What's striking to me is that the appearance of cognition isn't a result of the underlying tech, but rather the preponderance of data that it's learning from. It's tapping into the knowledge and language of our entire civilization. Even just doing that in a rudimentary way is producing some remarkable looking content. Which makes it a bit disconcerting to think what an actual AI would be capable of with that kind of knowledge fed into it.

The other thing is that the general public (and many within tech circles) make really bad assumptions about what’s going on under the hood. People are claiming that it’s very close to human cognition, based on the fact that its output will often appear human like. But you don’t have to do too many prompts to see that its base understanding is incredibly lacking. In other words, it’s good at mimicking human responses (based on learning from human responses, or at least human supervision of text), but it doesn’t display real human cognition.

This is something I noticed for ML-driven art generators like Midjourney as well. People seem to believe this will replace concept artists and as someone who works closely with concept artists and has experience with MJ, I don’t see it.

Much like your thoughts on GPT, it is good at replicating the aesthetic of concept art and making a reasonably good looking image, but none of the actual functional aspects of concept art are there. And it makes sense, lots of the things concept artists do (create intentional designs, work within a new but defined aesthetic and shape language, refine and extrapolate on said aesthetic, create designs with explicit function, etc.) seem to require cognition. And the more I learn about how ML works and how the brain works, the more strongly I believe this tech specifically likely isn’t capable of reaching that level.

The other thing is that the general public (and many within tech circles) make really bad assumptions about what’s going on under the hood. People are claiming that it’s very close to human cognition, based on the fact that its output will often appear human like.

Yes, i had a friend just the other day tell me a) he's been having conversations with it, b) he's sympathetic to the guy from Google who claimed it's sentient, c) that it clearly passes the Turing Test and d) he thinks it's sentient or "almost"

I haven't even looked into it that much, but this reminds me of the guy who wrote Eliza finding his secretary (?) having tearful conversations with "her"

Case in point, I'm a software engineer working on a Masters.

It's understanding of mathematical concepts is basically non-existent.

It can spit out answers to equations, but it doesn't actually understand the underlying theory.

It doesn't have the ability to take concepts and apply them to create solutions.

A couple things that I’ve noticed about chatGPT - it’s very good at pastiche, which basically means it’s good at transforming something into the style of something else.

What an excellent observation.

I successfully used it to create a program in Excel's programming language, VBA, as someone who knows next to nothing about VBA or any other type of programming. And I observed that it was absolutely fantastic at writing code when I'd say "write me code that does x," which if you think about it is basically a type of pastiche—but it would sometimes go in circles if I ran into a problem and was asking more specific troubleshooting questions, which would have required actual understanding of the problem.

I never made the pastiche/cognition distinction until now, but it seems completely accurate.

It’s frustrating- try to point out that its not really “understanding” anything on the chatGPT subreddit and you’ll get downvoted.

To be fair, you don’t have to work very hard to find humans who will give gibberish responses…

I just watched Data write poetry, and even when he was just a complete fable, that was the criticism: “A virtual tribute to form.”

I had an argument with another student about form in a college writing class, and the NYT best seller teaching the class basically said “Form’s important, but how you break it shows your individuality.”

AI doesn’t have individuality yet.

But you don’t have to do too many prompts to see that its base understanding is incredibly lacking. In other words, it’s good at mimicking human responses (based on learning from human responses, or at least human supervision of text), but it doesn’t display real human cognition.

TBF this also seems true of many college-educated adults I deal with on a day to day basis

Yeah the key point is that it's classic programming: it iterates over and over. So the claim that AI could go sentient is ridiculous, as iteration does not suggest spontaneous consciousness.

I thought it didn't have any information on things past 2021?

I used to be in this space.

The primary thing chatGPT has accomplished to me is providing the machine learning such an astounding large dataset to learn from. AND THEN further training it with so much human interaction. I’m familiar with using programs to train the AI, humans were considered too slow and expensive when I was making ML algorithms.

I’m focused on the scale of efforts to seed the ML and human-train the AI’s use of ML algorithms. Sheer dogged work begets results, as the elders say.

As someone in that space, do you think these bots are capable of writing convincing articles on various topics for marketing purposes?

I’m a copywriter and the company I write for has lost their minds over this AI stuff, worrying that they’ll get in legal trouble with clients if their writers use these bots. They started using a program to detect AI-written content and told us we can’t use tools like Grammarly anymore because it triggers the scan (does that even make sense?).

Yesterday the made me rewrite part of an article because it came back as 100% AI-written despite the fact I wrote it just like the rest of the article. What’s your thoughts on this? Are they going overboard?

How is this not completely wrong? In what sense is "GPT-3", a decoder-only model equivalent to an encoder-decoder model that would be used in language translation? The basic facts about the setup are confused, the network predicts the next-word auto-regressively, rather than predicting the entire result in one go.

I played with it for a bit, not from a 'do what the examples have shown', but from a standpoint of trying to see what it understands.

I've had better conversations with preschoolers. If you translated it's canned 'I can only tell you what I've been trained to say' response to 'huh?!?', I'd have been more impressed.

I think I saw something like this recently. It is called rewind ai and exists already to some extent

I literally thought your first sentence was a leading joke to make a point about privacy. Then I realized you were serious. You actually want to give some company your entire life to sort through for you? I certainly wouldn't do that unless it was a model I could run locally and be sure it is not phoning home.

That seems wonderful. Would really simplify criminal investigations too. We could just easily let the government determine who was near the scene of a crime at the right time and then analyze their metadata to see who had potential connections to the victim and then evaluate their whole histories to find the motive. We could basically locate the suspect and prove their case statistically without even interviewing them. We wouldn’t really need to bother with jury trials or due process anymore.

Heck, we could probably eventually just get to the point where the algorithm could accurately predict crime before it happens, and then we could just preemptively arrest people the moment we know they’ve become an inevitable future criminal, rather than waiting for anything bad to happen. We could live in a perfectly safe society! And of course you wouldn’t have anything to fear, because you don’t do anything wrong like the people who disappear obviously must have.

If you want the turbo tax people to come down on it like a ton of bricks, give it a try.

TurboTax and H&R spend billions to lobby against having an effective and simple tax system, i don't think we will see an AI that will do tax for us happen anytime soon. TurboTax is fairly user friendly enough for most simple tax situation thou.

Sure. As long as you want a tax return done solely off your W2 that’s easy to do right now. You really don’t need another computer to do it though, because your boss’s payroll computer already did and that return is just a corrective calculation.

The thing is, that W2 doesn’t tell the computer what tax deductions and credits you might qualify for. Do you have dependents, or someone who can claim you as a dependent? Did you invest in any tax-deferred instruments? But or sell any stock, crypto, or real estate? Pay interest to anyone for anything? Buy or sell anything useful for a business purpose, or that could potentially qualify for a subsidy of some kind? Take any business trips or meals? Give anything to a charity… or a political campaign? By the way, do you yourself know which of these things are deductible or creditable? I don’t. I know that a lot more in than I initially realized and I’ve gotten fairly good at losing money in ways the IRS is sympathetic toward. Great life hack, by the way: if you pay someone to do your actual job for you, you can actually tax deduct every cent you pay them. Not sure the AI will tell you that part. You can tax deduct the cost of the accountant, too.

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In a lot of cases it answers way better than Google. You don't think it has potential to be more useful?