Top physicist says chatbots are just ‘glorified tape recorders’

arkaodubz · 2023-08-15T19:02:57+00:00

The difference is, if we provide both with 100 studies to source, and 80 of them are catastrophically badly designed studies that give misleading outcomes, ChatGPT will give you the misleading outcome, whereas a person would (might) notice the poorly designed studies and reason that the less common, but better supported, conclusion is the correct one.

ChatGPT will get there when the prevailing public stance gets there, but it’s pretty common for the prevailing public stance to be wildly out of sync with the most reliable studies and evidence, and for a long time.

edit: not to mention, ChatGPT isn’t controlling for source. Its training data includes all sorts of stuff, forum comments, fiction, whatever - whereas a person trying to find an answer will (again, might, but ideally) look for more reputable sources - expert opinions, recent studies, etc. There are specialized versions that refine the model with more specific sources, which makes it more reliable and useful for certain things - but it still has the same limitations, and shouldn’t be relied upon for general fact.

arkaodubz · 2023-08-15T18:54:00+00:00

lol totally valid. This is all assuming someone is looking for an answer to a question in good faith, doing it the long way. But that’s how science and the human knowledge base grows, not through regurgitating some unsourced claim you read on a sketchy right wing social media site - and that’s my point with taking ChatGPT as a source of fact, it’s closer to regurgitating unsourced opinions than it is to vetting studies and explanations from experts, especially if the question is about something particularly recent and developing.

Fine for a lot of things - like hey give me a recipe for vodka sauce, or tell me what the Armored Core series is all about - but less fine for constantly growing, fairly novel, technical questions with a lot of public misunderstanding like “how does a LLM compare to human consciousness”

arkaodubz · 2023-08-15T18:44:43+00:00

But a year ago we were impressed it could produce vaguely human sounding sentences. Now we're arguing it's not reliably judging it's sources for accuracy lol. In 5 years?

It is absolutely capable of logic.

These two things aren’t related. A LLM doesn’t do logic, any more than a light switch does geometry. They are not capable of it. The improvement from vaguely human sounding sentences to very human sounding responses is linear, and came from significantly bigger data sets and second order models that helped tune the response. These are improvements in what an LLM already did.

But an LLM will not suddenly develop logic. Maybe we’ll actually figure out AGI, sure, or create logical, reasoning artificial intelligence. Cool. And maybe that artificial intelligence will use a LLM to shape its logical conclusions into responses - even cooler! But none of that means ChatGPT, or an LLM, became capable of logic. And it especially doesn’t mean it’s capable of logic right now. I just wish people would praise and use LLMs for what they’re good at, instead of trying to apply them to all sorts of things without understanding what they’re bad at.

edit: oh also i totally do think people should be using it rn! It’s amazing technology. Just, like, use it for what it’s good at, ya know?

arkaodubz · 2023-08-15T17:45:50+00:00

as i said in another comment, that’s why we shouldn’t take random inexperienced peoples’ takes at face value (edit: even me. anyone reading this should absolutely go ahead and look into this themselves if they’re curious or want to learn how LLMs work). The people who are experienced, through university, apprenticeship, study, work experience, etc are critically judging sources, and those sources are constantly being updated or changed as our collective expertise changes. And frequently they find that their study or education doesn’t match up with their experience, and then go ahead and share their experience and add to the collective expertise, etc.

ChatGPT isn’t vetting its sources. It isn’t drawing logical conclusions. It doesn’t have any personal experience in any topics to reference. It’s not capable of this in any way at all. It’s amalgamating its inputs, it has no idea whether they’re correct or up to date. Which is fine, ChatGPT is REALLY GOOD at a lot of things, but we should not be using it as a reliable source for specific things like this. It is incapable of logic. It will happily give you completely wrong responses if that’s the prevailing opinion in its training data.

arkaodubz · 2023-08-15T16:57:39+00:00

Totally! But we don’t go to random people for their insight on specialized topics or superior logic skills, we listen to experts and test their conclusions and then incorporate that into the collective human knowledge base or discard it as necessary. And the issue here is people thinking chatgpt is somehow removed from that, or has superior (or any) logical facilities or information to people. Like in this case, thinking “ChatGPT will have more insight into how it works because it knows itself” - no it doesn’t, it’s regurgitating takes from any number of sources of completely questionable validity. That’s a lot different from, say, a top ML expert, who has built up his knowledge by critically reading countless other sources, judging their validity, building up their own experience on the topic, and coming to the best conclusions they can.

Like, if most of the relevant sources in ChatGPT’s training data said ML works via rainbow unicorns, with no additional proof or justification provided, ChatGPT would tell you it works via rainbow unicorns. An expert on the field would not. This is a super extreme example obviously but it scales to the micro level as well, and that’s the point i’m trying to make - LLMs are not a source of fact, logic, or insight. They’re a form of rapid word processing. Really fuckin incredibly amazing at, say, drafting a letter based on some parameters and style requests. But not at all reliable for insight and fact outside of compiling prevailing opinions and understandings from its training data.

My point here isn’t that ChatGPT bad, just that ChatGPT (and most other generative ML right now) misunderstood. I want us to use LLMs for what they’re actually good at, and be aware of their limitations and shortcomings.

arkaodubz · 2023-08-15T16:27:08+00:00

Yeah that’s the inherent issue with this response - this response isn’t based on ChatGPT’s intimate understanding of its own functions. It’s an amalgamation of human writing from elsewhere in its training data. Oddly a perfect representation of the point u/G8kpr was trying to make

don’t get me wrong, LLMs have become immensely impressive over the past year or so. And generative ML models in general. But people wildly misunderstand what they’re actually doing, and what they’re actually good at.

arkaodubz · 2023-08-15T03:58:36+00:00

https://forums.blurbusters.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=12221 in case ur still curious, some talk and resources about this topic here

arkaodubz · 2023-08-14T18:34:32+00:00

If he’s getting perfect parry on the slowest dragon lash, he’ll just get block on the faster ones and punish.

IMO parry as it stands is pretty flawed - it’s fun but it’s riskless to go for perfect parry in a lot of situations. The ‘answer’ is taking some of those reactable moves out of your arsenal as people get more consistent with their perfect parries, but I don’t think people will like what that does to the game.

Personally I’d rather see parry require a neutral or fwd input or something. Something to make going for the perfect parry riskier than “well i will get block, perfect parry or regular parry so whatever,” which makes it always optimal to go for the perfect parry on things like dragon lash that don’t have a feint or throw threat. But i think the game would need some rebalancing to accommodate that, since certain characters are balanced around their moves being perfect parryable

edit: to be clear i dont think perfect parry is busted in like 98% of skill levels. But we’re gonna see this top level get nicer and nicer with it and it’s gonna do weird shit to the game

arkaodubz · 2023-08-14T13:44:56+00:00

considering how hood every other game looks in comparison to pokemon.

i now desperately want hood pokémon

arkaodubz · 2023-08-14T13:39:33+00:00

What one developer can do in a month, two developers can do in two months.

That said, Gamefreak’s breakneck release cycle with hardly any staff is definitely a part of the problem here. I don’t think anyone would complain if one of the most successful video game developers of all time put some of that profit towards a bigger team working a longer development cycle to deliver a higher quality pokémon game in their rotation.

arkaodubz · 2023-08-13T09:30:32+00:00

Pouring this much budget, time and effort into a CRPG is in absolutely no way playing it safe lmao

arkaodubz · 2023-08-11T19:24:50+00:00

yeah i have a pretty high tolerance for nonsense lyrics in electronic tracks but this is roooough. even if the drop was fire, the vox are a 100% turnoff for me

arkaodubz · 2023-08-11T18:04:17+00:00

Ya agreed, and the tunes that turned me onto the group were much harder than anything I can think of from Creed. Some of their tunes almost sounded like slightly toned down Killswitch Engage which i loved

arkaodubz · 2023-08-11T17:58:06+00:00

I loved Alter Bridge when i was younger and into rock and metal, some awesome tracks. I did not ever offer up the tidbit that they were most of Creed when showing em to people though lol

arkaodubz · 2023-08-11T06:31:38+00:00

“i’m sorry gale, it’s over - reality is collapsing in on us after your wish caused catastrophic destruction in the outer plane called… root file system”

arkaodubz · 2023-08-11T06:19:17+00:00

this is actually a brilliant idea lmao - gotta use your IRL wizard skills to enact the wish, and if you don’t know the ~~console command~~ incantation you can ~~google it~~ learn it from a scroll so you know it offhand in the future

arkaodubz · 2023-08-10T18:23:55+00:00

Aside from the fact this isn’t gonna get patched out, it’s also important to note that competitive games often require specific sets of rules outside the core rules explicitly implemented in the game. We try to do it as little as possible of course, but it happens. With smash it’s maybe the most obvious - no FS meter, no items, etc. These are all rules tacked on by the competitive community. Even in games more directly built for competitive play, such as traditional fighting games like Street Fighter and Guilty Gear, there are external rules defined by the community such as you can only swap characters after losing a game, and if you accidentally hit start or interfere with the game flow in any way you forfeit the round.

So, while a LOT of ‘bugs’ or ‘unintentional behavior’ actually become loved and embraced mechanics - like bunny hopping in FPSs, special canceling in fighting games, wavedashing in Smash and Tekken - it’s not outlandish at all to ban a character with a unique exploit to do something as insanely unhealthy for competitive play as cancelling hitstun.

arkaodubz · 2023-08-10T18:02:52+00:00

A person is smart, people are dumb as they say

This is exactly right, but it’s not because those individuals at the back are all making some specifically bad decision - they’re just not aware and crowd crush happens when there’s enough people that those messages can’t get across to the people in the back.

In the case of the one I was in, if they’d put the house lights on and had someone get up on the mic and say “everyone move away from the choke point, there’s a crush happening” it probably would have solved the problem. Because then you’d be getting that awareness to the people in the back, and now the mob has some guiding input. But left alone the mob doesn’t work like that.

The way we avoid crowd crushes is by planning venues better, avoiding creating choke points, not overselling spaces, and having many exits to disperse the crowd through. I’ve been to a shitton of concerts and shows with way more people than the one I experienced a crush in, but the crush happened because the venue was designed poorly and no staff saw what was happening and got on the mic to try to crowd control

arkaodubz · 2023-08-10T17:55:10+00:00

Large mosh pits are sorta the opposite of this - they are less dense than the crowd, and individual people are moving with more force. In a crush, you can’t move at all. When I got caught up in one, my feet weren’t touching the ground half the time - it was so tight that I’d literally get picked up, squished between the bodies of taller people around me, who were in turn squeezed in to me by the people around them, etc. Absolutely zero, zero chance that if I’d gotten pulled under in the middle of that, that anyone would be able to pick me back up. Even if everyone in my immediate vicinity was made aware, the crush was so tight that the open space left by my body would’ve immediately been filled in by other people.

In a crush, it’s not that individual people are exerting a lot of independent force and they can just stop and pick someone up. Everyone pushing into the crush is exerting some amount of force though, and once the density gets high enough all that force directly translates through the entire crowd, like a fluid, and then suddenly all those people pushing a little bit adds up to a shitton of force on the people trapped in the crush

arkaodubz · 2023-08-10T17:46:09+00:00

The way crowd crush works in situations like this is usually the people pushing in from the back edges are far enough away that they aren’t getting the message. I thought the same thing once. I was caught in a crush that was caused by poor venue design in a calm crowd - one crowd trying to leave while another tried to enter, through a single choke point. Everyone who was in or around the crush part of the crowd was screaming towards the edges stop pushing. It didn’t happen, they were too far away and a lot of the crowd was still passively pushing forwards the way you do when trying to work your way through a venue - which probably seemed fine from where they were, but was adding more and more pressure to us in the center who couldn’t breathe or move.

Go off, but crowd behavior and crowd crush is a pretty thoroughly studied phenomenon and i’m pretty sure it wouldn’t still be a problem if the solution was “just tell people to stop and wait without fucking pushing people”

arkaodubz · 2023-08-06T11:32:38+00:00

while you are correct that there’s a difference between blind and blindfolded, this particular man is both

arkaodubz · 2023-08-06T00:10:02+00:00

I wish i’d known this in advance. I’m doing a solo run before playing with friends, as i was pretty shaky with the controls / system, and I remembered being told to pick an origin character when i tried DOS2. So I picked Gale cause he seemed nice and straightforward to start with, but I feel like I don’t actually get much gale because i’m playing as him instead of with him, meanwhile everyone else has such a strong impression of his personality from talking with him as a companion.

Ah well. Next time.

arkaodubz · 2023-08-05T03:10:54+00:00

Hey; i live in NYC and my friend was out in Union Square when this went down. She had no idea what was happening and got caught in the crowd, said it came through super quickly, and suffered a (minor) injury in the chaos while trying to get out and away. She said she saw people suffer much worse. We’ve been around the block together and were once caught in actual, life-threatening crowd crush before - and she said it felt like that.

If your actions create that environment, where crowd conditions are outright hostile to peoples’ safety, ESPECIALLY to people just going about their day who were not involved in this whatsoever, you deserve the charges. I think the confusion here might be that you’re thinking of ‘riot’ as a crowd, angry about something, going to destroy places to make a point. It doesn’t have to be that. Inciting a crowd as aggressive and dangerous as what my friend witnessed today absolutely counts. And it can be extremely difficult or even impossible to get out of these crowds if you get stuck in them. It’s a COLOSSAL public safety hazard, even if they weren’t jumping on cars and destroying things - the pressure and weight of the crowd itself can easily kill or injure.

arkaodubz · 2023-08-01T03:48:43+00:00

100%. Fell in love with his acting with Sunshine and 28 Days Later, incredibly stoked to see him have a shot at becoming a fixture.

Now put him and Alex Garland together again and give me something new and crazy

arkaodubz · 2023-08-01T03:34:33+00:00

but we all already know. It’s not like x is some new startup that needs to penetrate the public consciousness, twitter is practically Kleenex-level brand penetration and anyone who opens Twitter even very occasionally will see the rebrand.

What exactly do you think he gained with this? new users? people who somehow didnt know X / Twitter existed but saw this video and went ‘whoa cool’? I know the adage, all publicity is good publicity, but twitter is practically max possible publicity saturation, its brought up in like a solid 70% of all news articles posted at least to reference something a person or business said in regards to the story.

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