute statement that _" Bill Gates has no valuable
| skills."_
| tinglymintyfrsh wrote:
| Globalized flattening is happening, but the issue is that the
| vast majority of everyone will be flattened to a level of
| poverty with a tiny fraction of humanity being *illionaires
| because they will own the means of production, the real
| estate, the intellectual property, and the influence on most
| government systems to keep it that way (regulatory capture,
| dirty campaign financing).
|
| It will be gradually harder and harder to compete with mega-
| rich entities in any area, automation and AI will increase,
| and so wages will fall while prices inflate.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| People have been predicting this since Marx and the exact
| opposite has been happening ever since. Even if you look at
| the US, the number of people living in poverty has gone
| down dramatically in the past 50 years just due to an
| expansion of welfare benefits.
| tinglymintyfrsh wrote:
| Respectfully, you're completely and utterly wrong.
|
| 1. https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM
|
| 2. Look outside and see how many homeless people there
| are in any average America metro. This was not the case
| 30, 40, 50, 60 or 70 years ago.
|
| 3. EDIT "Inequality for All" https://youtu.be/zvAFPHLFMa0
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| When your argument is "look outside" you should know it's
| so weak it's not worth posting.
| majani wrote:
| The way I see it, AI is a nifty tool, like a calculator. Who
| was disrupted by the calculator? It wasn't the peasants in the
| fields. It was the people with the ability to do mental sums on
| the fly. Such people went from having the king's ear to being
| parlor tricks on variety shows.
|
| Same thing in the case of AI. We're about to see a lot of so-
| called 10x developers become commoditized.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| How can you have the right comparison but come to the
| completely wrong conclusion is baffling.
|
| 10x developers won't become a commodity. 0.1x developers
| will.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| It's not their skills - it is their skills + their environment.
| If you dropped a lot of those billion people in America, a lot
| of them would be hireable at minimum wage or more.
| 11101010001100 wrote:
| So we should just hope? Sounds like a good plan.
| cjcole wrote:
| Then it's a shame that society has largely decided to discard
| as outdated longstanding philosophies whose tenets do teach the
| intrinsic value of each human independent of their economic
| output.
|
| https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/theogloss/imago-body.html
|
| But pushing aside those outmoded ways of thinking did make it
| easier to sell people useless goods and services which can't
| fill the hole where dignity and self-respect could instead
| reside.
|
| And on top we've built the artifice of "social" media (the most
| shameless oxymoron imaginable) producing sufficient anxiety
| ensuring that the hole remains unfilled despite all effort.
|
| This is a frightening confluence.
| thih9 wrote:
| Is this bigger than computers / web / smartphones? Many people
| lost their clients and had to change the way they work because
| of the above. The market has adjusted.
|
| Then again, it all happened in a relatively long timeframe.
| Whereas here we got access to chatgpt pretty much overnight.
| tedivm wrote:
| There's a difference between "the market has adjusted" and
| "society is better now". The market adjusted by increasing
| inequality, reducing wages, and shrinking the middle class
| (especially in specific regions).
|
| The fact that the market adjusts isn't a good metric to use
| for the healthiness of a society.
| thih9 wrote:
| Which regions? Are we sure there is causality? I meant job
| market, i.e. which jobs are in demand (e.g. social media
| manager) and which aren't (e.g. analog camera operator). Is
| society worse after that changes?
| kingstoned wrote:
| The bottom billion are mostly self-sufficient farmers or
| hunter-gatherers. Money is only relevant in an interconnected
| modern economy. A small tribe of hunter-gatherers or a small
| farming village has a GDP of 0, but they have the basics
| covered.
| pjc50 wrote:
| There are basically zero hunter-gatherers left except in
| national parks in a few places; like elephants and tigers the
| farmers and settlers tend to hunt them to extinction given
| the chance.
|
| Even the bottom billion are probably a lot more incorporated
| into the state than you would expect.
| sjducb wrote:
| This is true until they need something from the outside
| world. Having no money is a problem if you need a doctor.
| slothtrop wrote:
| They (hunter-gatherers) would be the first to tell you they
| don't need something from the outside world.
| shellfishgene wrote:
| The hunter-gatherer who finds out it takes a dentist 20
| minutes to make his year long toothache go away will
| quickly disagree.
| slothtrop wrote:
| There are cruder means to get rid of tooth aches. You
| can't think of a better example than that?
| slothtrop wrote:
| In large part farmers.
|
| Their lifestyle encompasses what seems to be romanticized by
| primitivist anarcho-communists and other radical leftists. If
| the only thing missing in this picture is "hospitals", then
| it has nothing to do with their wages.
|
| The crowd that bemoans consumerism and proselytizes that we
| "don't need" x/y/z also thinks that these independent
| farmers, who mostly don't participate in global trade (the
| poorest, I mean), need more money. Not to be conflated with
| what UN defines as "extreme poverty" which entails inability
| to provision food effectively. And the way they want to give
| them money, is through the benevolent progressive imperialism
| of Communist takeover.
| tudorw wrote:
| Just rebrand with a made up title, most people are average, it's
| average to expect average.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Then I replaced a weak verb with a stronger one--"would like
| to" became "crave".
|
| I agree. ChatGPT should be very good at writing clickbait.
| gizmo wrote:
| ChatGPT can automate the most basic programming tasks. It will
| help you find the right command line parameters or the right API
| calls, or help you with simple code manipulation.
|
| But when you're doing actual programming what use is ChatGPT? I
| hear programmers despair about how their skills have become
| commoditized, but ChatGPT can't do anything I consider
| programming. Yes it can help write or summarize documentation.
| It's a useful tool. But it can't program. What am I missing here,
| what is it that makes ChatGPT such a game-changer for software
| engineers?
| [deleted]
| kraftman wrote:
| i think you're missing that most software dev is basic
| programming tasks. most people arent writing anything that
| novel or complex, they're churning out different versions of
| the same stuff with the same frameworks. the biggest hindrance
| to chatgpt doing that all right now is the size of the context
| it can handle.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| You're missing that in as recently as 2019 LLM's could barely
| form a coherent sentence.
| switch007 wrote:
| So extrapoloating from that progress, it'll soon be able to
| do: requirement gathering, documentation, dependency
| management, unit tests, integration tests, configuration of
| infrastructure, cost management, alerting, monitoring,
| metrics, logging, secrets management, outage responses,
| discussions with stakeholders, A/B testing, security
| compliance etc?
| heurist wrote:
| Why wouldn't it? There are already tools that claim to do
| some of these as independent tasks.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| ... so?
|
| That happens to every new technology. It is mostly useless
| until some development makes it viable or useful.
|
| Getting a time cut from 2019 to 2023 and extrapolating that
| now it will advance at an exponential pace every few years is
| as stupid as getting a time cut from 1980 to 2020 and
| predicting it will have a glacial pace of advancement in the
| future.
|
| Truth is that there were some interesting advancements in LLM
| research, but it's difficult to tell what will happen. Will
| it plateau for a while? Will it keep advancing at a fast
| pace? Will it have frequent minor improvements but never
| really get to the point of AGI (basically growing
| asymptotically)?
| precompute wrote:
| Wow, that article's a really badly written mish-mash of
| paragraphs that end up saying nothing at all.
| throwaway8689 wrote:
| I tried chat gpt for the first time today. I asked it to write me
| a script to fetch some data from an API. It didn't succeed, and
| this kind of common task from a well-documented API should (I
| thought) be a slam dunk.
| vajrabum wrote:
| Prompt engineering is a thing for sure. Might want to search
| the news here for some clues on ycombinator to get better at
| it. And some tasks are beyond it.
| Kranar wrote:
| I tried driving a car for the first time today. I just wanted
| to drive from my house to the end of the block. I crashed into
| a fire hydrant and almost killed three people. This should be a
| very simple and common task, going from your house to the end
| of the block, and yet the car failed miserably.
|
| Sarcasm aside, at my company I've noticed a very disturbing
| split among my co-workers. One group of co-workers hold the
| above attitude, that they should be able to just use a tool on
| day one and it should be able to solve problems that even just
| a couple of months ago would have been unimaginable. That group
| of co-workers looks at ChatGPT and thinks it's basically
| underwhelming and a big nothingburger.
|
| The other group of co-workers are learning how to use ChatGPT
| to solve their problems. They're learning clever ways of
| prompting ChatGPT, how to give it a proper system message, how
| to take large tasks and break it down into smaller tasks to
| offload a lot of the grunt work onto ChatGPT while they focus
| more on the overall architecture. That group of co-workers is
| seeing excellent gains in productivity.
|
| The idea that you would just use a tool on day one, probably
| don't really know much about it or understand it that well, and
| expect it to magically solve your problems is about as foolish
| as driving a car for the first time, not really knowing
| anything about cars, and expecting nothing bad to happen.
|
| ChatGPT is a tool, the people who take the time to learn that
| tool and understand how it works will become much more
| productive software developers, and those who don't will get
| left behind.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| A big one for me is being able to decide when to use GPT3.5
| and when to use GPT4 for a given prompt. Perhaps it will be
| short term that this is a "skill", sooner or later they will
| lift the GPT4 cap and speed it up, but for right now I can
| stretch out a GPT4 session indefinitely if I know what gpt3.5
| can and can't handle.
|
| Besides that though, chatGPT has been nothing short of a huge
| product....I don't even want to say a "huge productivity
| boost", that implies like good sleep or drinking coffee, its
| been like an augmentation that allows be to bat above my
| league. Like a free (well $20/mo) co-worker who knows a lot
| about programming.
| throwaway8689 wrote:
| You have no information on how I approached using chat gpt,
| what prompts I used, how close its replies came to being
| correct/useful or not, but you decided to regale us with an
| irrelevant car metaphor anyway.
| Kranar wrote:
| My reply is just as informative and insightful as your
| original comment, in fact the entire purpose of that
| metaphor was to respond with the exact same precision and
| using the exact same structure as you did and the fact that
| you find it to be irrelevant is exactly the point.
|
| Now look in the mirror and instead of denigrating my post,
| reflect on your own comment and hopefully you'll see it is
| equally irrelevant.
|
| The burden is on you to communicate any information you
| think is relevant to fully appreciate or understand your
| circumstance. The burden is on you to indicate what prompts
| you provided, in what aspects did ChatGPT fail as well as
| the approach you took using it, that could open up an
| interesting discussion where you, me, and others can learn
| something new.
|
| The fact that you failed to do so and instead made a mostly
| irrelevant comment whose pointless nature is something you
| only recognize after seeing it reflected in my post is
| something you need to correct, not me.
| [deleted]
| jjude wrote:
| I am reminded of this intro by Marc Andreessen for Breaking
| Smart[1]: > A great deal of product development is based on
| the assumption that products must adapt to unchanging human
| needs or risk being rejected. Yet, time and again, people
| adapt in unpredictable ways to get the most out of new tech.
| Creative people tinker to figure out the most interesting
| applications, others build on those, and entire industries
| are reshaped.
|
| There will high group of people who will tinker and adapt to
| the way the gpts work and make the best of it - creating new
| apps, industries, and so on. This has been the case all
| through the tech cycles.
|
| We will change ourselves to the new tech and we won't even
| realize we changed.
|
| I am re-reading Breaking Smart book in the context of chatgpt
| and I'm getting way more insights than I read the first time.
|
| [1]: https://breakingsmart.com/en/season-1/introduction-by-
| marc-a...
| ogogmad wrote:
| GPT-4 is a lot better at things like that. That said, you'll
| either have to pay for it, or instead use some severely rate-
| limited but free interface you might find by asking around.
| drewcoo wrote:
| So ChatGPT allows Beck to pretend to be a creative and totally
| devalues creatives? That's not a great look.
|
| Honestly, I'm more comfortable with the notion of it making
| everyone code monkey for a day.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I think we are in a 3D Printing/ Block Chain/ VR hype cycle where
| something important is happening but everybody is over reacting.
|
| I really doubt 90% of anyone's skills have become worthless.
| Mediocre art and mediocre writing weren't valuable or expensive
| last year. People have been having programs write articles for a
| long time now. In the long run, yeah things are going to change a
| lot. But we knew that didn't we?
|
| I wouldn't invest into this now, because there is too much is
| being promised too soon.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > Mediocre art and mediocre writing weren't valuable or
| expensive last year.
|
| At one point every town had a blacksmith, even the smallest
| villages. You could go there to get your horse shod, buy a pair
| of fireplace tongs, get a new latch for your door, and so on.
| In the nature of things, most of these blacksmiths were
| mediocre, but still, they made a living.
|
| Now, there are certainly still a few people who make a living
| by being blacksmiths, but you sure won't find one at every wide
| spot in the road.
| ghiculescu wrote:
| ok, but has there ever been a time when mediocre artists or
| writers made a living?
| nemo44x wrote:
| Before the advent of music recording there were many more
| musicians since the only way to hear music was to to hear
| people play it. Of course music recording created a lot of
| job that didn't exist before too. But many of these
| musicians were presumably mediocre but they made a living
| doing it.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I don't know, do TV writers make a living?
| mjr00 wrote:
| Writers working on network TV represent the most
| successful 1% of all writers.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Yeah I'd say most of that is pretty mediocre.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Sure. The people who write clickbait articles get paid even
| now. Not very much, as a rule, but they do get paid.
| Riverheart wrote:
| Today? Or before the internet when people's idea of
| mediocrity and access to top talent was more limited?
| Depending on where in the world you live a $30 commission
| is a lot of money.
| mjr00 wrote:
| Except in this analogy, we're in the mid-20th century and
| you're lamenting that a new horseshoe-making AI is going to
| put mom & pop blacksmiths out of business.
|
| Mediocre art, writing, and music on their own _were already
| completely worthless_. Go look on Soundcloud and watch as
| hundreds of new songs get posted every minute, most of which
| get 2 or 3 plays; no AI necessary. Even before ChatGPT, if
| you looked at the latest Medium blogs it would be a steady
| flow of articles with a handful of views.
|
| Flooding the internet with AI-generated garbage content is
| going to be virtually indistinguishable from what we have
| now.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > you're lamenting that a new horseshoe-making AI is going
| to put mom & pop blacksmiths out of business.
|
| I'm not "lamenting" anything, and can't imagine where
| you're getting that from.
|
| > Mediocre art, writing, and music on their own were
| already completely worthless.
|
| Nope. Plenty of people get paid for creating mediocre art,
| writing, and music. The guy who writes commercial jingles
| for Bob's Used Cars is not Johann Sebastian Bach. But he
| still gets paid.
| deckard1 wrote:
| We are in the selling shovels to the paranoid neurotic
| upper/middle class that is dependent on tech for their
| livelihood phase. A new form of the hustle culture.
|
| Think about it this way. When the _true_ revolution arrives,
| you will not get open access to it. The person that has access
| to such an AI has access to infinite labor. They will be the
| closest thing to a living god and will attempt to protect that
| moat _at all costs_.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| I appreciate the excellent article. It sums up ChatGPT better
| than anything else I have seen.
|
| My first goal is to improve my skills by using AI as a personal
| tutor.
|
| My second goal is to improve my productivity by integrating AI
| into my work flow.
|
| My third goal is to never getting so lazy that I ever trust the
| output of an AI without proofreading it first. I try to imagine
| the output of the AI coming from a Reddit user with a suspicious-
| sounding handle.
|
| This is a lot like when I learned to use spell-checkers
| correctly. Some people always went with the first option, and
| wrote a lot of odd school papers. Some people use the spell
| checkers to correct their spelling in their school papers, but
| never learned to be a better speller. I learned correct spellings
| from spell checkers while correcting my spelling.
|
| There is also a metaphor for calculators. Students should use
| calculators to check their work, but never become dependent on
| them.
| coupdejarnac wrote:
| What's going to happen when AI's are trained on data produced by
| AI's?
|
| I would guess that AI generated writing is going to converge to
| some banal, widely accessible style.
| T-zex wrote:
| I wonder when is the right time for the governments to start
| protecting local jobs the way they protect farmers from the
| cheaper produce grown abroad.
| eloisant wrote:
| > If I'm big & you're small & you're growing faster, then it's a
| matter of time before you surpass me.
|
| This is true: my son went from 50cm to 150cm in 13 years, so when
| he turns 26 he should be roughly 250cm, then 350cm when he
| approaches 40.
| teddyh wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/605/
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| So, you're suggesting the tech is on an S curve, and you might
| be right, but I think the top of that S curve is going to be
| _much_ higher than you expect.
| croes wrote:
| The same seemed to be true for self driving cars, still not
| in sight.
|
| Same could happen with GPTs. Could be boring if all companies
| suddenly have the same texts because the asked the same model
| the same questions.
|
| GPTs can write like somebody but they can't be somebody new.
| zamnos wrote:
| Sure they can. http://sumplete.com is a new puzzle game,
| which its author says was invented by ChatGPT. If ChatGPT
| couldn't do anything new, then how did that game come to
| be?
|
| Outside of a very limited test area and test market, self-
| driving cars have yet to even be used by the general
| public. Meanwhile ChatGPT's been adopted by en estimated
| 100 million people, many of which are using even just the
| free version to deliver value to the companies they work
| for. Maybe if ChatGPT was all hyped and unavailable to try
| by the masses it would sound like a lot more hot air, but
| it's open to anyone with an account, who can verify claims
| on their own. Not everyone will or has to walk away
| impressed, but when it does in a couple minutes what would
| have taken you a few hours, it's hard not to be.
| toastmaster11 wrote:
| Sumplete is not an original game. Though points for an
| original name however.
|
| https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-copy-sumplete-puzzle-game-
| summer...
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The most important skill in a rapidly changing world is the
| ability to learn new skills - and skills build on other skills.
| If you don't understand the fundamentals of some area of
| technology, ChatGPT isn't going to be of much use in helping you
| build anything that looks at all professional. On the other hand,
| refusing to learn how to write effective LLM prompts makes little
| sense.
|
| Another important reality is that if you buy into what's being
| advertised as good for you, you may be setting yourself up for a
| long-term dependency, which if taken away, will leave you with
| less than nothing (rather like drug or alcohol addiction.)
|
| For example, how many people, if transported to a pre-industrial
| society, could play any meaningful role in recreating modern
| industrial civilization? How would those conversations go?
|
| "We had these wonderful things, the Internet and devices to
| communicate across long distances and we had fine textiles woven
| by machines controlled by computers and airplanes and..."
|
| "Oh, and how do you make such things?"
|
| "Ummmm.... well, first we're going to need some silicon ore..."
|
| Skills are only valuable in the context of economic activity in a
| society if other people see them as valuable. As far as ChatGPT,
| anyone becoming absolutely dependent on LLM models to do their
| job may find themselves in a world of hurt if those models
| suddenly become unavailable for some reason.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| > some silicon ore
|
| It's called "sand", btw. And you'd actually also need boron and
| phosphorus, to dope it with... hmm.
|
| In any case, one shouldn't try to jump over the steps. Black
| metallurgy first, parts standartization second, then coal
| chemistry, then toy-scale electricty, then steamworks, etc. Not
| to mention _radical_ changes in the structure of human
| societies! Good luck with that.
| 13years wrote:
| > The most important skill in a rapidly changing world is the
| ability to learn new skills
|
| This is what AI is. It is a skill learning machine that can
| outpace your ability to learn given enough training data. The
| answer of just learning a new skill will not hold up forever.
| That window will continue to shrink.
|
| > anyone becoming absolutely dependent on LLM models to do
| their job may find themselves in a world of hurt if those
| models suddenly become unavailable for some reason.
|
| This can be said of every technology.
| croes wrote:
| But some technologies can more easily become unavailable,
| especially if they mainly exist as a web service.
|
| MS could remove PowerPoint from Office 365 at anytime if they
| wish, my local Office installation is harder to kill.
| 13years wrote:
| There are already multiple models and open source versions
| of the LLMs. Becoming unavailable would seem to be a highly
| unlikely outcome.
| [deleted]
| poulpy123 wrote:
| I mean 1000 x nothing is still nothing
| rsrsrs86 wrote:
| I've been having ridiculously good code generation results. I
| mean projects that took months delivered under one hour.
| greenthrow wrote:
| ChatGPT is amazing at creating the TGI Fridays or Chili's or
| Applebee's level of copy. If you want Michelin star, or hole in
| the wall, or 70 year old street vendor level copy, you still need
| a human. In my opinion this is intrinsic to the way LLMs work and
| won't change until we have AGI. A great writer's writing is
| informed by all kinds of experience, taste and knowledge that an
| LLM simply cannot posess. It can only imitate.
| krona wrote:
| > It can only imitate.
|
| That already eclipses (at a guess) 75% of humanity, then.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Yes, but 75% of humanity can't make a living wage writing or
| making art. So really at this point you are replacing an
| intern or a fiverr contractor.
| croes wrote:
| >If I'm big & you're small & you're growing faster, then it's a
| matter of time before you surpass me
|
| Yeah, because grow rates are constant and don't change over time.
| seu wrote:
| > The differential value of being better at putting words in a
| row just dropped to nothing. Anyone can now put words in a row
| pretty much as well as I can.
|
| People seem to overvalue "putting words in a row" and undervalue
| "saying something interesting or new" these days.
| makach wrote:
| Douglas Adams got it right. It's not about the answers, it's all
| about the questions. It is truly amazing what GPT can produce -
| but not after long you start noticing a pattern in the answers it
| is providing. There still is room for human intervention in order
| to transform and refine the information in the correct context.
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| Ironically, the pattern you're describing is likely due to
| RLHF.
| kykeonaut wrote:
| In my opinion, those 90% of skills were always worth $0, yet we
| need them to enable the 10% of skills that are worth 1000x. In
| fact even with AI, you still need the $0 skills to ensure that
| whatever model you are using is giving you the answer you need.
| There is a deep connection between our different skills that
| enable us to create value. Bundling them into separate bins based
| on how much value they provide individually feels like the wrong
| approach.
| bccdee wrote:
| > My skills continue to improve, but ChatGPT's are improving
| faster. It's a matter of time.
|
| Nah, I don't think there's any way that LLMs can totally
| circumvent the problems of pervasive hallucination and low-
| quality output. There's a fundamental divide between the things
| LLMs would have to do to replace us (think critically, problem-
| solve) and the things they're designed to do (produce "realistic"
| text based on the data they were trained on). Sure, they can
| engage in a basic level of critical thinking and problem-solving,
| but I'd expect to see diminishing returns long before they can
| actually compete with humans. After all, we're not training them
| to produce smarter or more correct answers--just more
| verisimilitudinous ones. The local maximum is bland and
| uninsightful yet very plausibly human writing.
|
| I'll worry when we come up with an architecture & training scheme
| that directly optimizes for problem-solving.
| vervez wrote:
| min{d(problem)/d(theta)} is essentially what LLMs are doing
| with a prompt. Every session that a chatgpt user has leads to
| either a resolution or not, which is the loss function given
| the prompt used to reach that point. It's getting better at not
| hallucinating in my experience over just the past 4 months.
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