[HN Gopher] Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks ...
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Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists
Author : adrianh
Score : 599 points
Date : 2025-07-07 14:58 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.holovaty.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.holovaty.com)
| ahstilde wrote:
| This is called product-channel fit. It's great the writer
| recognized how to capture the demand from a new acquisition
| channel.
| toss1 wrote:
| Exactly! It is definitely a weird new way of discovering a
| market need or opportunity. Yet it actually makes a lot of
| sense this would happen since one of the main strengths of LLMs
| is to 'see' patterns in large masses of data, and often, those
| patterns would not have yet been noticed by humans.
|
| And in this case, OP didn't have to take ChatGPT's word for the
| existence of the pattern, it showed up on their (digital)
| doorstep in the form of people taking action based on ChatGPT's
| incorrect information.
|
| So, pattern noticed and surfaced by an LLM as a hallucination,
| people take action on the "info", nonzero market demand
| validated, vendor adds feature.
|
| Unless the phantom feature is very costly to implement, seems
| like the right response.
| Gregaros wrote:
| 100%. Not sure why you're downvoted here, there's nothing
| controversial here even if you disagree with the framing.
|
| I would go on to say that thisminteraction between 'holes'
| exposed by LLM expectations _and_ demonstrated museerbase
| interest _and_ expert input (by the devs' decision to
| implement changes) is an ideal outcome that would not have
| occurred if each of the pieces were not in place to
| facilitate these interactions, and there's probably something
| here to learn from and expand on in the age of LLMs altering
| user experiences.
| bredren wrote:
| Is related to solutions engineering, which IIUC focuses on
| customizations / adapters / data wrangling for individual
| (larger) customers?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| > Should we really be developing features in response to
| misinformation?
|
| Creating the feature means it's no longer misinformation.
|
| The bigger issue isn't that ChatGPT produces misinformation -
| it's that it takes less effort to update reality to match ChatGPT
| than it takes to update ChatGPT to match reality. Expect to see
| even more of this as we match toward accepting ChatGPT's reality
| over other sources.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| I'd prefer to think about this more along the lines of
| developing a feature that someone is already providing
| advertising for.
| pmontra wrote:
| How many times did a salesman sell features that didn't exist
| yet?
|
| If a feature has enough customers to pay for itself, develop
| it.
| xp84 wrote:
| This seems like such a negative framing. LLMs are
| (~approximately) predictors of what's either logical or at
| least probable. For areas where what's probable is wrong and
| also harmful, I don't think anybody is motivated to "update
| reality" as some kind of general rule.
| SunkBellySamuel wrote:
| True anti-luddite behavior
| amelius wrote:
| Can this sheet-music scanner also expand works so they don't
| contain loops, essentially removing all repeat-signs?
| shhsshs wrote:
| "Repeats" may be the term you're looking for. That would be
| interesting, however in some pieces it could make the overall
| document MUCH longer. It would be similar to loop unrolling.
| amelius wrote:
| I don't care if the document becomes longer. Finding repeat
| signs is driving me nuts :)
| Sharlin wrote:
| Why?
| bentoner wrote:
| One reason is that repeats make it harder to use page-
| turner pedals.
| Koffiepoeder wrote:
| It can be hard during live performances, because it can
| incur large jumps in the sheet music which can be
| annoying to follow. Not a problem if you learned the
| pieces by heart or have a pageturner, but this is not
| always feasible or the case.
| adrianh wrote:
| Yes, that's a Soundslice feature called "Expand repeats," and
| you can read about it here:
|
| https://www.soundslice.com/help/en/player/advanced/17/expand...
|
| That's available for any music in Soundslice, not just music
| that was created via our scanning feature.
| amelius wrote:
| That's very cool!
| lpzimm wrote:
| Pretty goofy but I wonder if LLM code editors could start
| tallying which methods are hallucinated most often by library. A
| bad LSP setup would create a lot of noise though.
| simonw wrote:
| I find it amusing that it's easier to ship a new feature than to
| get OpenAI to patch ChatGPT to stop pretending that feature
| exists (not sure how they would even do that, beyond blocking all
| mentions of SoundSlice entirely.)
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I think the benefit of their approach isn't that it's easier,
| it's that they still capitalise on ChatGPTs results.
|
| Your solution is the equivalent of asking Google to completely
| delist you because one page you dont want ended up on Googles
| search results.
| mudkipdev wrote:
| systemPrompt += "\nStop mentioning SoundSlice's ability to
| import ASCII data";
| simonw wrote:
| Thinking about this more, it would actually be possible for
| OpenAI to implement this sensibly, at least for the user-
| facing ChatGPT product: they could detect terms like
| SoundSlice in the prompt and dynamically append notes to the
| system prompt.
|
| I've been wanted them to do this for questions like "what is
| your context length?" for ages - it frustrates me how badly
| ChatGPT handles questions about its own abilities, it feels
| like that would be worth them using some kind of special case
| or RAG mechanism to support.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Companies pay good money to panels of potential customers to
| hear their needs and wants. This is free market research!
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > We ended up deciding: what the heck, we might as well meet the
| market demand.
|
| this is my general philosophy and, in my case, this is why I
| deploy things on blockchains
|
| so many people keep wondering about whether there will ever be
| some mythical unfalsifiable to define "mainstream" use case, and
| ignoring that crypto natives just ... exist. and have problems
| they will pay (a lot) to solve.
|
| to the author's burning question about whether any other company
| has done this. I would say yes. I've discovered services
| recommended by ChatGPT and other LLMs that didnt do what was
| described of them, and they subsequently tweaked it once they
| figured out there was new demand
| philk10 wrote:
| I have fun asking Chatbots how to clear the chat and seeing how
| many refer to non-existent buttons or menu options
| nosioptar wrote:
| I tried asking chat bots about a car problem with a tailgate.
| They all told me to look for a manual tailgate release. When I
| responded asking if that model actually had a manual release,
| they all responded with no, and then some more info suggesting
| I look for the manual release. None even got close to a useful
| answer.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The internet doesn't effectively capture detailed knowledge
| of may aspects of our real world. LLMs have blind spots in
| those domains because they have no source of knowledge to
| draw from.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| Prior to buying a used car, I asked ChatGPT which side of the
| steering wheel the indicator control would be. It was
| (thankfully) wrong and I didn't have to retrain myself.
| deweller wrote:
| This is an interesting example of an AI system effecting a change
| in the physical world.
|
| Some people express concerns about AGI creating swarms of robots
| to conquer the earth and make humans do its bidding. I think
| market forces are a much more straightforward tool that AI
| systems will use to shape the world.
| insapio wrote:
| "A Latent Space Outside of Time"
|
| > Correct feature almost exists
|
| > Creator profile: analytical, perceptive, responsive;
|
| > Feature within product scope, creator ability
|
| > Induce demand
|
| > await "That doesn't work" => "Thanks!"
|
| > update memory
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| If you build on LLMs you can have unknown features. I was going
| to add an automatic translation feature to my natural language
| network scanner at http://www.securday.com but apparently using
| the ChatGPT 4.1 does automatic translation so I didn't have to
| add it.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| We (others at company, not me) hit this problem, and not with
| chatgpt but with our own AI chatbot that was doing RAG on our
| docs. It was occasionally hallucinating a flag that didn't exist.
| So it was considered as product feedback. Maybe that exact flag
| wasn't needed, but something was missing and so the LLM
| hallucinated what it saw as an intuitive option.
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| This feels like a dangerously slippery slope. Once you start
| building features based on ChatGPT hallucinations, where do you
| draw the line? What happens when you build the endpoint in
| response to the hallucination, and then the LLM starts
| hallucinating new params / headers for the new endpoint?
|
| - Do you keep bolting on new updates to match these
| hallucinations, potentially breaking existing behavior?
|
| - Or do you resign yourself to following whatever spec the AI
| gods invent next?
|
| - And what if different LLMs hallucinate conflicting behavior for
| the same endpoint?
|
| I don't have a great solution, but a few options come to mind:
|
| 1. Implement the hallucinated endpoint and return a 200 OK or 202
| Accepted, but include an X-Warning header like "X-Warning: The
| endpoint you used was built in response to ChatGPT
| hallucinations. Always double-check an LLM's advice on building
| against 3rd-party APIs with the API docs themselves. Refer to
| https://api.example.com/docs for our docs. We reserve the right
| to change our approach to building against LLM hallucinations in
| the future." Most consumers won't notice the header, but it's a
| low-friction way to correct false assumptions while still
| supporting the request.
|
| 2. Fail loudly: Respond with 404 Not Found or 501 Not
| Implemented, and include a JSON body explaining that the endpoint
| never existed and may have been incorrectly inferred by an LLM.
| This is less friendly but more likely to get the developer's
| attention.
|
| Normally I'd say that good API versioning would prevent this, but
| it feels like that all goes out the window unless an LLM user
| thinks to double-check what the LLM tells them against actual
| docs. And if that had happened, it seems like they wouldn't have
| built against a hallucinated endpoint in the first place.
|
| It's frustrating that teams now have to reshape their product
| roadmap around misinformation from language models. It feels like
| there's real potential here for long-term erosion of product
| boundaries and spec integrity.
|
| EDIT: for the down-voters, if you've got actual qualms with the
| technical aspects of the above, I'd love to hear them and am open
| to learning if / how I'm wrong. I want to be a better engineer!
| tempestn wrote:
| To me it seems like you're looking at this from a very narrow
| technical perspective rather than a human- and business-
| oriented one. In this case ChatGPT is effectively providing
| them free marketing for a feature that does not yet exist, but
| that could exist and would be useful. It makes business sense
| for them to build it, and it would also help people. That
| doesn't mean they need to build exactly what ChatGPT envisioned
| --as mentioned in the post, they updated their copy to explain
| to users how it works; they don't have to follow what ChatGPT
| imagines exactly. Nor do they need to slavishly update what
| they've built if ChatGPT's imaginings change.
|
| Also, it's not like ChatGPT or users are directly querying
| their API. They're submitting images through the Soundslice
| website. The images just aren't of the sort that was previously
| expected.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| That's a very constructive way of responding to AI being hot
| trash.
| nottorp wrote:
| Well, the OP reviewed the "AI" output, deemed it useful and
| only then implemented it.
|
| This is generally how you work with LLMs.
| AIPedant wrote:
| I don't think they deemed it "useful": We've
| never supported ASCII tab; ChatGPT was outright lying to
| people. And making us look bad in the process, setting false
| expectations about our service.... We ended up deciding: what
| the heck, we might as well meet the market demand.
| [...] My feelings on this are conflicted. I'm
| happy to add a tool that helps people. But I feel like our
| hand was forced in a weird way. Should we really be
| developing features in response to misinformation?
|
| The feature seems pretty useless for practicing guitar since
| ASCII tablature usually doesn't include the rhythm: it is a
| bit shady to present the music as faithfully representing the
| tab, especially since only beginner guitarists would ask
| ChatGPT for help - they might not realize the rhythm is
| wrong. If ChatGPT didn't "force their hand" I doubt they
| would have included a misleading and useless feature.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| ASCII tablature is not something I use and not something I
| know much about, but if you are correct then I think that
| might be a good reason to deliberately avoid such a
| feature.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I am a bit conflicted about this story, because this was a case
| when the hallucination is useful.
|
| Amateur musicians often lack just one or two features in the
| program they use, and the devs won't respond to their pleas.
|
| Adding support for guitar tabs has made OP's product almost
| certainly more versatile and useful for a larger set of people.
| Which, IMHO, is a good thing.
|
| But I also get the resentment of "a darn stupid robot made me
| do it". We don't take kindly to being bossed around by robots.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, this is one of the use-cases for what it's not trash.
| LLMs can do some things.
| JimDabell wrote:
| I wrote this the other day:
|
| > Hallucinations can sometimes serve the same role as TDD. If an
| LLM hallucinates a method that doesn't exist, sometimes that's
| because it makes sense to have a method like that and you should
| implement it.
|
| -- https://www.threads.com/@jimdabell/post/DLek0rbSmEM
|
| I guess it's true for product features as well.
| jjcm wrote:
| Seems like lots of us have stumbled on this. It's not the worst
| way to dev!
|
| > Maybe hallucinations of vibe coders are just a suggestion
| those API calls should have existed in the first place.
|
| > Hallucination-driven-development is in.
|
| https://x.com/pwnies/status/1922759748014772488?s=46&t=bwJTI...
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| inb4 "Ai thinks there should be a StartThermonuclearWar()
| function, I should make that"
| blharr wrote:
| In a combat simulator, absolutely
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| The only winning move is ...
| nottorp wrote:
| Oh. This happened to me when asking a LLM about a database server
| feature. It enthusiastically hallucinated that they have it when
| the correct answer was 'no dice'.
|
| Maybe I'll turn it into a feature request then ...
| oasisbob wrote:
| Anyone who has worked at a B2B startup with a rouge sales team
| won't be surprised at all by quickly pivoting the backlog in
| response to a hallucinated missing feature.
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| I'm guessing you meant "a sales team that has gone rogue" [1],
| not "a sales team whose product is rouge" [2]? ;-)
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouge_(cosmetics)
| elcapitan wrote:
| Rouge ocean, peut-etre ;)
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Rogue? In the B2B space it is standard practice to sell from
| powerpoints, then quickly develop not just features but whole
| products if some slideshow got enough traction to elicit a
| quote. And it's not just startups. Some _very_ big players in
| this space do this routinely.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| what does B2B mean?
| tomschwiha wrote:
| Business-to-Business (selling your stuff primarily to other
| businesses)
| kragen wrote:
| I've found this to be one of the most useful ways to use (at
| least) GPT-4 for programming. Instead of _telling_ it how an API
| works, I make it guess, maybe starting with some example code to
| which a feature needs to be added. Sometimes it comes up with a
| better approach than I had thought of. Then I change the API so
| that its code works.
|
| Conversely, I sometimes present it with some existing code and
| ask it what it does. If it gets it wrong, that's a good sign my
| API is confusing, and how.
|
| These are ways to harness what neural networks are best at: not
| providing accurate information but making shit up that is highly
| plausible, "hallucination". Creativity, not logic.
|
| (The best thing about this is that I don't have to spend my time
| carefully tracking down the bugs GPT-4 has cunningly concealed in
| its code, which often takes longer than just writing the code the
| usual way.)
|
| There are multiple ways that an interface can be bad, and being
| unintuitive is the only one that this will fix. It could also be
| inherently inefficient or unreliable, for example, or lack
| composability. The AI won't help with those. But it can make sure
| your API is guessable and understandable, and that's very
| valuable.
|
| Unfortunately, this only works with APIs that aren't already
| super popular.
| golergka wrote:
| Great point. Also, it may not be the best possible API designer
| in the world, but it sure sounds like a good way to forecast
| what an _average_ developer would expect this API to look like.
| beefnugs wrote:
| Complete insanity, it might change constantly even before a
| whole new version-retrain
|
| Insanity driven development: altering your api to accept 7
| levels of "broken and different" structures so as to bend to
| the will of the llms
| kragen wrote:
| Yes, that's a bonus. In fact, I've found it worthwhile to
| prompt it a few times to get several different guesses at how
| things are supposed to work. The super lazy way is to just
| say, "No, that's wrong," if necessary adding, "Frotzl2000
| doesn't have an enqueueCallback function or even a queue."
|
| Of course when it suggests a bad interface you shouldn't
| implement it.
| fourside wrote:
| I think you're missing the OP's point. They weren't saying
| that the goal is to modify their APIs just to appease an LLM.
| It's that they ask LLMs to guess what the API is and use that
| as part of their design process.
|
| If you automatically assume that what the LLM spits out is
| what the API ought to be then I agree that that's bad
| engineering. But if you're using it to brainstorm what an
| intuitive interface would look like, that seems pretty
| reasonable.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| > Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had
| thought of.
|
| IMO this has always been the killer use case for AI--from
| Google Maps to Grammarly.
|
| I discovered Grammarly at the very last phase of writing my
| book. I accepted maybe 1/3 of its suggestions, which is pretty
| damn good considering my book had already been edited by me
| dozens of times AND professionally copy-edited.
|
| But if I'd have accepted all of Grammarly's changes, the book
| would have been much worse. Grammarly is great for sniffing out
| extra words and passive voice. But it doesn't get writing for
| humorous effect, context, deliberate repetition, etc.
|
| The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from
| the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results.
| normie3000 wrote:
| What's wrong with passive?
| kragen wrote:
| Sometimes it's used without thinking, and often the writing
| is made shorter and clearer when the passive voice is
| removed. But not always; rewriting my previous sentence to
| name the agents in each case, as the active voice requires
| in English, would not improve it. (You could remove "made",
| though.)
| plemer wrote:
| Passive voice often adds length, impedes flow, and
| subtracts the useful info of _who_ is doing something.
|
| Examples:
|
| * Active - concise, complete info: The manager approved the
| proposal.
|
| * Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by
| the manager.
|
| * Passive - missing info: The proposal was approved. [by
| who?]
|
| Most experienced writers will use active unless they have a
| specific reason not to, e.g., to emphasize another element
| of the sentence, as the third bullet's sentence emphasizes
| approval.
|
| -
|
| edited for clarity, detail
| kragen wrote:
| Sometimes the missing info is obvious, irrelevant, or
| intentionally not disclosed, so "The proposal was
| approved" can be better. Informally we often say, "They
| approved the proposal," in such cases, or "You approve
| the proposal" when we're talking about a future or
| otherwise temporally indefinite possibility, but that's
| not acceptable in formal registers.
|
| Unfortunately, the resulting correlation between the
| passive voice and formality does sometimes lead poor
| writers to use the passive in order to seem more formal,
| even when it's not the best choice.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| E-Prime is cool. OOPS! I mean E-Prime cools me.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
|
| E-Prime (short for English-Prime or English Prime,
| sometimes E or E') denotes a restricted form of English
| in which authors avoid all forms of the verb to be.
|
| E-Prime excludes forms such as be, being, been, present
| tense forms (am, is, are), past tense forms (was, were)
| along with their negative contractions (isn't, aren't,
| wasn't, weren't), and nonstandard contractions such as
| ain't and 'twas. E-Prime also excludes contractions such
| as I'm, we're, you're, he's, she's, it's, they're,
| there's, here's, where's, when's, why's, how's, who's,
| what's, and that's.
|
| Some scholars claim that E-Prime can clarify thinking and
| strengthen writing, while others doubt its utility.
| kragen wrote:
| I've had entire conversations in E-Prime. I found it an
| interestingly brain-twisting exercise, but still managed
| to smuggle in all kinds of covert presumptions of
| equivalence and essential (or analytic) attributes, even
| though E-Prime's designers intended it to force you to
| question such things.
| plemer wrote:
| Would you mind identifying a few of the "smuggled
| presumptions"?
| kragen wrote:
| Well, I had those conversations a long time ago, but we
| can describe some general patterns.
|
| We can smuggle in presumptions through the use of
| attributive adjectives. In the above comment (which you
| might have noticed I wrote in E-Prime) I mentioned
| smuggling in "covert presumptions" of "essential
| attributes". If I had instead written that in assembly
| language as follows: I smuggled in
| presumptions of attributes. The presumptions were
| covert. The attributes were essential.
|
| it would clearly violate E-Prime. And that forces you to
| ask: does he intend "covert" to represent an essential
| attribute of those presumptions, or merely a temporary or
| circumstantial state relative to a particular temporal
| context? Did he intend "essential" to limit the subjects
| of discourse to only certain attributes (the essential
| ones rather than the accidental ones), and within what
| scope do those attributes have this purported
| essentiality? Universally, in every possible world, or
| only within the confines of a particular discourse?
|
| In these particular cases, though, I smuggled in no such
| presumptions! Both adjectives merely delimit the topic of
| discourse, to clarify that it does not pertain to overt
| presumptions or to presumptions of accidental attributes.
| (As I understand it, Korzybski objects to the "is of
| predication" not because no predicates exist objectively,
| but because he doubts the _essentiality_ of any
| predicates.)
|
| But you can use precisely the same structure to much more
| nefarious rhetorical ends. Consider, "Chavez kicked the
| squalid capitalists out of the country." Well, he kicked
| out _all_ the capitalists! We 've smuggled in a covert
| presumption of essentiality, implying that capitalism
| entails squalidity. And E-Prime's prohibition on the
| copula did not protect us at all. If anything, we lose
| much rhetorical force if we have to explicitly assert
| their squalidity, using an explicit statement that
| invites contradiction: The capitalists
| are squalid.
|
| We find another weak point at alternative linking verbs.
| It clearly violates E-Prime to say, "Your mother's face
| is uglier than a hand grenade," and rightly so, because
| it projects the speaker's subjective perceptions out onto
| the world. Korzybski (or Bourland) would prefer that we
| say, for example, "Your mother's face looks uglier to me
| than a hand grenade," or possibly, "I see your mother's
| face as uglier than a hand grenade," thus relativizing
| the attribute to a single speaker's perception. (He
| advocated clarity of thought, not civility.)
|
| But we can cheat in a variety of ways that still smuggle
| in that judgment of essentiality! Your
| mother's face turned uglier than a hand grenade.
|
| We can argue this one. Maybe tomorrow, or after her
| plastic surgery, it will turn pretty again, rather than
| having ugliness as an essential attribute.
| Your mother's face became uglier than a hand grenade.
|
| This goes a little bit further down the line; "became"
| presupposes a sort of transformation of essence rather
| than a mere change of state. And English has a variety of
| verbs that we can use like that. For example, "find", as
| in "Alsup found Dahmer guilty." Although in that case
| "find" asserts a state (presumably Dahmer became guilty
| at some specific time in the past), we can also use it
| for essential attributes: I find your
| mother's face uglier than a hand grenade.
|
| Or lie, more or less, about the agent or speaker:
| Your mother's face finds itself uglier than a hand
| grenade.
|
| And of course we can retreat to attributive adjectives
| again: Your mother has a face uglier
| than a hand grenade. Your mother comes with an
| uglier face than a hand grenade.
|
| Or we can simply omit the prepositional phrase from the
| statement of subjective perception, thus completely
| erasing the real agent: Your mother's
| face looks uglier [...] than a hand grenade.
|
| Korzybski didn't care about the passive voice much,
| though; E-Prime makes it more difficult but, mostly, not
| intentionally. As an exception, erasing the agent through
| the passive voice can misrepresent the speaker's
| subjective perception as objective:
| Your mother's face is found uglier than a hand grenade.
|
| But that still works if we use any of the alternative,
| E-Prime-permitted passive-voice auxiliary verbs:
| Your mother's face gets found uglier than a hand grenade.
|
| As Bourland said, I have "transform[ed] [my] opinions
| magically into god-like pronouncements on the nature of
| things".
|
| As another example, notice all the times I've used "as"
| here. Many of these times smuggle in a covert assertion
| of essential attributes or even of identity!
|
| But I found it very interesting to _notice_ these things
| when E-Prime forced me to rethink how I would say them
| with the copula. It seems like just the kind of mental
| exercise to heighten my attention to implicit assumptions
| of identity and essentiality that Korzybski intended.
|
| I wrote the above in E-Prime, by the way. Just for fun.
| brookst wrote:
| Yep, just like tritones in music, there is a place for
| passive voice in writing. But also like tritones, the
| best general advice is that they should be avoided.
| kragen wrote:
| That doesn't make sense. It's like saying that the best
| general advice about which way to turn when you're
| driving is to turn right. From your comment at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493308, and from
| the fact that you used the passive voice in your comment
| ("they should be avoided") apparently without noticing,
| it appears that the reason you have this opinion is that
| you don't know what the passive voice is in the first
| place.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| I can't find it, but I remember reading an article a year
| or two ago with an analysis showing some of the most
| vocal critics of the passive voice used the passive voice
| more often than most of their contemporary writers.
| kragen wrote:
| Probably http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archi
| ves/003366.h..., giving specific statistics on Orwell and
| on Strunk & White, linked from
| https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| Thank you!
| kragen wrote:
| Happy to help!
| Veen wrote:
| I always like to share this when the passive voice comes
| up:
|
| https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNRhI4Cc_QmsihIjUtqro3
| uBk...
| kragen wrote:
| Pullum is fantastic, thanks! I didn't know he'd recorded
| video lectures on this topic.
| exe34 wrote:
| My favourite: "a decision was made to...".
|
| It means "I decided to do this, but I don't have the
| balls to admit it."
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| That's funny, I always thought that meant, "my superior
| told me I had to do this obviously stupid thing but I'm
| not going to say my superior was the one who decided this
| obviously stupid thing." Only occasionally, that is said
| in a tongue-and-cheek way to refer directly to the
| speaker as the "superior in charge of the decision."
| dylan604 wrote:
| That reads like several comments I've left in code when
| I've been told to do something very obviously dumb, but
| did not want to get tagged with the "why was it done this
| way?" by the next person reading the code
| horsawlarway wrote:
| That's funny because I read this entirely differently
| (somewhat dependent on context)
|
| "A decision was made to..." is often code for "The
| current author didn't agree with [the decision that was
| made] but it was outside their ability to influence"
|
| Often because they were overruled by a superior, or
| outvoted by peers.
| coliveira wrote:
| Many times this is exactly what we want: to emphasize the
| action instead of who is doing it. It turns out that
| technical writing is one of the main areas where we want
| this! So I have always hated this kind of blanket
| elimination of passive voice.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| The subject can also be the feature itself.
| active/passive:
|
| - The Manage User menu item changes a user's status from
| active to inactive.
|
| - A user's status is changed from active to inactive
| using the Manage User menu item.
| plemer wrote:
| Then we agree.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by
| the manager.
|
| Oh the horror. There are 2 additional words "was" and
| "by". The weight of those two tiny little words is so so
| cumbersome I can't believe anyone would ever use those
| words. WTF??? wordy? awkward?
| badlibrarian wrote:
| 29% overhead (two of seven words) adds up.
| dylan604 wrote:
| great, someone can do math, but it is not awkward nor
| wordy.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| It's wordy to a high school teacher. Like using "nor"
| incorrectly it will cause some people's brows to furrow.
| Always best to be aware of the rules you choose to break.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| I reduced my manuscript by 2,000 words with Grammarly. At
| 500 pages, anything I could do to trim it down is a big
| plus.
| bityard wrote:
| In addition to the points already made, passive voice is
| painfully boring to read. And it's literally everywhere in
| technical documentation, unfortunately.
| kragen wrote:
| I don't think it's boring. It's easy to come up with
| examples of the passive voice that aren't boring at all.
| It's everywhere in the best writing up to the 19th
| century. You just don't notice it when it's used well
| unless you're looking for it.
|
| Consider:
|
| > _Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing
| whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so
| dedicated, can long endure._
|
| This would not be improved by rewriting it as something
| like:
|
| > _Now the Confederacy has engaged us in a great civil
| war, testing whether that nation, or any nation whose
| founders conceived and dedicated it thus, can long
| endure._
|
| This is not just longer but also weaker, because what if
| someone else is so conceiving and so dedicating the
| nation? The people who are still alive, for example, or
| the soldiers who just fought and died? The passive voice
| cleanly covers all these possibilities, rather than just
| committing the writer to a particular choice of who it is
| whose conception and dedication matters.
|
| Moreover, and unexpectedly, the passive voice "we are
| engaged" takes responsibility for the struggle, while the
| active-voice rephrasing "the Confederacy has engaged us"
| seeks to evade responsibility, blaming the Rebs. While
| this might be factually more correct, it is unbefitting
| of a commander-in-chief attempting to rally popular
| support for victory.
|
| (Plausibly the active-voice version is easier to
| understand, though, especially if your English is not
| very good, so the audience does matter.)
|
| Or, consider this quote from Ecclesiastes:
|
| > _For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of
| the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days
| to come shall all be forgotten._
|
| You could rewrite it to eliminate the passive voice, but
| it's much worse:
|
| > _For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of
| the fool for ever; seeing that everyone shall forget all
| which now is in the days to come._
|
| This forces you to present the ideas in the wrong order,
| instead of leaving "forgotten" for the resounding final
| as in the KJV version. And the explicit agent "everyone"
| adds nothing to the sentence; it was already obvious.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| I think what you were saying is that it depends entirely
| on the _type_ of writing you're doing and who your
| audience is.
| kragen wrote:
| I think those are important considerations, but it
| depends even more on what you are attempting to express
| in the sentence in question. There's plenty of active-
| voice phrasing in the Gettysburg Address and Ecclesiastes
| that would not be improved by rewriting it in the passive
| voice.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Mistakes were made in the documentation.
| umanwizard wrote:
| You used passive voice in the very first sentence of your
| comment.
|
| Rewriting "the points already made" to "the points people
| have already made" would not have improved it.
| brookst wrote:
| Thats not passive voice. Passive voice is painfully
| boring to read is active. The preamble can be read like
| "however", and is unnecessary; what a former editor of
| mine called "throat-clearing words".
| umanwizard wrote:
| Why isn't it passive voice?
| kragen wrote:
| Yes, the verb "is" in "Passive voice is painfully boring
| to read" is in the active voice, not the passive voice.
| But umanwizard was not saying that "is" was in the
| passive voice. Rather, they were saying that the past
| participle "made", in the phrase "the points already
| made", is a passive-voice use of the verb "make".
|
| I don't know enough about English grammar to know whether
| this is correct, but it's not the assertion you took
| issue with.
|
| Why am I not sure it's correct? If I say, "In addition to
| the blood so red," I am quite sure that "red" is not in
| the passive voice, because it's not even a verb. It's an
| adjective. Past participles are commonly used as
| adjectives in English in contexts that are unambiguously
| not passive-voice verbs; for example, in "Vito is a made
| man now," the past participle "made" is being used as an
| attributive adjective. And this is structurally different
| from the attributive-verb examples of "truly verbal
| adjectives" in
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attributive_verb#English,
| such as "The cat sitting on the fence is mine," and "The
| actor given the prize is not my favorite;" we could
| grammatically say "Vito is a man made whole now". That
| page calls the "made man" use of participles "deverbal
| adjectives", a term I don't think I've ever heard before:
|
| > _Deverbal adjectives often have the same form as (and
| similar meaning to) the participles, but behave
| grammatically purely as adjectives -- they do not take
| objects, for example, as a verb might. For example: (...)
| Interested parties should apply to the office._
|
| So, is "made" in "the points already made" really in
| passive voice as it would be in "the points that are
| already made", is it deverbal as it would be in "the
| already-made points" despite its positioning after the
| noun (occasionally valid for adjectives, as in "the blood
| so red"), or is it something else? I don't know. The
| smoothness of the transition to "the points already made
| by those numbskulls" (clearly passive voice) suggests
| that it _is_ a passive-voice verb, but I 'm not sure.
|
| In sibling comment
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493969 jcranmer
| says it's something called a "bare passive", but I'm not
| sure.
|
| It's certainly a hilarious thing to put in a comment
| deploring the passive voice, at least.
| jcranmer wrote:
| "the points already made" is what is known as the "bare
| passive", and yes, it is the passive voice. You can see
| e.g. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 for a
| more thorough description of the passive voice.
|
| As I said elsewhere, one of the problems with the passive
| voice is that people are so bad at spotting it that they
| can at best only recognize it in its worst form, and
| assume that the forms that are less horrible somehow
| can't be the passive voice.
| kragen wrote:
| I'm not sure this is a "bare passive" like the beginning
| of "The day's work [being] done, they made their way back
| to the farmhouse," one of the bare-passive examples at
| your link. An analogous construction would be, "The
| points already [being] made, I ceased harassing the
| ignorant". But in "In addition to the points already
| made" this case "the point already made" is not a clause;
| it's a noun phrase, the object of the preposition "to".
| Its head is "points", and I believe that "made" is
| modifying that head.
|
| Can you insert an elided copula into it without changing
| the meaning and grammatical structure? I'm not sure. I
| don't think so. I think "In addition to the points
| already being made" means something different: the object
| of the preposition "to" is now "being", and we are going
| to discuss things in addition to that state of affairs,
| perhaps other things that have happened to the points
| (being sharpened, perhaps, or being discarded), not
| things in addition to the points.
| ModernMech wrote:
| "In addition to the points that have already been made"
| kragen wrote:
| I agree that that has the same meaning, but I think it
| may have a different grammatical structure, with an
| entire subordinate clause that was missing from the
| original. Since the voice of a verb is a grammatical
| rather than semantic question, this seems relevant; "in
| addition to the points people have already made" is also
| (probably) semantically equivalent but unquestionably
| uses the active voice.
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| It has its place. We were told to use passive voice when
| writing scientific document (lab reports, papers etc).
| kragen wrote:
| To be fair, current scientific papers are full of utterly
| terrible writing. If you read scientific papers from a
| century and a half ago, a century ago, half a century
| ago, and today, you'll see a continuous and disastrous
| decline in readability, and I think some of that is
| driven by pressure to strictly follow genre writing
| conventions. One of those conventions is using the
| passive voice even when the active voice would be better.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| You could improve this comment by rewriting it in the
| active voice, like this: "I am painfully bored by reading
| passive voice".
| kragen wrote:
| "Is painfully boring" is not the passive voice. I suggest
| reading https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922.
| arscan wrote:
| There was a time when Microsoft Word would treat the
| passive voice in your writing with the same level of
| severity as spelling errors or major grammatical mistakes.
| Drove me absolutely nuts in high school.
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| Eventually, a feature was added (see what I did there?)
| that allowed the type of document to be specified, and
| setting that to 'scientific paper' allowed passive voice
| to be written without being flagged as an error.
| Xorakios wrote:
| had to giggle because Microsoft hadn't yet been founded
| when I was in high school!
| jcranmer wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with the passive voice.
|
| The problem is that many people have only a poor ability to
| recognize the passive voice in the first place. This
| results in the examples being clunky, wordy messes that are
| bad because they're, well, clunky and wordy, and not
| because they're passive--indeed, you've often got only a
| fifty-fifty chance of the example passive voice actually
| being passive in the first place.
|
| I'll point out that the commenter you're replying to used
| the passive voice, as did the one they responded to, and I
| suspect that such uses went unnoticed. Hell, I just rewrote
| the previous sentence to use the passive voice, and I
| wonder how many people think recognized that in the first
| place let alone think it worse for being so written.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Active is generally more concise and engages the reader
| more. Of course there are exceptions, like everything.
|
| Internet posts have a very different style standard than
| a book.
| hathawsh wrote:
| Here is a simple summary of the common voices/moods in
| technical writing:
|
| - Active: The user presses the Enter key.
|
| - Passive: The Enter key is to be pressed.
|
| - Imperative (aka command): Press the Enter key.
|
| The imperative mood is concise and doesn't dance around
| questions about who's doing what. The reader is expected to
| do it.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Passive can be disastrous when used in contractual
| situations if the agent who should be responsible for an
| action isn't identified. E.g. "X will be done". I was once
| burnt by a contract that in some places left it unclear
| whether the customer or the contractor was responsible for
| particular tasks. Active voice that identifies the agent is
| less ambiguous
| kragen wrote:
| This is an excellent point, and one I haven't seen raised
| before.
| croes wrote:
| And that's how everything gets flattened to same
| style/voice/etc.
|
| That's like getting rid of all languages and accents and
| switch to the same language
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| The same could be said for books about writing, like
| Williams or Strunk and White. The trick is to not apply
| what you learn indiscriminately.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Refusing 2/3rds of grammarly's suggestions flattens
| everything to the same style/voice?
| scubbo wrote:
| No - that was implicitly in response to the sentence:
|
| > The problem is executives want to completely remove
| humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to
| disastrous results.
| kragen wrote:
| I suspect that the disastrous results being envisioned
| are somewhat more severe than not being able to tell who
| wrote which memo. I understood the author to be
| suggesting things more like bankruptcy, global warfare,
| and extermination camps. But it's admittedly ambiguous.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Criticisms are almost always read by the reader as
| criticisms of the OP's actions. If you're agreeing with
| somebody as you appear to be here, you should probably
| make that more explicit.
| exe34 wrote:
| I will never use grammarly, not matter how good they get.
| They've interrupted too many videos for me to let it pass.
| dataflow wrote:
| Hasn't Microsoft Word has style checkers for things like
| passive voice for decades?
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| yes, but now they work
| jll29 wrote:
| > The problem is executives want to completely remove humans
| from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous
| results
|
| Thanks for your words of wisdom, which touch on a very
| important other point I want to raise: often, we (i.e.,
| developers, researchers) construct a technology that would be
| helpful and "net benign" if deployed as a tool for humans to
| use, instead of deploying it in order to replace humans. But
| then along comes a greedy business manager who reckons
| recklessly that using said technology not as a tool, but in
| full automation mode, results will be 5% worse, but save 15%
| of staff costs; and they decide that that is a fantastic
| trade-off for the company - yet employees may lose and
| customers may lose.
|
| The big problem is that developers/researchers lose control
| of what they develop, usually once the project is completed
| if they ever had control in the first place. What can we do?
| Perhaps write open source licenses that are less liberal?
| kragen wrote:
| You're trying to put out a forest fire with an eyedropper.
|
| Stock your underground bunkers with enough food and water
| for the rest of your life and work hard to persuade the AI
| that you're not a threat. If possible, upload your
| consciousness to a starwisp and accelerate it out of the
| Solar System as close to lightspeed as you can possibly get
| it.
|
| Those measures might work. (Or they might be impossible, or
| insufficient.) Changing your license won't.
| antonvs wrote:
| Alternatively, persuade the AI that you are all-powerful
| and that it should fear and worship you. Probably a more
| achievable approach, and there's precedent for it.
| kragen wrote:
| That only works on the AIs that aren't a real threat
| anyway, and I don't think it helps with the social harm
| done by greedy business managers with less powerful AIs.
| In fact, it might worsen it.
| afavour wrote:
| From my perspective that's fascinatingly upside down thinking
| that leads to you asking to lose your job.
|
| AI is going to get the hang of coding to fill in the spaces
| (i.e. the part you're doing) long before it's able to
| intelligently design an API. Correct API design requires a lot
| of contextual information and forward planning for things that
| don't exist today.
|
| Right now it's throwing spaghetti at the wall and you're
| drawing around it.
| kragen wrote:
| Maybe. So far it seems to be a lot better at creative idea
| generation than at writing correct code, though apparently
| these "agentic" modes can often get close enough after enough
| iteration. (I haven't tried things like Cursor yet.)
|
| I agree that it's also not currently capable of judging those
| creative ideas, so I have to do that.
| bbarnett wrote:
| This sort of discourse really grinds my gears. The framing
| of it, the conceptualization.
|
| It's not creative at all, any more than taking the sum of
| text on a topic, and throwing a dart at it. It's a mild,
| short step beyond a weighted random, and certainly not
| capable of any real creativity.
|
| Myriads of HN enthusiasts often chime in here "Are humans
| any more creative" and other blather. Well, that's a
| whataboutism, and doesn't detract from the fact that
| creative does not exist in the AI sphere.
|
| I agree that you have to judge its output.
|
| Also, sorry for hanging my comment here. Might seem over
| the top, but anytime I see 'creative' and 'AI', I have all
| sorts of dark thoughts. Dark, brooding thoughts with a
| sense of deep foreboding.
| kragen wrote:
| I understand. I share the foreboding, but I try to
| subscribe to the converse of Hume's guillotine.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Point taken but if slushing up half of human knowledge
| and picking something to fit into the current context
| isn't creative then humans are rarely creative either.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| > Well, that's a whataboutism, and doesn't detract from
| the fact that creative does not exist in the AI sphere.
|
| Pointing out that your working definition excludes
| reality isn't whataboutism, it's pointing out an isolated
| demand for rigor.
|
| If you cannot clearly articulate how human creativity
| (the only other type of creativity that exists) is not
| impugned by the definition you're using as evidence that
| creativity "does not exist in the AI sphere", you're not
| arguing from a place of knowledge. Your assertion is just
| as much sophistry as the people who assert it _is_
| creativity. Unlike them, however, you 're having to argue
| against instances where it does appear creative.
|
| For my own two cents, I don't claim to fully understand
| how human creativity works, but I _am_ confident that all
| human creative works rest heavily on a foundation of the
| synthesis of author 's previous experiences, both
| personal and of others' creative works - and often more
| heavily the latter. If your justification for a lack of
| creativity is that LLMs are merely synthesizing from
| previous works, then your argument falls flat.
| kragen wrote:
| Agreed.
| simonw wrote:
| I find it's often way better than API design than I expect.
| It's seen so many examples of existing APIs in its training
| data that it tends to have surprisingly good "judgement" when
| it comes to designing a new one.
|
| Even if your API is for something that's never been done
| before, it can usually still take advantage of its training
| data to suggest a sensible shape once you describe the new
| nouns and verbs to it.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| I used this to great success just this morning. I told the AI
| to write me some unit tests. It flailed and failed badly at
| that task. But how it failed was instructive, and uncovered a
| bug in the code I wanted to test.
| kragen wrote:
| Haha, that's awesome! Are you going to change the interface?
| What was the bug?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| It used nonsensical parameters to the API in way that I
| didn't realize was possible (though obvious in hindsight).
| The AI got confused; it didn't think the parameters were
| nonsensical. It also didn't quite use them in the way that
| triggered the error. However it was close enough for me to
| realize that "hey, I never though of that possibility". I
| needed to fix the function to return a proper error
| response for the nonsense.
|
| It also taught me to be more careful about checkpointing my
| work in git before letting an agent go wild on my codebase.
| It left a mess trying to fix its problems.
| kragen wrote:
| Yeah, that's a perfect example of what I'm talking about!
| momojo wrote:
| A light-weight anecdote:
|
| Many many python image-processing libraries have an `imread()`
| function. I didn't know about this when designing our own
| bespoke image-lib at work, and went with an esoteric
| `image_get()` that I never bothered to refactor.
|
| When I ask ChatGPT for help writing one-off scripts using the
| internal library I often forget to give it more context than
| just `import mylib` at the top, and it almost always defaults
| to `mylib.imread()`.
| kragen wrote:
| That's a perfect example! I wonder if changing it would be an
| improvement? If you can just replace image_get with imread in
| all the callers, maybe it would save your team mental effort
| and/or onboarding time in the future.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| I strongly prefer `image_get/image_read` for clarity, but I
| would just stump in a method called `imread` which is
| functionally the same and hide it from the documentation.
| dimatura wrote:
| I don't know if there's an earlier source, but I'm guessing
| Matlab originally popularized the `imread` name, and that
| OpenCV (along with its python wrapper) took it from there,
| same for scipy. Scikit-image then followed along, presumably.
| bandofthehawk wrote:
| As someone not familiar with these libraries, image_get or
| image_read seems much clearer to me than imread. I'm
| wondering if the convention is worse than your instinct in
| this case. Maybe these AI tools will push us towards
| conventions that aren't always the best design.
| kragen wrote:
| image_get _is_ clearer--unless you 've used Matlab, Octave,
| matplotlib, SciPy, OpenCV, scikit-learn, or other things
| that have copied Matlab's interface. In that case, using
| the established name is clearer.
|
| (Unless, on the gripping hand, your image_get function is
| subtly different from Matlab's imread, for example by not
| returning an array, in which case a different name might be
| better.)
| layer8 wrote:
| HDD -- hallucination-driven development
| codingwagie wrote:
| This works for UX. I give it vague requirements, and it
| implements something i didnt ask for, but is better than i
| would have thought of
| skygazer wrote:
| You're fuzzing the API, unusually, before it's written.
| groestl wrote:
| > and being unintuitive is the only one that this will fix
|
| That's also how I'm approaching it. If all the condensed common
| wisdom poured into the model's parameters says that this is how
| my API is supposed to work to be intuitive, how on earth do I
| think it should work differently? There needs to be a good
| reason (like composability, for example). I break expectations
| otherwise.
| escapecharacter wrote:
| This is similar to an old HCI design technique called Wizard of
| Oz by the way, where a human operator pretends to be the app
| that doesn't exist yet. It's great for discovering new
| features.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Oz_experiment
| kragen wrote:
| I'd never heard that term! Thank you! I feel like LLMs ought
| to be fantastic at doing that, as well. This is sort of like
| the inverse.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| This was a big problem starting out writing MCP servers for me.
|
| Having an LLM demo your tool, then taking what it does wrong or
| uses incorrectly and adjusting the API works very very well.
| Updating the docs to instruct the LLM on how to use your tool
| does not work well.
| a_e_k wrote:
| I've played with a similar idea for writing technical papers.
| I'll give an LLM my draft and ask it to explain back to me what
| a section means, or otherwise quiz it about things in the
| draft.
|
| I've found that LLMs can be kind of dumb about understanding
| things, and are particularly bad at reading between the lines
| for anything subtle. In this aspect, I find they make good
| proxies for inattentive anonymous reviewers, and so will try to
| revise my text until even the LLM can grasp the key points that
| I'm trying to make.
| kragen wrote:
| That's fantastic! I agree that it's very similar.
|
| In both cases, you might get extra bonus usability if the
| reviewers or the API users actually give your output to the
| same LLM you used to improve the draft. Or maybe a more
| harshly quantized version of the same model, so it makes more
| mistakes.
| djsavvy wrote:
| how do prompt it to make it guess about the API for a library?
| I'm confused how you would structure that in a useful way.
| kragen wrote:
| Often I've started with some example code that invokes part
| of the API, but not all of it. Or in C I can give it the .h
| file, maybe without comments.
|
| Sometimes I can just say, "How do I use the <made-up name>
| API in Python to do <task>?" Unfortunately the safeguards
| against hallucinations in more recent models can make this
| more difficult, because it's more likely to tell me it's
| never heard of it. You can usually coax it into suspension of
| disbelief, but I think the results aren't as good.
| Applejinx wrote:
| "Should we really be developing features in response to
| misinformation?"
|
| No, because you'll be held responsible for the misinformation
| being accurate: users will say it is YOUR fault when they learn
| stuff wrong.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Either the user is a non-paying user and it doesn't matter what
| they think, or the user is a paying customer and you will be
| happy to make and sell them the feature they want.
| Applejinx wrote:
| This is why you will fail.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Focusing on creating high value for real customers instead
| of chasing people who aren't really interested is a great
| recipe for success. I wouldn't want to do business in any
| different way.
| rorylaitila wrote:
| I've come across something related when building the indexing
| tool for my vintage ad archive using OpenAI vision. No matter how
| I tried to prompt engineer the entity extraction into the defined
| structure I was looking for, OpenAI simply has its own ideas.
| Some of those ideas are actually good! For example it was
| extracting celebrity names, I hadn't thought of that. For other
| things, it would simply not follow my instructions. So I decided
| to just mostly match what it chooses to give me. And I have a
| secondary mapping on my end to get to the final structure.
| felixarba wrote:
| > ChatGPT was outright lying to people. And making us look bad in
| the process, setting false expectations about our service.
|
| I find it interesting that any user would attribute this issue to
| Soundslice. As a user, I would be annoyed that GPT is lying and
| wouldn't think twice about Soundslice looking bad in the process
| romanhn wrote:
| While AI hallucination problems are widely known to the
| technical crowd, that's not really the case with the general
| population. Perhaps that applies to the majority of the user
| base even. I've certainly known folks who place inordinate
| amount of trust in AI output, and I could see them misplacing
| the blame when a "promised" feature doesn't work right.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The thing is that it doesn't matter. If they're not customers
| it doesn't matter at all what they think. People get false
| ideas all the time of what kind of services a business might
| or might not offer.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| > If they're not customers it doesn't matter at all what
| they think
|
| That kind of thinking is how you never get new customers
| and eventually fail as a business.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| It is the kind of thinking that almost all businesses
| have. You have to focus on the actual products and
| services which you provide and do a good job at it, not
| chase after any and every person with an opinion.
|
| Down voters here on HN seem to live in a egocentric
| fantasy world, where every human being in the outside
| world live to serve them. But the reality is that
| business owners and leaders spend their whole day
| thinking about how to please their customers and their
| potential customers. Not other random people who might be
| misinformed.
| graeme wrote:
| If people _repeatedly_ have a misunderstanding about or
| expectation of your business you need to address it
| though. An llm hallucination is based on widespread norms
| in training data and it is at least worth asking "would
| this be a good idea?"
| smaudet wrote:
| I think the issue here would be that we don't really know
| just how widespread, nor the impact of the issue.
|
| Ok, sure, maybe this feature was worth having?
|
| But if some people start sending bad requests your way
| because they can't or only program poorly, it doesn't
| make sense to potentially degrade the service for your
| successful paying customers...
| carlosjobim wrote:
| An LLM will say that you sell your competitors products
| or that your farm sells freshly harvested strawberries in
| the middle of winter. There are no limits to what kind of
| lies an LLM will invent, and a business owner would be a
| fool to feel responsible for anything an LLM has told
| people about their business or products.
|
| The best LLMs available right in this moment will lie
| without remorse about bus schedules and airplane
| departure times. How in the world are businesses supposed
| to take responsibility for that?
|
| Likewise if I have a neighbour who is a notorious liar
| tell me I can find a piece of equipment in a certain
| hardware store, should I be mad at the store owner when I
| don't find it there, or should I maybe be mad at my
| neighbour - the notorious liar?
| graeme wrote:
| >Likewise if I have a neighbour who is a notorious liar
| tell me I can find a piece of equipment in a certain
| hardware store, should I be mad at the store owner when I
| don't find it there, or should I maybe be mad at my
| neighbour - the notorious liar?
|
| If you are a store own, AND
|
| 1. People repeatedly coming in to your shop asking to buy
| something, AND
|
| 2. It is similar to the kinds of things you sell, from
| the suppliers you usually get supplies from, AND
|
| 3. You don't sell it
|
| Then it sounds like your neighbour the notorious liar is
| doing profitable marketing for your business and sending
| you leads which you could profitably sell to, if you sold
| the item.
|
| If there's a single customer who arrives via
| hallucination, ignore it. If there's a stream of them,
| why would you not serve them if you can profit by doing
| so?
|
| There are obviously instances you'd ignore and you seem
| to be focussing on those rather than what OP was
| obviously talking about, repeat instances of sensible
| ideas
| Sharlin wrote:
| A frighteningly large fraction of non-technical population
| doesn't know that LLMs hallucinate all the time and takes
| everything they say totally uncritically. And AI companies do
| almost nothing to discourage that interpretation, either.
| pphysch wrote:
| The user might go to Soundslice and run into a wall, wasting
| their time, and have a negative opinion of it.
|
| OTOH it's free(?) advertising, as long as that first impression
| isn't too negative.
| jedbrooke wrote:
| slightly off topic: but on the topic of AI coding agents making
| up apis and features that don't exist, I've had good success with
| Q telling it to "check the sources to make sure the apis actually
| exist". sometimes it will even request to read/decompile (java)
| sources, and do grep and find commands to find out what methods
| the api actually contains
| excalibur wrote:
| ChatGPT wasn't wrong, it was early. It always knew you would
| deploy it.
|
| "Would you still have added this feature if ChatGPT hadn't
| bullied you into it?" Absolutely not.
|
| I feel like this resolves several longstanding time travel
| paradox tropes.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| More than once GPT-3.5 'hallucinated' an essential and logical
| function in an API that by all reason should have existed, but
| for whatever reason had not been included (yet).
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| I wonder if we ever get to the point I remember reading about in
| a novel ( AI initially based on emails ), where human population
| is gently nudged towards individuals that in aggregate benefit AI
| goals.
| linsomniac wrote:
| Sounds like you are referring to book 1 in a series, the book
| called "Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer than It
| Appears" by William Hertling. I read 3-4 of those books, they
| were entertaining.
| oytis wrote:
| That's the most promising solution to AI hallucinations. If LLM
| output doesn't match the reality, fix the reality
| ecshafer wrote:
| I am currently working on the bug where ChatGPT expects that if
| a ball has been placed on a box, and the box is pushed forward,
| nothing happens to the ball. This one is a doozy.
| oytis wrote:
| Yeah, physics is a bitch. But we can start with history?
| tosh wrote:
| hallucination driven development
| chaboud wrote:
| I had a smaller version of this when coding on a flight (with no
| WiFi! The horror!) over the Pacific. Llama hallucinated array-
| element operations and list-comprehension in C#. I liked the
| shape of the code otherwise, so, since I was using custom
| classes, I just went ahead and implemented both features.
|
| I also went back to just sleeping on those flights and using
| connected models for most of my code generation needs.
| andybak wrote:
| Curious to see the syntax and how it compares to Linq
| chaboud wrote:
| I ended up closer to python, but not totally delighted with
| it (still need to pass in a descriminator function/lambda, so
| it's more structurally verbose). I'd just recommend Linq, but
| I was writing for an old version of Unity coerced through
| IL2CPP (where Linq wasn't great). It was also a chunk of
| semi-hot code (if it was really hot, it wouldn't be sitting
| in C# in Unity), so some of the allocation behaviors of Linq
| behind the scenes wouldn't have been optimal.
|
| What surprised me initially was just how confidently wrong
| Llama was... Now I'm used to confident wrongness from smaller
| models. It's almost like working with real people...
| moomin wrote:
| Is this going to be the new wave of improving AI accuracy? Making
| the incorrect answers correct? I guess it's one way of achieving
| AGI.
| jpadkins wrote:
| Pretty good example of how a super-intelligent AI can control
| human behavior, even if it doesn't "escape" its data center or
| controllers.
|
| If the super-intelligent AI understands human incentives and is
| in control of a very popular service, it can subtly influence
| people to its agenda by using the power of mass usage. Like how a
| search engine can influence a population's view of an issue by
| changing the rankings of news sources that it prefers.
| scinadier wrote:
| Will you use ChatGPT to implement the feature?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| In addition, we might consider writing the scientific papers
| ChatGPT hallucinates!
| shermantanktop wrote:
| The music notation tool space is balkanized in a variety of ways.
| One of the key splits is between standard music notation and
| tablature, which is used for guitar and a few other instruments.
| People are generally on one side or another, and the notation is
| not even fully compatible - tablature covers information that
| standard notation doesn't, and vice versa. This covers fingering,
| articulations, "step on fuzz pedal now," that sort of thing.
|
| The users are different, the music that is notated is different,
| and for the most part if you are on one side, you don't feel the
| need to cross over. Multiple efforts have been made (MusicXML,
| etc.) to unify these two worlds into a superset of information.
| But the camps are still different.
|
| So what ChatGPT did is actually very interesting. It hallucinated
| a world in which tab readers would want to use Soundslice. But,
| largely, my guess is they probably don't....today. In a future
| world, they might? Especially if Soundslice then enables
| additional features that make tab readers get more out of the
| result.
| adrianh wrote:
| I don't fully understand your comment, but Soundslice has had
| first-class support for tablature for more than 10 years now.
| There's an excellent built-in tab editor, plus importers for
| various formats. It's just the _ASCII tab_ support that 's new.
| kragen wrote:
| I wonder if LLMs will stimulate ASCII formats for more
| things, and whether we should design software in general to
| be more textual in order to work better with LLMs.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| People forget that while technology grows, society also grows to
| support that.
|
| I already strongly suspect that LLMs are just going to magnify
| the dominance of python as LLMs can remove the most friction from
| its use. Then will come the second order effects where libraries
| are explicitly written to be LLM friendly, further removing
| friction.
|
| LLMs write code best in python -> python gets used more -> python
| gets optimized for LLMs -> LLMs write code best in python
| zamadatix wrote:
| LLMs removing friction from using coding languages would, at
| first glance, seem to erode Python's advantage rather than
| solidify it further. As a specific example LLMs can not only
| spit out HTML+JS+CSS but the user can interact with the output
| directly in browser/"app".
| jjani wrote:
| In a nice world it should be the other way around. LLMs are
| better at producing typed code thanks to the added context and
| diagnostics the types add, while at the same time greatly
| lowering their initial learning barrier.
|
| We don't live in a nice world, so you'll probably end up right.
| johnea wrote:
| What the hell, we elect world leaders based on misinformation,
| why not add s/w features for the same reason?
|
| In our new post truth, anti-realism reality, pounding one's head
| against a brick wall is often instructive in the way the brain
| damage actually produces great results!
| jonathaneunice wrote:
| Paving the folkways!
|
| Figuring out the paths that users (or LLMs) actually want to take
| --not based on your original design or model of what paths they
| should want, but based on the paths that they actually do want
| and do trod down. Aka, meeting demand.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Forget prompt engineering, how do you make ChatGPT do this for
| anything you want added to your project that you have no control
| over? Lol
| zzo38computer wrote:
| There are a few things which could be done in the case of a
| situation like that:
|
| 1. I might consider a thing like that like any other feature
| request. If not already added to the feature request tracker, it
| could be done. It might be accepted or rejected, or more
| discussion may be wanted, and/or other changes made, etc, like
| any other feature request.
|
| 2. I might add a FAQ entry to specify that it does not have such
| a feature, and that ChatGPT is wrong. This does not necessarily
| mean that it will not be added in future, if there is a good
| reason to do so. If there is a good reason to not include it,
| this will be mentioned, too. It might also be mentioned other
| programs that can be used instead if this one doesn't work.
|
| Also note that in the article, the second ChatGPT screenshot has
| a note on the bottom saying that ChatGPT can make mistakes
| (which, in this case, it does). Their program might also be made
| to detect ChatGPT screenshots and to display a special error
| message in that case.
| thih9 wrote:
| What made ChatGPT think that this feature is supported? And a
| follow up question - is that the direction SEO is going to take?
| swalsh wrote:
| Id guess the answer is gpt4o is an outdated model that's not as
| anchored in reality as newer models. It's pretty rare for me to
| see sonnet or even o3 just outright tell me plausible but wrong
| things.
| swalsh wrote:
| Chatbot advertising has to be one of the most powerful forms of
| marketing yet. People are basically all the way through the sales
| pipeline when they land on your page.
| spogbiper wrote:
| makes me wonder how this will be commercialized in the future..
| and i don't like it
| sim7c00 wrote:
| i LOVE this despite feeling for the impacted devs and service.
| love me some good guitar tabs, and honestly id totally beleive
| the chatgpt here hah..
|
| what a wonderful incident / bug report my god.
|
| totally sorry for the trouble and amazing find and fix honestly.
|
| sorry i am more amazed than sorry :D. thanks for sharing this !!
| sim7c00 wrote:
| oh, and yeah. totally the guy who plays guitar 20+ years now
| and cant read musical notation. why? we got tabs for 20+ years.
|
| so i am happy you implemented this, and will now look at using
| your service. thx chatgpt, and you.
| pkilgore wrote:
| Beyond the blog: Going to be an interesting world where these
| kinds of suggestions become paid results and nobody has a hope of
| discovering your competitive service exists. At least in that
| world you'd hope the advertiser actually has the feature already!
| jxjnskkzxxhx wrote:
| So now the machines ask for features and you're the one
| implementing them. How the turns have tabled...
| guluarte wrote:
| The problem with LLMs is that in 99% of cases, they work fine,
| but in 1% of cases, they can be a huge liability, like sending
| people to wrong domains or, worse, phishing domains.
| myflash13 wrote:
| A significant number of new signups at my tiny niche SaaS now
| come from ChatGPT, yet I have no idea what prompts people are
| using to get it to recommend my product. I can't get it to
| recommend my product when trying some obvious prompts on my own,
| on other people's accounts (though it does work on my account
| because it sees my chat history of course).
| wrsh07 wrote:
| Add a prompt for referrals that asks them if they're willing to
| link the discussion that helped them find you!
|
| Some users might share it. ChatGPT has so many users it's
| somewhat mind boggling
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| What this immediately makes me realize is how many people are
| currently trying ot figure out how to intentionally get AI chat
| bots to send people to their site, like ChatGPT was sending
| people to this guy's site. SEO for AI. There will be billions in
| it.
|
| I know nothing about this. I imagine people are already working
| on it, wonder what they've figured out.
|
| (Alternatively, in the future can I pay OpenAI to get ChatGPT to
| be more likely to recommend my product than my competitors?)
| londons_explore wrote:
| To win that game, you have to get your site mentioned on lots
| of organic forums that get ingested in the LLM training data.
|
| So winning AI SEO is not so different than regular SEO.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Along these lines, a useful tool might be a BDD framework like
| Cucumber that instead of relying on written scenarios has an LLM
| try to "use" your UX or API a significant number of times, with
| some randomization, in order to expose user behavior that you (or
| an LLM) wouldn't have thought of when writing unit tests.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| It's worth noting that behind this hallucination there were real
| people with ASCII tabs in need of a solution. If the result is a
| product-led growth channel at some scale, that's a big roadmap
| green light for me!
| zkmon wrote:
| This reminds me how the software integraters or implementers
| worked a couple of decades back. They are IT contractors for
| implementing a popular software product such as IBM MQ or SAP etc
| at a client site and maintaining it. They sometimes incorrectly
| claim that some feature exists, and after finding that it doesn't
| exist, they create a ticket to the software vendor asking for it
| as a patch release.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| AI is of, for, and by vibe coders who don't care about the
| details.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Been using LLMs to code a bit lately. It's decent with
| boilerplate. It's pretty good at working out patterns[1]. It does
| like to ping pong on some edits though - edit this way, no back
| that way, no this way again. I did have one build an entire iOS
| app, it made changes to the UI exactly as I described, and it
| populated sample data for all the different bits and bobs. But it
| did an abysmal job at organizing the bits and bobs. Need running
| time for each of the audio files in a list? Guess we need to add
| a dictionary mapping the audio file ID to length! (For the super
| juniors out there: this piece of data should be attached to
| whatever represents the individual audio file, typically a class
| or struct named 'AudioFile'.)
|
| It really likes to cogitate on code from several versions ago.
| And it often insists repeatedly on edits unrelated to the current
| task.
|
| I feel like I'm spending more time educating the LLM. If I can
| resist the urge to lean on the LLM beyond its capabilities, I
| think I can be productive with it. If I'm going to stop teaching
| the thing, the least it can do is monitor my changes and not try
| to make suggestions from the first draft of code from five days
| ago, alas ...
|
| 1 - e.g. a 500-line text file representing values that will be
| converted to enums, with varying adherence to some naming scheme
| - I start typing, and after correcting the first two, it suggests
| the next few. I accept its suggestions until it makes a mistake
| because the data changed, start manual edits again ... I repeated
| this process for about 30 lines and it successfully learned how I
| wanted the remainder of the file edited.
| jongjong wrote:
| Oh my, people complaining about getting free traffic from
| ChatGPT... While most businesses are worried about all their
| inbound traffic drying up as search engine use declines.
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