[HN Gopher] Congress gets 40 ChatGPT Plus licenses to start expe...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Congress gets 40 ChatGPT Plus licenses to start experimenting with
       generative AI
        
       Author : occamschainsaw
       Score  : 128 points
       Date   : 2023-04-25 10:20 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (fedscoop.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (fedscoop.com)
        
       | ttul wrote:
       | Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the
       | United States of America in Congress assembled,
       | 
       | SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
       | 
       | This Act may be cited as the "As an AI language model, I can't
       | ..."
        
         | albert_e wrote:
         | I was going to make a similar joke.
         | 
         | We already have large legislations that include a lot of
         | sneaked in clauses that no one reads. It is only a matter of
         | time before "As an AI model" ends up in the constitution and
         | laws.
        
           | ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
           | I interned at the US Senate for a year, and it was pretty eye
           | opening. There are quite literally teams available to members
           | to which they basically can go "write me a law that does X,"
           | and then they get to work. Staff at the Congressional
           | Research Service has to be sweating bullets now! /s
        
             | Tactician_mark wrote:
             | The pipeline will shift quickly. Won't be long before the
             | ask is "Write me a prompt that does X".
        
               | ProllyInfamous wrote:
               | The pipeline will shift quickly. Won't be long before the
               | ask is "Sneak `nefarious prompt` into `House Bill 123:
               | Save All the Kittahs`"
        
           | AdamJacobMuller wrote:
           | Obviously you can try to subvert this, but, it seems like AI
           | would also be good at finding these kinds of sneaked-in
           | clauses.
        
       | darkwizard42 wrote:
       | This seems like a pretty big win, but could have some unintended
       | side effects. Writing a summary of a bill is great to glean it's
       | purpose at a high level. However, this isn't enough to make a
       | decision, a bill could have hundreds of lines of text with real
       | legal enforceable effect on citizen's rights. Every one of those
       | lines is important so while this MIGHT help summarize all the
       | "legalese" I'm not sure it will help us get simpler, more
       | straightforward legislation.
       | 
       | On the positive side it could lead to people who never read bills
       | to actually get some sort of summary they can read quickly.
       | Caveat: I don't think it is fun or interesting read a 500-page
       | farm bill, but also that is their job, so they have to do it or
       | pass simpler bills.
       | 
       | On the negative side, it could lead to further crap being shoved
       | into bills which lobbyists know won't be picked up by an AI-
       | driven "bill-explainer" product.
        
         | dragonwriter wrote:
         | > Writing a summary of a bill is great to glean it's purpose at
         | a high level. However, this isn't enough to make a decision
         | 
         | Staff summaries are a major driver of decisions on bills as it
         | is.
         | 
         | OTOH, ChatGPT is notoriously bad in any serious legal analysis
         | related task--fast, yes, but quite often outrageously wrong in
         | ways that are very good at convincing non-experts and might
         | often also convince experts if they didn't do the same work (it
         | won't fool experts on the toy problems it fails, but where its
         | analyzing a large bill that the expert hasn't also fully
         | analyzed, it may or may not be obvious that the LLM is
         | hallucinating the premise underlying its analysis.)
        
       | kneebonian wrote:
       | This is bad. Let's say that ChatGPT has, or is induced to have a
       | bias in a certain direction.
       | 
       | Then one side of a political discussion is able to generate bills
       | en masse, constant new over and over with slight tweaks. Another
       | side of the discussion is unable to get new bills to discussion
       | or consideration because of the mass of bills generated by the
       | other side.
       | 
       | Effectively a legislative DoS attack. Not to mention ChatGPT in
       | it's current form would already be unwilling to generate the text
       | of bills for certain issues.
        
         | flangola7 wrote:
         | ChatGPT will generate nearly anything you want unless it is
         | pretty clearly sexual or unethical. GPT4 especially so.
        
         | DoctorOW wrote:
         | It'd have to be more than a slight bias for ChatGPT to be
         | completely useless. However, this provides an excellent
         | incentive to reform the legislative process which is long
         | overdue anyways.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | ElfinTrousers wrote:
       | Well hold on, what's wrong with the current system where
       | legislation is generated by lobbyists? /s
        
       | mLuby wrote:
       | Each paragraph of AI-generated content should have to be prefaced
       | with the phrase "computer-generated:" with the same visibility as
       | the rest of the text. Same goes for images but with a watermark
       | instead. No site-wide opt-outs.
        
         | justrealist wrote:
         | What if the content is generated, read by a human, and
         | approved? What if the content is drafted by a generative AI and
         | then edited by a human? What if I had an extensive conversation
         | with GPT-4 to figure out what I was going to write, and then
         | wrote it myself?
        
           | mLuby wrote:
           | Using plagiarism rules seems both fair and appropriate (given
           | the source of the AI's content).
           | 
           | A human reviewing an author's writing and then passing it off
           | as their own isn't okay. If they make substantive edits such
           | that it's essentially new work, then it's okay. Discussing
           | with the author then writing their own versions is okay.
           | 
           | Really though what I'm after is a mass protection so
           | consumers can understand that images they're seeing or
           | language they're reading or hearing isn't from a primary (ie
           | human) source. Sort of like the "actor portrayal" or "this
           | image has been photoshopped" requirements some countries
           | have.
        
       | hathym wrote:
       | CHATGPT: As a creative congressman, I propose a new law that
       | grants copyright protection to AI-generated works. This law will
       | acknowledge that AI systems can produce unique and creative works
       | that deserve legal protection. The law will also ensure that such
       | protection does not infringe on the rights of human authors and
       | creators.
       | 
       | The law will recognize that AI systems do not have a personality
       | or consciousness to imprint on what they produce, but they can
       | produce works that are original and creative. Some countries like
       | the United Kingdom, Ireland, and New Zealand already grant
       | copyright-like protection to computer-generated works. The UK
       | Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 creates a legal fiction
       | for computer-generated works where there is no human author.
       | Section 9(3) states that "the author shall be taken to be the
       | person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the
       | work are undertaken." This provision assumes some form of
       | creative intervention by a human and not autonomous, human-less
       | generation by a computer program alone. Therefore, this new law
       | will ensure that AI-generated works that require human
       | intervention will be protected under copyright law.
       | 
       | The law will also recognize the importance of originality in
       | copyright protection. Common law jurisdictions generally have a
       | low threshold for originality, requiring only a minimal level of
       | creativity or intellectual labor and independent creation for a
       | work to be protectable. Some other countries, like Brazil,
       | approach originality from the negative, and state that all works
       | of the (human) mind that do not fall within the list of works
       | that are expressly defined as "unprotected works" can be
       | protected. Therefore, this new law will ensure that AI-generated
       | works that meet the threshold for originality will be protected
       | under copyright law.
       | 
       | Furthermore, the law will recognize the importance of fictional
       | characters in creative works. Copyright law protects creative
       | expression, and the legal theory is based on derivation
       | copyrights. Derivative works become separate copyright-protected
       | work independent from the original as long as the transformation,
       | modification, or adaptation of the original work is substantial
       | and original. This new law will ensure that AI-generated
       | fictional characters that meet the threshold for originality will
       | be protected under copyright law.
       | 
       | In conclusion, this new law will protect the creative works
       | generated by AI systems that meet the threshold for originality
       | and require human intervention. The law will also ensure that
       | such protection does not infringe on the rights of human authors
       | and creators. This law will acknowledge the importance of AI-
       | generated works and provide a legal framework for their
       | protection.
        
       | seydor wrote:
       | Sudden influx of donations to Kenyan RLHF workers
        
       | riffic wrote:
       | 40 licenses, 441 members (6 are non-voting).
       | 
       | Not sure how they intend to make this work but the article has
       | some obtuse phrasing like:
       | 
       | > The chatbot won't be able to run within the House of
       | Representatives' internal server, which has a firewall that will
       | block it.
        
       | tibbydudeza wrote:
       | AI is just a series of tubes - all AI is bad except TruthSocial
       | oops I meant TruthGPT (trademark pending).
        
       | sharemywin wrote:
       | Wonder how long before the lobbyists are in control of the
       | training data.
        
       | web3-is-a-scam wrote:
       | Surely nothing possibly could go wrong.
        
       | digitalacetone wrote:
       | I wonder if they will also see 25 prompts per 3 hours limit.
        
       | lspears wrote:
       | I wonder if it will hallucinate tax loopholes. Based on its
       | training data of existing laws, it seems likely.
        
         | darkwizard42 wrote:
         | I'm not saying I used ChatGPT/Bard exclusively to do my taxes,
         | but it does a surprisingly good job explaining concepts on the
         | tax forms that TurboTax just doesn't even bother helping you
         | with.
        
       | swader999 wrote:
       | I think they've been experimenting with AI before this. Not much
       | in the last few years seems real to be honest.
        
       | tmaly wrote:
       | write us a bill that grants us unlimited power, be sure to use
       | all existing case law to ensure that it will withstand a court
       | challenge.
        
       | jruohonen wrote:
       | Now this is alarming:
       | 
       | "According a recent AI Working Group internal email obtained by
       | FedScoop, the AI tool is expected to be used for many day to day
       | tasks and key responsibilities within congressional offices such
       | as: generating constituent response drafts and press documents;
       | summarizing large amounts of text in speeches; drafting policy
       | papers or even bills; creating new logos or graphical element for
       | branded office resources and more."
       | 
       | While generating press documents, summarizing speeches, and
       | creating logos seem all reasonable innocent tasks, "drafting
       | policy papers or even bills" is not exactly something that should
       | be outsourced to a garbage-generating machine...
        
         | christkv wrote:
         | can probably be used to explore massive bills as well.
        
           | gs17 wrote:
           | Many of those are so massive they even exceed the 32K token
           | limit of GPT-4.
        
             | welshwelsh wrote:
             | That's true but it doesn't need to process the whole bill
             | in one prompt.
             | 
             | For example you could split a 200K token bill into 10 parts
             | that are 20K each, and ask GPT-4 to create a 2K token
             | summary of each part. Then combine those summaries to
             | create another 20k prompt, and ask it to summarize that.
        
         | counttheforks wrote:
         | I can't wait for no organization to be contactable anymore.
         | Give it a year or two and every form of communication will be
         | handled by a ChatGPT bot.
        
         | roenxi wrote:
         | The entire process whereby laws are drafted and enforced is
         | alarming. Lobbyists and people who disagree with your way of
         | life have substantial influence. I believe that for some of the
         | largest expenditures of my lifetime the US Congress voted
         | literally without people having read the final text bills they
         | were voting on [0]. The language is interpreted by a large
         | group of unreliable judges and juries. Corruption hangs in the
         | air, and people who talk rationally are thin in the
         | conversation. Lord of the Flies looms large in everyone's
         | minds.
         | 
         | Using AI in the drafting process is hardly something to get
         | worked up about in amongst that mess. ChatGPT has a nice clear
         | style and will probably help make these laws more accessible.
         | 
         | ChatGPT _can_ read a 4,000 page bill in 3 days. It 'll probably
         | be a net win once the dust settles if it makes it harder to ram
         | stuff through without debate. And it'll be a nice neutral way
         | of arguing about what is in a bill - people might be able to
         | agree on which AI is reasonable and what it thinks the summary
         | should be. That'd be a win the size of the moon in terms of
         | better pressure to write good legislation.
         | 
         | [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64069764
        
           | notahacker wrote:
           | > It'll probably be a net win once the dust settles if it
           | makes it harder to ram stuff through without debate
           | 
           | Or make it worse, because it completely normalises the
           | practice of foisting long revisions on people at the last
           | minute "you had plenty of time to understand it; my computer
           | read it in seconds!" and encourages people rely more on
           | tooling than dividing reading text between themselves and
           | people they trust who (unlike GPT) have a shared interest in
           | achieving particular goals and protecting particular parties.
           | 
           | From what we've seen current gen summarising tools aren't
           | particularly accurate at summarising legal documents, never
           | mind highlighting stuff which is politically sensitive, and
           | that's before we get into clauses inserted adversarially by
           | entities _who have the same tools to test whether GPT
           | summaries pick them up_
        
           | ElevenLathe wrote:
           | I agree that lawmaking has never been a process under any
           | kind of statistical control, and so its hard to say what any
           | change to the system is really doing.
           | 
           | That said, I can only really agree that it might be a net
           | good IF the weights (and all other data necessary to
           | reproduce the summaries) were open knowledge. Without that,
           | you are just shipping a bill off to a black box and trusting
           | that the gremlins in the box are acting in good faith. If
           | every legislative office is doing this, then those gremlins
           | will become the new focal point of a basically-invisible form
           | of lobbying. This is good for OpenAI (and whoever controls
           | it) but probably bad for everyone else.
        
           | juujian wrote:
           | I don't know about GPT 4, but I did not find GPT 3.5 great
           | for summarizing long documents. I tried it on two long that I
           | knew the content on, and it did not pick up the main themes
           | well. Not even well enough that it would be believable at a
           | glimpse, but I would be more concerned if it was believable
           | and used as the basis of a debate. GPT 4 should do a little
           | bit better in that regard, since it allows for longer input
           | strings, but still not long enough to properly process 4,000
           | pages.
        
           | defgeneric wrote:
           | > And it'll be a nice neutral way of arguing about what is in
           | a bill - people might be able to agree on which AI is
           | reasonable and what it thinks the summary should be.
           | 
           | It's more likely that they'll further politicize these
           | models.
        
           | tzs wrote:
           | > I believe that for some of the largest expenditures of my
           | lifetime the US Congress voted literally without people
           | having read the final text bills they were voting on.
           | 
           | Congress is similar to most other large organizations, such
           | as large software companies. In a large company software
           | company the upper level managers don't actually read all the
           | code. They make their decisions based what managers below
           | them report, and so on down the management chain.
           | 
           | Representatives and Senators are Congress' equivalent to
           | those upper level managers.
           | 
           | The House has over 6000 staff members, ranging from staff
           | working for individual representatives to staff employed by
           | committees. The Senate has over 4000 staff members. Those are
           | the people that deal with nitty gritty details of the bills.
        
           | AnimalMuppet wrote:
           | > ... people might be able to agree on which AI is reasonable
           | and what it thinks the summary should be.
           | 
           | We're going to wind up with ChatDNC and ChatRNC. Nobody in
           | office is going to agree on which one is reasonable, for the
           | same reason that they refuse to agree on anything today.
        
           | dragonwriter wrote:
           | > ChatGPT can read a 4,000 page bill in 3 days
           | 
           | So can the legislative staff of the committee of
           | responsibility.
           | 
           | > And it'll be a nice neutral way of arguing about what is in
           | a bill - people might be able to agree on which AI is
           | reasonable
           | 
           | Ha ha ha ha. No. Just like they can't do that with human
           | experts, and for the same reason. Heck, this has already been
           | demonstrated in the case of AI models quite resoundingly.
           | 
           | And it would be a bad thing if they could: designating a
           | single AI vendor as the sole arbiter of truth in the
           | lawmaking process would be _much worse_ than the status quo.
        
           | Centigonal wrote:
           | > ChatGPT can read a 4,000 page bill in 3 days.
           | 
           | Can it, though? The context window is nowhere near 4,000
           | pages. Getting ChatGPT to understand and summarize such a
           | long document seems nontrivial.
        
             | orbital-decay wrote:
             | It probably can, assuming that a bill can be separated into
             | smaller parts, more or less independent of each other.
             | Trusting the summary is another story.
             | 
             | But expecting people to read 4000 pages in 3 days and make
             | informed decisions after that is unrealistic, regardless of
             | whether they are using lossy untrusted compression tools
             | like ChatGPT.
        
               | nathan_compton wrote:
               | "Trusting the summary is another story." What story could
               | we possibly be interested in that involves having chat
               | GPT read a bill but we don't care about a summary of it
               | being accurate?
        
             | shmel wrote:
             | Add an intern in the loop that feeds every chapter
             | separately and then compiles per-chapter summary that can
             | then be summarized again if it is too long or has too many
             | interdependencies.
        
             | TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
             | super trivial actually. Just tokenize the document using
             | Llama index and pass the vectorization instead.
        
             | candiddevmike wrote:
             | And with most bills I've read, the devil is 100% in the
             | details. Of those 4000 pages, it might just be one sentence
             | that has far reaching ramifications. Alternatively, folks
             | will start maliciously crafting bills in a way that the
             | ChatGPT summary misses the key parts.
        
           | nathan_compton wrote:
           | ChatGPT _can't_ read a 4000 page bill in 3 days. It can't
           | even read a 10 page not-very dense technical document without
           | hallucinating wildly in its summary in my experience with
           | ChatGPT4.
        
           | throwawayadvsec wrote:
           | "ChatGPT can read a 4,000 page bill in 3 days."? in 3
           | minutes?
        
             | cardboardbach wrote:
             | Of course, but the statement was likely a jab at an organic
             | congressperson's inability to read a bill in even three
             | days, before going ahead and signing it anyway.
        
             | saulpw wrote:
             | Actually it takes about 10-30 seconds (one request) for
             | GPT4 to summarize 2000 words (a page or two). And there is
             | a limit of 25 requests every 3 hours for GPT4, and no API
             | access. So this might even take significantly longer than 3
             | days.
        
               | flangola7 wrote:
               | GPT4 does have an API with a 32k token token window.
               | That's 25,000 words.
        
               | saulpw wrote:
               | I don't have access to it, and I'm guessing neither do
               | the 40 ChatGPT Plus licenses that Congress got.
        
           | dmreedy wrote:
           | I agree with the first part of your comment. I'm not sure I
           | can follow you where you take it though.
           | 
           | > ChatGPT has a nice clear style and will probably help make
           | these laws more accessible.
           | 
           | If the laws are not meant to be read in the first place
           | (which I agree with as a likely pattern), how is this
           | motivating? I'm skeptical that they're not read because of
           | their density. I'd flip the causality; they're dense because
           | they're not to be read.
           | 
           | > nice neutral way of arguing about what is in a bill
           | 
           | Elon Musk is already talking about "TruthGPT", an AI without
           | "liberal bias". I don't think you will find anything
           | resembling neutrality in this conversation.
        
             | roenxi wrote:
             | > Elon Musk is already talking about "TruthGPT", an AI
             | without "liberal bias". I don't think you will find
             | anything resembling neutrality in this conversation.
             | 
             | Between TruthGPT, Chuck Schumer & Mitch McConnell I would
             | expect the most honest summary to be TruthGPT. I doubt it'd
             | be close. Even with a very healthy dose of cynicism towards
             | all billionaire projects and scepticism of the abilities of
             | AI. If nothing else the AI has a big advantage because it
             | would have read and possibly remembered the text of the
             | bill and could answer specific questions which already
             | gives it a massive edge over its geriatric competition.
             | 
             | The politicians lie proactively with plausible deniability
             | and/or people wilfully ignoring it because of team
             | dynamics. Something like ChatGPT is hard to train to lie
             | without it being demonstrable with experimental evidence.
        
               | dmreedy wrote:
               | > Something like ChatGPT is hard to train to lie without
               | it being demonstrable with experimental evidence.
               | 
               | See, I consider the functional definition of what current
               | generation LLMs do to be "lying". Not out of malice or
               | moral failing (of the model or the model's creators), but
               | simply out of lack of control/alignment/modulation
               | systems that people typically associate with honesty,
               | integrity, and intention.
               | 
               | The problem-model behind these systems is "predict what
               | comes next". The objective in training is not accuracy of
               | content (by whatever definition...), but verisimilitude
               | of output. An LLM happily improvises on whatever seed you
               | give it. Sometimes this leads to output that aligns with
               | someone's definition of reality. Sometimes it's
               | hallucination or bullshit or garbage or whatever you term
               | you want to use for it. You can modulate this with better
               | prompt engineering, but only by degrees.
               | 
               | I have no doubt future generations of these systems will
               | start tackling this, but the systems as they stand now
               | are by their very nature, liars.
               | 
               | edit: And additionally, while I can't necessarily argue
               | against _your_ trust in these systems (especially given
               | the choice you presented.. I 'd probably choose XGPT
               | too), "neutrality" is defined by a _shared_ trust that I
               | don 't see a route to in the current climate.
        
               | mrguyorama wrote:
               | ChatGPT CAN'T NOT lie even if it wanted to, because it
               | has no concept of truth or false, it's just generating
               | sentences. A lie is just as valid a sentence to construct
               | from a prompt as an accurate statement.
        
               | notahacker wrote:
               | > Something like ChatGPT is hard to train to lie without
               | it being demonstrable with experimental evidence.
               | 
               | ChatGPT "lies" even when you _don 't_ want it to. It's
               | true that it's not a _strategic_ liar like a regular
               | politician, and liable to give the game away by
               | accidentally telling the truth, but it 'll happily refine
               | your lies or make up coherent nonsense pretty much
               | anywhere it hasn't been trained specifically _not_ to
        
               | dragonwriter wrote:
               | > Between TruthGPT, Chuck Schumer & Mitch McConnell I
               | would expect the most honest summary to be TruthGPT
               | 
               | Since "TruthGPT" has an overt mission ("anti-woke") to
               | _lean even harder_ into biases existing LLMs have
               | demonstrated, I... would expect the opposite.
               | 
               | > Something like ChatGPT is hard to train to lie without
               | it being demonstrable with experimental evidence.
               | 
               | ChatGPT lies all the time, and has no innate access to
               | experimental evidence.
        
             | jruohonen wrote:
             | To put all political opinions aside, I was also about to
             | add that it is fundamentally wrong that representatives in
             | a representative democracy are outsourcing lawmaking to a
             | private company whose training data and associated
             | reinforcement learning may contain all sorts of unknown
             | biases. Even if all biases would be absent, I would argue
             | that elected representatives are neither doing their jobs
             | nor serving their constituencies if they outsource policy
             | deliberation and lawmaking to a machine owned by a private
             | company.
        
         | meltyness wrote:
         | An _easily-verifiable_ garbage-generation resource!
        
           | jruohonen wrote:
           | Against which would you verify when the goal of policy
           | documents and bills is to create something new (and even the
           | references to old things are unavailable, inaccurate, or even
           | invented)?
           | 
           | Another thing is that the Congress (like any governmental
           | body in any country) presumably has huge databases of
           | digitalized documents that could be used to train a custom
           | LLM better suited for these tasks.
        
         | ellisv wrote:
         | > generating constituent response drafts and press documents;
         | 
         | Not too worried about that one since most responses are already
         | automated
         | 
         | > summarizing large amounts of text in speeches;
         | 
         | Again, this seems fine.
         | 
         | > drafting policy papers or even bills;
         | 
         | Not terribly thrilled about this one but I don't expect it to
         | be able to draft actual legislation -- my experience has been
         | that ChatGPT doesn't know actual legislation well and wouldn't
         | know how to modify current laws.
         | 
         | > creating new logos or graphical element for branded office
         | resources and more
         | 
         | Fine with this one.
         | 
         | Only one of these is potentially problematic to me but there
         | are also ways for them to use it to make better laws.
        
           | berkeleyjunk wrote:
           | >> summarizing large amounts of text in speeches; > Again,
           | this seems fine.
           | 
           | Not sure about that. Imagine all the misunderstandings of the
           | speeches already and add on ChatGPT making up something or
           | wrongly summarizing something.
        
         | Pilottwave wrote:
         | Calling cutting edge-models consumer facing models like
         | ChatGPT-4 garbage generating machines is very intellectually
         | dishonest. These models are fully capable of drafting these
         | kinds of texts, esp. when qualified staff is guiding the model.
        
           | jruohonen wrote:
           | I beg to disagree. There are already hundreds of real-world
           | examples whereby these models are doing terrible jobs with
           | anything related to jurisprudence.
        
             | jruohonen wrote:
             | If you want proof, it is enough to point to the following
             | recent paper from Microsoft people:
             | 
             | https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712
             | 
             | All things mentioned in Section 10.2 are extremely worrying
             | in a context of lawmaking and jurisprudence in general.
        
           | smeagull wrote:
           | Intellectual honesty is very much in the garbage generating
           | machine camp. Making an embedding space of reasonable
           | language and then randomly sampling it is not a way to draft
           | a law.
        
             | KyeRussell wrote:
             | As someone that doesn't know how the human brain works, and
             | has never drafted any laws, let alone empirically seen what
             | value an LLM can bring in this scenario, you should
             | certainly quality this with a massive "in my layperson's
             | opinion".
        
           | jerf wrote:
           | Well, I just popped in "Write a new Federal law banning the
           | collection of melted snow by individuals or small-business
           | proprietorships for the purpose of protecting endangered
           | plant species. Include a loophole that excludes minority-
           | owned businesses or people who contribute a sufficient amount
           | of money to carbon sequestration technologies or senators or
           | representatives who voted in favor of strongly pro-union
           | causes." and I won't burden HN with the results but it
           | definitely has the shape of a fully-fledged bill for Congress
           | to pass.
           | 
           | One problem ChatGPT would have in its current form is it
           | would need auxiliary assistance to craft a larger-sized bill,
           | as bills easily exceed its current window size. But that's a
           | solvable problem too.
        
           | PartiallyTyped wrote:
           | Guiding and finalizing / correcting.
        
           | dmreedy wrote:
           | They may not generate garbage per se, but they do generate
           | bullshit. Or if you want to put it more positively, they are
           | consummate improvisers. The amount of guidance they require
           | cannot be understated, since while they demonstrate
           | phenomenal capacity for production of language, and
           | understanding of language, they do not yet demonstrate much
           | in the way of capacity for control or alignment.
           | 
           | A technology can be both wildly powerful, mindblowingly cool,
           | and deeply imperfect. I don't believe it's intellectually
           | dishonest to emphasize the latter when it comes to impact
           | against the human beings on the other end of the barrel.
           | Especially when the technology starts to break out of the
           | communities that already understand it (and its limitations).
        
             | spenczar5 wrote:
             | > They may not generate garbage per se, but they do
             | generate bullshit. Or if you want to put it more
             | positively, they are consummate improvisers. The amount of
             | guidance they require cannot be understated, since while
             | they demonstrate phenomenal capacity for production of
             | language, and understanding of language, they do not yet
             | demonstrate much in the way of capacity for control or
             | alignment.
             | 
             | I truly can't tell whether you are describing the US
             | Congress or LLMs.
        
               | dmreedy wrote:
               | I can't deny that the similarities are strong enough that
               | it weakens some of the philosophical underpinnings of the
               | argument. But I am also wondering these days whether we
               | are all just LLMs at the core of it.
        
           | ihatepython wrote:
           | > Calling cutting edge-models consumer facing models like
           | ChatGPT-4 garbage generating machines is very intellectually
           | dishonest.
           | 
           | This is true. It is not really _generating_ garbage, as much
           | as it is regurgitating garbage from the input data.
        
           | MaxMatti wrote:
           | As long as they actually look at it which I don't expect them
           | to, especially after revision 15 of a multi-page document.
        
           | waboremo wrote:
           | How is it intellectually dishonest? It generates garbage,
           | it's fully up to you to dig into that garbage and find
           | something worthy from it. It has no idea it's even generating
           | garbage!
           | 
           | You admit this yourself, it requires qualified staff to guide
           | the model aka some people to dig through the garbage to find
           | the good bits it produced.
           | 
           | Of note: I use chatgpt a lot to generate a lot of garbage. Or
           | for those of you offended by the word, then mentally replace
           | it with something more "neutral" sounding like "debris" or
           | "fragments".
        
             | rvz wrote:
             | > You admit this yourself, it requires qualified staff to
             | guide the model aka some people to dig through the garbage
             | to find the good bits it produced.
             | 
             | Exactly.
             | 
             | It is AI snake oil with the humans still checking if it
             | will hallucinate which it certainly will and thus cannot be
             | fully autonomous and needs qualified people monitoring and
             | reading / checking the output.
             | 
             | Since not only it can generate garbage, it is untrustworthy
             | to be left by itself and to be fully autonomous at the
             | click of a button.
        
               | KyeRussell wrote:
               | Nobody suggested it be left by itself.
               | 
               | There are plenty of people that I would've leave by
               | themselves to do something, but they still provide value,
               | and I wouldn't classify them as generating garbage. A
               | technology with shortcomings is not snake oil.
               | 
               | Look at where this conversation started, where it's ended
               | up, and honestly tell me that you haven't moved the
               | goalposts.
               | 
               | This community has such a ridiculous blueprint for "anti-
               | ChatGPT" arguments. There are enough vocal people here
               | that feel the need to look impressive by repeating it
               | over and over, that legitimate nuanced conversations and
               | genuine information transfer with regard to the strengths
               | and weaknesses of these models are drowned out.
        
               | rvz wrote:
               | > Nobody suggested it be left by itself.
               | 
               | It is relevant and you know exactly why it can't be left
               | by itself.
               | 
               | > There are plenty of people that I would've leave by
               | themselves to do something, but they still provide value,
               | and I wouldn't classify them as generating garbage. A
               | technology with shortcomings is not snake oil.
               | 
               | Except that people can be held to account when something
               | goes wrong and an AI cannot. I can guarantee you that you
               | would not trust an AI in high risk situations such as
               | Level 5 transportation in cars or planes with no pilots
               | (this is not the same as autopilot mid-flight) and sit on
               | the passenger's seat to transport you from A to B.
               | 
               | > Look at where this conversation started, where it's
               | ended up, and honestly tell me that you haven't moved the
               | goalposts.
               | 
               | You're not getting the point. It's about trustworthiness
               | in AI, when a human does something wrong they can explain
               | themselves and their actions transparently. A black-box
               | AI model cannot, and can generate and regurgitate
               | nonsense confidently from it's own training set to
               | convince novices that it is correct.
               | 
               | > There are enough vocal people here that feel the need
               | to look impressive by repeating it over and over, that
               | legitimate nuanced conversations and genuine information
               | transfer with regard to the strengths and weaknesses of
               | these models are drowned out.
               | 
               | Or perhaps many here are skeptical about the AI LLM hype
               | and still do not trust it?
        
               | waboremo wrote:
               | In attempts to avoid the phrase "garbage generator"
               | you've described human beings in your life in the most
               | depressing way possible. Value providers who you don't
               | trust to operate by themselves.
               | 
               | Anyways, I have a bone to pick with you in your last
               | paragraph. You are creating the problem for yourself.
               | There are plenty of people elsewhere (even within HN)
               | discussing exactly what you want, but you choose not to
               | interact with them and instead spend time arguing against
               | "ridiculous blueprints".
               | 
               | You choose what you interact with online when it comes to
               | posting comments, you are choosing not to interact with
               | "nuanced conversations and genuine information transfer"
               | -- why? Are we certain you care about genuine information
               | transfer, or are you just here to feel superior to plebs
               | with "anti-ChatGPT arguments"? Rhetorical questions for
               | the culture.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | badcppdev wrote:
         | Just what you need. A AI hallucinating some reply to a
         | constituent and then that eventually becoming official or
         | somehow becoming law.
        
           | sidewndr46 wrote:
           | What happens when a Congress member uses Chat GPT to draft a
           | public statement and it accidentally includes their
           | resignation? Will we suddenly find that AI is a danger to
           | society and must be regulated?
        
             | akiselev wrote:
             | Nothing happens, except everyone on the Hill will ridicule
             | the politician and his staff.
             | 
             | To resign Congress members have to actually send a letter
             | to the governor of the state they represent. Most
             | unilateral actions in government require some sort of
             | formal document addressed to the relevant authority.
        
         | idopmstuff wrote:
         | I don't think it's reasonable to assume they're just going to
         | let GPT write bills with no supervision, especially given that
         | the first sentence specifically says they're experimenting with
         | it.
         | 
         | It's really, really good that they're doing this - this is an
         | incredibly important technology, and the best way for
         | politicians to understand it is to actually use it in their day
         | to day work. Have it write the first draft of bills and see
         | what kind of weird stuff it puts in there - that's how you
         | actually understand the hallucination issue.
        
         | kmlx wrote:
         | agree
         | 
         | 1. the warning is right there when you open up chatgpt:
         | 
         | > This is a free research preview.
         | 
         | Our goal is to get external feedback in order to improve our
         | systems and make them safer.
         | 
         | While we have safeguards in place, the system may occasionally
         | generate incorrect or misleading information and produce
         | offensive or biased content. It is not intended to give advice.
         | 
         | 2. i know lots of companies that have banned the use of chatgpt
         | for a plethora of reasons. but government is allowed to use it?
        
         | antibasilisk wrote:
         | And that my friends is how we handed control of government to
         | machines
        
         | BeFlatXIII wrote:
         | Considering what human congressmen pass, the AI will likely do
         | a better job.
        
         | throwawayadvsec wrote:
         | I literally have more trust in GPT-3(or even Llamma 7b) than in
         | Republicans
        
         | sesteel wrote:
         | When I see statements like "garbage-generating machine", I
         | immediately think that the person making such a statement may
         | not be aware of the capabilities of GPT-4.
        
           | ionwake wrote:
           | Conversely , I disagree and think garbage generating machine
           | is funny and on point in this serious context. Just for the
           | record I love chatgpt but don't tell me it also doesn't
           | produce garbage as per OP.
        
             | throwawayadvsec wrote:
             | yeah just like most humans produce garbage all the time
             | 
             | I wouldn't call a tool that is more capable and
             | knowledgeable than the average human to be a garbage
             | generating machine
        
               | smeagull wrote:
               | I wouldn't either. But I would still call GPT-4 a garbage
               | generating machine.
        
               | throwawayadvsec wrote:
               | I'm actually arguing that GPT-4 is more knowledgeable and
               | capable than the average human, and I insist on the word
               | average.
        
           | contravariant wrote:
           | Eh, did something change or is GPT-4 a language model?
           | 
           | The one way to show that something contains very little
           | information at all is to show how easily it can be predicted.
           | 
           | There's no difference between you sending me random text or
           | me letting GPT random text for me, and the only information
           | difference between a prompted text and a fully random text is
           | the prompt itself.
           | 
           | Hence why it is garbage-generating, the output contains
           | exactly as much information as the input, except possibly in
           | more words.
        
           | smeagull wrote:
           | Funny, I see that I think they've been in the trenches and
           | had to beat the thing into submission to get useful output
           | from it and realised the true impossibility of the task.
        
         | cush wrote:
         | At least ChatGPT is faster than our current garbage-generating
         | machine
        
           | dmreedy wrote:
           | To quote Mitch Ratcliffe, 'A computer lets you make more
           | mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible
           | exceptions of handguns and Tequila.'
        
       | lagniappe wrote:
       | It's easy to think this will be only bad things, but currently we
       | have volumes of legislation being dropped at the 11th hour and
       | kneejerk judgements on whether to sign it or delegate "the good
       | parts" to understudies and interns to review. If this gets
       | legislators to get a good summary, it won't fix the system but
       | does fix the problem for now.
        
         | jerf wrote:
         | To be honest, it basically can't make the current situation
         | significantly worse. DC has already solved the problem of how
         | to pass extremely large amounts of legislation with no
         | accountability (who wrote this line?) and no ability for any
         | individual human, most notably including the people nominally
         | voting on the bill, to possibly have read the entire bill even
         | at a skimming speed, let alone comprehend and understand the
         | possible implications.
         | 
         | I don't mean this as a cynical crack, either. It's literally
         | true. The spending omnibusses and such are often passed at
         | speeds where it is only borderline physically possible for a
         | legislator to have skimmed the bills, and certainly utterly
         | impossible for them to understand what is in it. DC doesn't
         | need help on that front.
        
       | electrondood wrote:
       | This actually could be quite useful for summarizing all of the
       | parts of legislation that is written in overly-complicated
       | legalese, crammed into other legislation, and delivered the night
       | before a vote.
        
       | precompute wrote:
       | So... should I start making websites with subtle AI jailbreaks
       | that favor positions that benefit me? Heck, I almost feel like a
       | politician!
        
       | wave100 wrote:
       | I wonder if FOIA would cover interactions between congresspeople
       | and ChatGPT. Would be interesting to see how it's being used.
        
       | RugnirViking wrote:
       | one can only hope that they use it at least in tiny part to allow
       | for just a little bit more whimsy in the maze of bureaucracy. An
       | occasional artistic flourish of pirate speak or poetry in
       | subsection 37B, while preserving meaning could be wonderful.
       | Remember that a lawyer will be the one using the tool, so its at
       | least possible this could be done without major issues
        
       | jascii wrote:
       | Considering we have no real way to audit ChatGPT's correctness or
       | security, I find this worrisome at best.
        
         | darkwizard42 wrote:
         | I mean we have ~4,000 page bills going through Congress today,
         | it is impossible to even verify anyone has read through the
         | entire thing. At least this will be a start.
        
         | tiahura wrote:
         | You mean like reviewing the output? How do we audit a
         | congressional staffer's correctness?
        
           | jascii wrote:
           | Yes. What's the use of having standards for document handling
           | and guaranteeing their correctness if we then feed them
           | through a black box and accept its interpretation at face
           | value.
        
       | boredumb wrote:
       | Summarize the following bill and propose a public response in the
       | tone of a left leaning democrat congressman from the midwest
       | united states:
        
       | Haga wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-04-25 23:02 UTC)