Annie D

@ann-arcana

Queen of Burgers 🍔

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www.redpanda.fun/

Writer, game designer, engineer, bisexual tranthing, FFXIV addict

OC: Anna Verde - Primal/Excalibur, Empyreum W12 P14

Mare: E6M76HDMVU
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Annie D @ann-arcana2/10/2023, 6:28 PM

walking mirage @atomicthumbs

@davin2/10/2023, 12:26 AM

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web

I hate the AI Industry and I love Ted Chiang https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

videodante @videodante2/10/2023, 4:24 AM

The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she’s read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material. In human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.

I've read plenty of posts, articles, pieces, flippant thoughts about how ChatGPT is some sort of "breakthrough" or that we're "finally seeing real artificial intelligence" (and I'm admit to have been starstruck by it at first glance, as davin can attest to before he metaphorically dunked me in cold water about it) and it's just put so clearly here how what we are seeing is, basically, a well-organized search engine with a few parlor tricks of compression.

there's no mind behind the words, there's just, as ted chiang puts it here, well-placed blur.

#ai #good reads

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in reply to @videodante's post:

@davin2/10/2023, 5:55 AM

it's both a real cool technical achievement and a path to ever more convincing p-zombies

Alex Froio @dukecarge2/10/2023, 2:08 PM

tbh at best this technology is a useful indexing tech for the internet. One of the benefits of this compression is likely tossing out all the articles that are copy/paste of each other when trying to get clicks from benign searches such as "how to do taxes" or "how do I factory reset my phone." kinda like a... checksum of the contents that allows for a faster view of whether we've seen it before.

But then again, even that would be a stretch, because as the article pointed out, compression wants to average out the incident area to store less information. So even in this use we run up against the risk of just an overwhelming amount of content farms becoming the average.

@secrets2/10/2023, 6:39 PM

the constant fabricating renders it useless even as an indexer; unless you're willing to carefully curate your inputs (which nobody involved in "AI" nor their boosters has shown the slightest inclination to do, and would obviate the whole automation labor-saving theory here) or throw out the internet and start over from scratch it just gives you a homogenized slurry of true, false, and irrelevant information, stripped even of any of the base data's contextual cues on which might be which (did this tax advice originate from H&R Block or fiatphoney on r/libertarianism or, most likely, a random mix of both?). You can only reasonably expect to get a real answer on how to do your taxes from it if you already knew the answer before you asked.

Cliff 🦖 Pervocracy @pervocracy2/10/2023, 6:57 PM

I tried it and it wimped out and told me to consult a tax professional. Unclear if I hit a built-in safeguard or if it was cribbing from the disclaimer on some human-written site.

@secrets2/10/2023, 7:01 PM

the main utility I've seen from OpenAI has been from watching them get so freaked out about getting done like Tay that they're painstakingly manually working their way back to a machine that outputs nothing at all

Alex Froio @dukecarge2/10/2023, 7:04 PM

wasn't there somebody who wanted to... use a large language model to represent people in court? Last I heard, he had to cancel that as several legal boards threatened him with impersonating a legal professional.

Cliff 🦖 Pervocracy @pervocracy2/10/2023, 8:39 PM

Yeah it was such a bad case of "AI is magic", the theory was it bargains down your traffic tickets but, apart from not being a lawyer, it also would become a perjury machine the instant the judge asks any question of fact.

Alex Froio @dukecarge2/10/2023, 7:02 PM

Reminds me of how Amazon at one point wanted a curated list of resumes they could pull from and wanted it to be automated tbh.

At the end of the day it just got cut down to a duplicates and spam linting bot because their data set made it too lenient to serving male resumes over anything else.

From what you're saying, I don't think the model could even be stripped down to the indexing functionality I talked about. What a waste of power and effort, then.

@secrets2/10/2023, 7:10 PM

oh an infinite firehose of garbage that is difficult to immediately identify as such is an extremely powerful tool that's bound to see wide adoption, but strictly for malevolent applications. Those spam sites clogging up every internet search, replacing support lines with a chatbot that sounds helpful but will never help you, nuking everyone's inboxes forever, an incredible force multiplier for scammers, and all that's even before some effective altruist gives it a range of human-sounding voices.

Alex Froio @dukecarge2/10/2023, 7:15 PM

Terrifying that these words I am reading are just the initial reaction given form when watching it work the first time.

Terrifying that I keep thinking about how this will further create odd spaces in the internet taken up by this output and insulate people from one another as the outputs make it harder and hard to comprehend which are real/people and which are not.

Terrifying that there are people who consider continuing this work worthwhile doing as the world burns around them from the fruits of their labor.

@secrets2/10/2023, 7:30 PM

oh man I was just thinking of normal 419 type guys I hadn't even considered what'll happen when Qanon Bot takes Facebook by storm. Wonder when we'll see the first entirely algorithmically radicalized and coordinated terror cell, wonder if it's out there already.

Having grown up in the DC suburbs I'm kinda used to the upper-middle-class norm being a bunch of people who think of themselves as nice sensible liberals who put up those No Human Is Illegal signs and spend all their time working on the new child-seeking loitering munitions package for Raytheon, but yeah it's pretty grim that that kind of outlook has pervaded to just, like, everything.

Cliff 🦖 Pervocracy @pervocracy2/10/2023, 6:45 PM

Compression also likes to fill in gaps, whether they should be filled or not. I asked ChatGPT how to reset my phone and it gave reasonably correct directions! Then I asked it how to reset a nonexistent model of phone and it gave equally plausible-sounding directions.

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