Well, yeah. People are acting like language models are full fledged AI instead of just a parrot repeating stuff said online.
The paper actually argues otherwise, though it's not fully settled on that conclusion, either.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
Link to the article if anyone wants it
Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005)
Now I kinda want to read On Bullshit
That's actually a fun read
fucking love that article. sums up everything wrong with AI. Unfortunately, it doesn't touch on what AI does right: help idiots like me achieve a slight amount of competence on subjects that such people can't be bothered with dedicating their entire lives to.
This paper should cite On Bullshit.
It does. It’s even cited in the abstract, and it’s the origin of bullshit as referenced in their title.
It talks extensively about On Bullshit, lol.
Yup. The paper is worth actually reading
Suddenly it dawned on me that I can plaster my CV with AI and win over actual competent people easy peasy
What were you doing between 2020 and 23? I was working on my AI skillset. Nobody will even question me because they fucking have no idea what it is themselves but only that they want it.
As an engineering manager, I've already seen cover letters and intro emails that are so obviously AI generated that it's laughable. These should be used like you use them for writing essays, as a framework with general prompts, but filled in by yourself.
Fake friendliness that was outsourced to an ai is worse than no friendliness at all.
I didn’t mean AI generated anything though 🙄. I meant put lots of ‘AI’ keyword in the resume in whatever way looks professional but in reality is pure bullshit
Watch their neuron being activated as they see magic word. Gotta play the marketing game.
You want to be AI ready? Hire me. I have spent three years working with AI and posses invaluable experience that will elevate your company into a new era of rapid development.
It's extremely easy to detect this. Recruiters actively filter out resumes like this for important roles.
Plot-twist: The paper was authored by a competing LLM.
There are things that chatgpt does well, especially if you temper your expectations to the level of someone who has no valuable skills and is mostly an idiot.
Hi, I'm an idiot with no valuable skills, and I've found chatgpt to be very useful.
I've recently started learning game development in godot, and the process of figuring out why the code that chatgpt gives me doesn't work has taught me more about programming than any teacher ever accomplished back in high school.
Chatgpt is also an excellent therapist, and has helped me deal with mental breakdowns on multiple occasions, while it was happening. I can't find a real therapist's phone number, much less schedule an appointment.
I'm a real shitty writer, and I'm making a wiki of lore for a setting and ruleset for a tabletop RPG that I'll probably never get to actually play. ChatGPT is able to turn my inane ramblings into coherent wiki pages, most of the time.
If you set your expectations to what was advertised, then yeah, chatgpt is bullshit. Of course it was bullshit, and everyone who knew half of anything about anything called it. If you set realistic expectations, you'll get realistic results. Why is this so hard for people to get?
Because few people know what's realistic for LLMs
Intelligence is a very loaded word and not very precise in general usage. And i mean that amongst humans and animals as well as robots.
I'm sure the real AI and compsci researchers have precise terms and taxonomies for it and ways to measure it, but the word itself, in the hands of marketing people and the general population as an audience . . . not useful.
Hah I had that exact same experience with Godot
Just reading the intro pulls you in
We draw a distinction between two sorts of bullshit, which we call ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ bullshit
This is something I already mentioned previously. LLMs have no way of fact checking, no measure of truth or falsity built into. In the training process, it probably accepts every piece of text as true. This is very different from how our minds work. When faced with a piece of text we have many ways to deal with it, which range from accepting it as it is to going on the internet to verify it to actually designing and conducting experiments to prove or disprove the claim. So, yeah what ChatGPT outputs is probably bullshit.
Of course, the solution is that ChatGPT be trained by labelling text with some measure of truth. Of course, LLMs need so much data that labelling it all would be extremely slow and expensive and suddenly, the fast moving world of AI to screech to almost a halt, which would be unacceptable to the investors.
Your statement on no way of fact checking is not a 100% correct as developers found ways to ground LLMs, e.g., by prepending context pulled from „real time“ sources of truth (e.g., search engines). This data is then incorporated into the prompt as context data. Well obviously this is kind of cheating and not baked into the LLM itself, however it can be pretty accurate for a lot of use cases.
Does using authoritative sources is fool proof? For example, is everything written in Wikipedia factually correct? I don’t believe so unless I actually check it. Also, what about reddit or stack overflow? Can they be considered factually correct? To some extent, yes. But not completely. That is why most of these LLMs give such arbitrary answers. They extrapolate on information they have no way knowing or understanding.
Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit.
This is actually a really nice insight on the quality of the output of current LLMs. And it teaches about how they work and what the goals given by their creators are.
They are but trained to produce factual information, but to talk about topics while sounding like a competent expert.
For LLM researchers this means that they need to figure out how to train LLMs for factuality as opposed to just sounding competent. But that is probably a lot easier said than done.
Unlike OpenAI, this article is actually open.
clearly they have never heard of harry g frankfurts (excellent) „on bullshit“
The paper explicitly states that they are calling ChatGPT "bullshit" in the Frankfurtian sense and they cite "On Bullshit" as the source for that definition. It's right there in the introduction.
You'd know this if you had read the paper or even checked whether your statement were true. So either you read it and then lied deliberately, or you didn't read the paper nor actually care about the truth value of your own statement, rendering your comment itself bullshit in the Frankfurtian sense.
Actually, they reference him.
Can we please keep the AI hate in the fuck_ai community so that I don't have to see it?
I don't care what Lemmy thinks, ChatGPT has improved my life for the better. I utilize it every day.
Yes, but it also actively worsens people's lives too.
What AI hate? This is science memes, and that is a science publication. I'm glad I got to enjoy this sciencey meme
Why? This is a scientific article with a shitpost as the title
You can make or find a pro-ai community and stay in there.
It's not the rest of the world's job to coddle you.
I wouldn't trust the work you do at all.
And are you being paid more for your increased productivity, or is your company stealing that value?
Fucking lol.
Proper main character syndrome haha
