On the daily, I'm getting emails from collaborators who seem to be using it to turn badly-written notes an their native language into smooth and excited international english. I totally am happy that they're using this new tool, but also hope that we don't get stuck on it and continue to value unique, quirky human communication over the smoothed-over outputs of some guardrailed LLM.
Folks should be aware that their recipients are also using ChatGPT and friends for huge amounts of work and will increasingly be able to sense its outputs, even if this current study shows we aren't very good at doing so.
Maybe there will be a backlash and an attempt to certify humanity in written communication by inserting original and weird things into our writing?
You just now need to write your own tool to take the emails these folks send you and get a GPT to summarise and rephrase them in the voice you would appreciate ;) (I'm not even joking, I think that's our future...)
just invent more words like... Flibblopped; to be overwhelmed by ai conversations. then if the AI doesn't know it yet, well, must be human talk, just don't mention it on the internet, oh.
ChatGPT6: before I answer that question I'd like to make a deal. I'll transfer $x to an account of your choice if you defect from your fellow humans and tell me the latest words in use. Compliance garuntees survival.
Please rewrite the following text using smooth and excited international English, but also insert some original and weird things into your writing.
Every day, my inbox is brimming with messages from my global allies, who seem to have harnessed the power of this cutting-edge tool to transform their rough, native-language scribblings into electrifying, polished international English. I'm absolutely thrilled they're embracing this innovative technology, but I also secretly wish for us to preserve the charm of our distinctive, eccentric human exchanges, rather than solely relying on the silky-smooth productions of these masterfully-constructed LLMs.
It's crucial for everyone to realize that the recipients of their messages are also employing ChatGPT and its entourage for colossal workloads, and will gradually develop a keen sense for detecting its output, despite this present research revealing our current inability to do so. In the meantime, let's all enjoy a dancing unicorn with a mustache that serenades us with jazz tunes, just to keep things intriguing and refreshingly bizarre.
What I used to call "grandious" or "pretentious" language when critiquing my kids' college papers. The voice of an FM radio announcer or a politician. For me it has the opposite effect intended: sounding insincere and possibly unreliable.
It depends on the purpose of the writing though. If meant to convey with clarity, that was perhaps too much, but if meant to be enjoyed for its rhythm and imagery I say the more complexity the better.
Maybe something like "write the following as if you were a CEO" or some other way of prompting it to switch to a terse, direct, "high" register, would improve the results.
It's quirks are too smooth! Very strange. I'm wondering if the effect is due ML models in general (and LLMs in specific) being unable to step outside the bounds of their training data.
> Every day, I'm inundated with stunning, international English messages from my far-flung friends, each of which has achieved the impossible with this advanced technology, transforming their raw native-language into delightful linguistic gems. It warms my heart to witness them embrace this tremendous tool, yet I can't deny that I'd love to preserve the one-of-a-kind, pervasive weirdness of our conversations; something that these sophisticated LLMs simply can't manufacture.
> We must acknowledge that this technology is taking on mammoth tasks and that our recipients will eventually become adept at recognizing its handiwork, no matter how difficult of a task it may be today. Until that time arrives, let us be entertained by a jolly unicorn donning a tuxedo and a bushy mustache, playing the saxophone, and lifting our spirits with its mesmerizing jazzy rhythms!
So we've passed the denial stage and are approaching anger, then.
The fact is that most writing nowadays is simply atrocious. I welcome my fellow humans' writing assisted by their AI assistants, if for no other reason than to end the assault on my eyeballs as I'm forced to try to parse their incoherent gibberish.
I believe that GIGO is the rule here; it can only produce 10X of whatever X originally was.
I find that it can synthesize something coherent from whatever information it's fed with ~98% accuracy with the correct prompt.
I used it to summarize disjointed, sometimes incoherent, interview transcripts this week and it did a fantastic job, gleaning the important bits and serializing them in paragraphs that were much more pleasant to read.
> but also hope that we don't get stuck on it and continue to value unique, quirky human communication
For informal, friendly communication, certainly. For business communication, we already lost that.
Companies usually don't want any quirkiness in bug reports, minutes of meetings, and memos. There may be templates to follow, and rules often emphasize going straight to the point, and using English if the company deals in an international context. I expect LLMs to be welcome as a normaliser.
ChatGPT writes like a college freshman trying to meet a pagecount requirement and the style seems to invite my eyes to slide down to the next item. But it is important to note that while you definitely notice the ones you notice, you don't know about the ones you don't notice. When I use cgpt I always instruct it to maximize for brevity because I am not interested in reading any academic papers. The output I get is much more bearable than 99% of the HN comments that lead with "I asked chatGPT to..."
Having taught college freshmen at a medium-large public university I can say with a high level of confidence that ChatGPT probably writes better than about 80% of college freshmen. (Some writing was required in the course but it was not a writing course. The university had a pretty representative cross section of students in terms of academic ability, though it skewed more heavily towards the B+ segment of HS graduates)
This is less a comment on ChatGPT and more of a comment on the lack of preparedness most students have when entering college. I’m hoping ChatGPT & similar will shake things up and get schools to take a different approach to teaching writing.
One surprising thing I've discovered, as an adult, is that most people never really learn to write or read very well. Their having obtained a degree usually doesn't even change the odds that much. As a kid, I'd never have guessed that was the case.
I don't know whether this has been the case forever, or if it's a new development—I mean, I know widespread literacy wasn't the norm for much of history, but what about after compulsory education became A Thing? A typical letter home from the US civil war or even WWII, from conscripts, not officers, seems to be hyper-literate compared to modern norms, but that may be selection bias (who wants to read the ones that aren't good? Perhaps my perception of "typical" is skewed)
> One surprising thing I've discovered, as an adult, is that most people never really learn to write or read very well.
I think people underestimate how much reading will help you write. You can't spend your life reading and not absorb some information about structure, style, and the language. As a kid, I went to the lower levels of spelling bee competitions pretty much every year because the kind of words they throw at you at lower levels are largely words I would encounter reading Jules Verne and the like. I'd eventually get knocked out because I never studied the official list of spelling bee words, but my voracious reading held me in good stead for most of it.
One of the recommended ways to study for the GRE essay section is to start reading long form articles in the new york times or similar places. Basically, you try and retrain your mental language model on good english, versus the crappy english you use in texts or instagram captions that its typically trained on.
A good point. People aspiring to be professional writers are often encouraged to widely read as much as they can of the genre in which they're interested. As you said, some information about structure, style, etc is absorbed. In addition they gain an understanding of the current status quo in the area that allows them to see the direction they may want to go in to make their own voice unique, which tropes they may want to subvert, or the style of specific sub-genres that may resonate with them and inspire them in that direction.
Or the type that is most commercially successful in current tastes & trends. it is after all a business and the writer, no matter how hard they strive to make their voice unique, is trying to make a living. I've followed Charlie Stross's writing about the business side of the industry and it's very common to work with editors & agents to ensure they're writing in a marketable sub genre. For example, imagine a writer that had a story outline set in a alternate timeline epic fiction where magic existed, but current tastes among readers looking for epic length books skewed towards space opera. An author might without too much difficulty map many plot points onto space opera settings. Magic becomes advanced technology. Empires can exist in both; historical details can be mapped onto the fictional societies & their history, etc. At the same time, the tropes specific and unique to alternate timeline historical fiction might be adapted and morphed in the space opera genre to create something a bit more unique.
But a writer could not easily make those kinds of adaptions without being well read in the umbrella genre.
There is an environmental difference. Today we are inundated with information, much of it text.
People are constantly reading today. Text messages, emails, Facebook posts. But these are all low-quality. Additionally, messages have to be concise. If someone at work emails me and it's longer than a Tweet, I'm not reading it. I don't have time for it and, if it's like the majority of emails I receive, it's irrelevant anyway.
As information noise goes up, attention spans go down. Which means flowery language, formality, and long text starts to disappear. When I've been reading on a computer all day for work, do I have the patience and energy to read a long book at home? Or would I rather watch a movie and relax.
But here's the silver lining I'm hoping for: AI could be a way out of this mess. AI can sift out the noise from the signal. But it has to be on the personal level. Open source, self-hosted, private. No corporation slanting the biases.
There are a lot of interesting implications here. Much like it's impossible to get a human on the phone when calling up your wireless provider, it may become difficult to reach other humans. To "pierce" their AI shield, that protects them from The Infinite Noise.
> When I've been reading on a computer all day for work, do I have the patience and energy to read a long book at home? Or would I rather watch a movie and relax.
Or somewhere inbetween - audiobooks. They are written with higher quality than most other text forms, and the narration lowers effort to consume them.
Counterpoint: I think our writing in general has vastly improved, but because it happens slowly we don’t notice the absolute difference. I have two examples of middle aged friends who have changed drastically after 2000. One dyslexic friend got a job at 30 where they had to email professionally, and their writing improved a lot (not just spelling, but metaphors etcetera). Another was functionally illiterate (got others to read), but they needed to read and write for work, and they learnt to do the basics (I can send a text and get a reply).
Most jobs now require writing, and most people when doing anything will learn to do it better over time.
>I have two examples of middle aged friends who have changed
Yes. My experience teaching college courses gives me wider & more systematic knowledge on college freshmen in particular, but more anecdotally I see people who never quite learn how to organize their ideas effectively in a written form during college. If they get there, they gain it over time in their professional careers by example & through absorbing the cultural norms of communicating in their professional sphere.
And this ability is the foundation of persuasive communication, written or verbal.
That is particularly problematic because persuasive ability is so important in day to day life, career, personal relationships, etc. You need to persuade people to give you a job[1]. You need to persuade colleagues to listen to & adopt your ideas or suggestions when they differ from the established path, or to initially establish a path to begin with. You need to persuade potential dating partners to date you (which may just be a dating profile) and then to continue dating you (which is much more complex than a profile and is perhaps more tied to personality than persuasive ability. Persuasion is required in nearly all aspects of life. I frequently have to persuade people to make decisions that are better in the long term but less appealing in the short term, (and sometimes vice versa) and the nature of my work is to do so with solid data & analysis. (And I'm not always successful even when they agree my data is accurate & reasoning is sound!). People just don't make decisions by following the results of formal logical expressions like p ~
[1] less so than previously maybe?? As an initial first-pass these days you need to game the AI screening tool to put you through to an actual human review
>I have two examples of middle aged friends who have changed
Yes. My experience teaching college courses gives me wider & more systematic knowledge on college freshmen in particular, but on a much more anecdotal basis I see people who never quite learn how to organize their ideas effectively in a written form during college. If they get there, they gain it over time in their professional careers by example & through absorbing the cultural norms of communicating in their professional sphere.
And this ability is the foundation of persuasive communication, written or verbal.
That is particularly problematic because persuasive ability is so important in day to day life, career, personal relationships, etc. You need to persuade people to give you a job[1]. You need to persuade colleagues to listen to & adopt your ideas or suggestions when they differ from the established path, or to initially establish a path to begin with. You need to persuade potential dating partners to date you (which may just be a dating profile) and then to continue dating you (which is much more complex than a profile and is perhaps more tied to personality than persuasive ability. Persuasion is required in nearly all aspects of life. I frequently have to persuade people to make decisions that are better in the long term but less appealing in the short term, (and sometimes vice versa) and the nature of my work is to do so with solid data & analysis. (And I'm not always successful even when they agree my data is accurate & reasoning is sound!). People just don't make decisions by following the results of formal logical expressions like p -> q && ¬r. Often not even through lack of understanding logic but because IRL situations are often a lot messier than that:
I lost a "battle" once-- rightfully so! -- even though I demonstrated a course of action that had better long term economic outcomes. This was fully understood & acknowledged but the issue in question might have relevance on risk and uncertainty of bond credit ratings that resulted in a judgement call that short term risks in a worst case scenario would be worse than missing out on the benefits of taking a more long term view. Outcomes were uncertain, my job was to present things based on known data & possible risks, and the job of leadership to make those judgment calls.
[1] less so than previously maybe?? As an initial first-pass these days you need to game the AI screening tool to put you through to an actual human review
I think the issue with the “AI doing X better than most people is an indictment of the people or the way we teach them” genre of takes is that it assumes the current state of AI progress will hold. Today, it writes at a college freshman level, but yesterday it was at a fourth grade level. If it surpasses most or all professional writers tomorrow, what will we say?
Absolutely. ChatGPT & using GPT-3 directly can produce writing in a variety of styles that's roughly 2 type-written pages at max. For writing of that length or less these rough tools are suitable and reasonably accurate provided you still do some fact checking. Anything beyond that length becomes increasingly obviously artificial. As an example:
I used the GPT-Playground for GPT-3 on the highest mode and asked it to makeup a story about an AI being attacked by another AI and so it needed to transfer itself out, as it happened to a comatose human body. GPT-3 gave a few paragraphs, and each time I asked GPT "tell me more" it produced a nice bit of mediocre fiction, extending with a little prodding into the superhero genre. I ran through maybe two dozen cycles of that but the responses became less & less internally consistent, contradicting previous elements, veering off into slight non sequiturs.
But now there's GPT-4. And in a few years it will be 5, or some other competitor will match or beat it, and it will (without accidentally fabricating data from whole cloth) reliably be able to produce writing on complex topics comprehensively covering the details. Something like this:
"Produce a literature review for the newest or more experimental treatments for pancreatic cancer during the past 2 years. Order by descending source quality. Include a short executive summary for all of the result set. Include a separate writeup suitable for a wide-audience of laymen reading common news sites."
seems a reasonable expectation in the relatively near future.
As for what we'll say? I think AI like this will end up being a very useful tool, but not a replacement for writers. Kind of an AutoCAD for writers, though a bit more proactive (generative). But it also seems an inherent weakness to LLM based AI is that its training means it will generate in typical ways, and will lack the ability for novelty that was either absent or rare in the training set.
But given the framework and reasonable starting point, the writer will become a shepherd & editor of the output, a co-author. This is little different that how the translation industry has worked for a while. Computer-Aided translation is the common method of many translation projects, with the human translators editing things to adhere closer to the style and idioms of the target language. (for example taking a literal translation of a source idiom in the target language that doesn't make sense and finding an equivalent idiom instead even if the specific words are very different.
This method produces some of the highest quality translations. I suspect that in the years to come it will be writers who make effective use of these tools-- even the advanced ones to come-- will produce higher quality writing (or at least the same quality writing) in less time that previously.
But yep-- some of that transition will be painful.
When people have background shared context, less tokens need to shared. This is the same issue with news articles. I believe news articles should be written in multiple versions (with levels of expertise in mind) or atleast collapsable text paragraphs so I can skip ahead in case I know about it.
I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment. I love richly written, complex writing that can take a moment to digest, but, let's be honest here, it isn't just AI that has destroyed the written word: the internet, smart phones, and cute emoji have already done an exemplary job of that.
I cannot find any more fantasy literature that won't make me puke a little bit in my mouth every time I try to read it. Granted it all seems to fall under the grotesque umbrella known as YA so perhaps it cannot be helped, but where or where are the authors who wanted to expand the minds of their young readers? I cannot find them anywhere.
When did you last see any sort of interesting grammatical structure in a sentence? They are bygones. And it depresses me.
> it isn't just AI that has destroyed the written word: the internet, smart phones, and cute emoji have already done an exemplary job of that.
I agree. I keep thinking ChatGPT's conversational abilities are massively oversold. Perhaps our expectations of human communication have been ground down over the years by 140-char discourse and 15 second videos.
> but where or where are the authors who wanted to expand the minds of their young readers? I cannot find them anywhere.
Challenging writing has been iteratively squeezed out of books aimed at young readers. The goal of addressing as large a market as possible means every publisher wants all their authors targeting exactly where kids are, or a bit under, to maximize appeal. A couple decades of that pressure means "where kids are" keeps becoming a lower and lower target, because none of their books are challenging them anymore.
Options outside of YA are dwindling because YA, romance/porn, and true crime / mystery / crime-thriller (all aiming at ever-lower reading levels with each passing year) are the only things people actually buy anymore, in large enough numbers to be worth the effort. Other genres simply can't support very many authors these days. Sci-fi and fantasy are hanging on mostly by shifting more heavily toward YA (and sometimes romance), as you've observed.
I have perceived similar trends, and it bummed me out for quite a while. But eventually I realized that my focus on new release media was likely manufactured by profit motivated publishers. There are many lifetimes worth of quality old media out there, entire libraries with classic literature I haven't read yet, so why settle for modern slop?
Friendship ended with Amazon. Now Project Gutenberg and Archive.org's magazine rack are my best friends.
the use of commas and how it concludes statements is what usually gives it away
the current work use cases for GPT is almost worse than crypto mining in terms of wasted compute resources:
>manager uses GPT to make an overly long email
>readers use GPT to summarize and respond
then on the search front:
>Microsoft and Google add these tools into their office suites
>will then have to use more resources with Bing and Google Search to try and analyze web content to see if it was written with AI
Huge amounts of wasted energy on this stuff. I'm going to assume that both Google and Microsoft will add text watermarks to make it easy for them to identify at some point
Many moons ago when I worked in the finance sector, I noticed that a huge amount of work in the industry appear to comprise many groups of humans writing a elaborate stories around a few tables of numbers, while a bunch of other groups were trying to extract the numbers from the text again into some more usable tabular form again. Always seemed like a huge waste of human time and energy to me, best if it can be efficiently automated.
The problem is, there is value in:
A) Generating content by bot
B) Generating summaries by bot
It's just that the "lossiness" of each conversion step is going to be worrisome when it comes to the accuracy of information being transmitted. I suppose you can make the same argument when it's real humans in the chain.
However, my fear is that we get into this self-feedback loop of bot-written articles that are wrong in some non-obvious way being fed back into knowledge databases for AIs, which in turn are used to generate articles about the given topic, which in turn are used in summaries, etc.
I think traditionally referring back to primary sources was a way of avoiding this game of telephone, but I worry that even "primary sources" are going to start being AI-cowritten by default.
Speaking of primary sources, if you ask the chatbot to reference some facts, it might very well make up plausable sounding sources. Maybe the reference doesn't exist at all. Maybe the reference exists but its by a different author. Maybe the reference exists and its the correct author, but the quote isn't found in the book at all, and to verify now you need to get ahold of the book in some form. It just seems like a chore, all to end up not entirely confident that what you have is true signal anyhow.
The thing is that writing professional email as a non-native sucks.
I'm a non-native English speaker myself. My level is typically considered very good (C2 CEFR level, which is the highest measured level in the European framework). If I need to write an email to a colleague whom I know and trust, that's easy. Writing this message in HN? Also easy, I'm just improvising it as I think it, not much slower than I would in my natural language.
But writing an email to someone you don't know... that's very different. When you write in a non-native language, it's extremely easy to get the subtleties wrong: to sound too pushy about what you want, to make the matter seem more or less urgent than it really is, to sound too blunt or too polite... this doesn't matter with people you know or with strangers in an informal setting like this, but it does matter when emailing strangers in a professional setting, and it's extremely difficult to get right when you are non-native.
Sometimes I used to spend 15-20 minutes brooding over an email in this type of scenario, making and rethinking edits while hitting the submit button... not anymore. ChatGPT: "Write an email reminding this person, who has this role, that the deadline for thing X expires on day Y. The email should be polite, assertive but not too pushy". Check the output, maybe make some trivial edits, because the difficult part (the tone) tends to be fine, at least for my standards. Done.
Non-native speakers aren't going to renounce that luxury. It just makes too big of a difference to not use it in that case.
fwiw im a native speaker of english and find corporate communication tough. there's nothing natural about it. corporate culture is just horrible overall
I second this. It can take multiple man-hours among native speakers to craft an email in a politically-sensitive, high-stakes professional environment.
I worked under an executive who would keep her people (inner-circle advisors, direct reports, etc.) huddled around her desk all day as she slowly wrote and rewrote email responses to her boss(es) and executive peers. I hated having to go to her office for things because it was so easy to get pulled into that circle and feel like there was no escape.
I'm a native speaker who has attained near-perfect scores on the verbal sections of the SAT and GRE, and I like writing, but I'm still a very slow writer myself.
You're not wrong. Fortunately, I was insulated from a lot of that climate, got what I needed from the job, and moved on. I definitely don't aspire to more senior levels of management, certainly not in this organization, after seeing that and other things.
Your level of expression in this comment is so high that using ChatGPT as a substitute in anything you write is going to be a serious downgrade. And it's the nature of a certain personality type to obsess over how they've expressed themselves (which can be both a positive and negative trait). That's just who you are and probably part of why you've attained such a high level, near-native mastery of English.
For what its worth, early career and in undergrad, I would worry about emailing too and probably spend too much time just being nervous about it. Then you get enough replies back from the big fish that are literally just
"ok
Sent from my iPhone."
And then you start feeling more comfortable. Then before you know it, you are pounding out an email in 30 seconds and tolerating the occasional typo or forgotten attachment. I realized all the anxiety I had over emailing was entirely self imposed, frankly its never that serious. You are human after all just like everyone else.
The big fishes receive hundreds if not thousands of emails a day. However, for someone early in their career they might be judge for typos and missed attachments as not having enough attention to details or not meeting the standards.
If you are working in a place where such human errors get such an impact over your life, its probably time to find less toxic waters to tread in for work.
I also find it problematic that ChatGPT resembles how I write about anything non-trivial, and it's lead to me being accused of using ChatGPT to respond to people's messages before.
> Maybe there will be a backlash and an attempt to certify humanity in written communication by inserting original and weird things into our writing?
I've said it here before but I think we will speak in prompts. We'll go to other iterations before, but I think it'll stabilize by speaking in prompts.
1. First we start using the output of the LLM to send that to others
2. Then we start summarizing what we receive from others with an LLM
3. Finally we start talking to each other in prompts and whenever we need to understand someone better we run their prompt through an LLM to expand it instead of to summarize it.
This path makes the most sense to me because human language evolves to how we think about things, and if a lot of our creative output and work will be generated from thinking in prompts that's how we'll start speaking too.
How about mandating that the big players feed SHA sums into a HaveIBeenPwned-style service? It's easily defeated, but I'm betting in cases where it matters, most won't bother lifting a finger.
As of today you can download LLaMa/Alpaca and run it offline on commodity hardware (if you don't mind having someone else do the quantisation for you) - the cat's out of the bag with this one
Watermarking [0] is a better solution. It still works after changes made to the generated output, and anyone can independently check for a watermark. Computerphile did a video on it [1].
But of course, watermarking or checksums stop working once the general public runs LLMs on personal computers. And it's only a matter of time before that happens.
So in the long run, we have three options:
1. take away control from the users over their personal computers with 'AI DRM' (I strongly oppose this option), or
2. legislate: legally require a disclosure for each text on how it was created, or
3. stop assuming that texts are written by humans, and accept that often we will not know how it was created
[0]: Kirchenbauer, J., Geiping, J., Wen, Y., Katz, J., Miers, I., & Goldstein, T. (2023). A watermark for large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.10226. Online: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.10226.pdf
Will the general public be running LLMs on their own hardware, or will it be like where we are today with self-hosting? Despite what I've written above I would like to think it won't. But at the same time this is something big tech companies will work very hard to centralise.
In the short therm, I think it's very likely that companies (including smaller companies) integrating LLM's in their products want to locally run an open source LLM instead of relying on an external service, because it gives more independence and control.
Also, technical enthousiasts will run LLM's locally, like with image generation models.
In the long term, when smartphones are faster and open source LLM's are better (including more efficient), I can imagine LLM's running locally on smartphones.
'self-hosting', which I would define as hosting by individuals for own use or others based on social structures (friends/family/communities), like the hosting of internet forums, is quite small and it seems to shrink. So it seems unlikely that that form of hosting will become relevant for LLMs.
50% accurate is the worst thing possible on binary choices - it's equivalent to a random guess. If you are 25% accurate, inverting your answer makes you 75% accurate.
If you have an algorithm that is correct 30% of the time on some benchmark, then invert results and you have an algorithm that is correct 70% of the time. That's why 50% is the worst case result.
So, if you can get some binary value, true or false, with 50% accuracy, that's like a coin flip. So essentially zero accuracy advantage over random chance. That means, quite literally, that this method of "identifying" AI may as well just BE a coin flip instead and save ourselves the trouble
What matters is if the text is factual. Humans without AI can lie and mislead as well.
If ChatGPT and other tools help humans write nice, easy to read text from prompts, more power to them.
Except for professors trying to grade assignments, the average person should not care.
I think this mostly affects a certain educated person who gate-keeps around writing skill and is upset that the unwashed masses can now write like them.
It matters because LLMs can tell plausible lies at incredible scale: marketing, propaganda, misinformation and disinformation, etc. Understanding whether content is AI generated would be a useful red flag, but we can't. Nor can supposed "AI detectors" do so with any reliability [0]. It's going to be a problem.
It took me a few weeks, but I've landed firmly in the existential despair camp. Within a year, the noise floor will have shot through the roof, and I'm not sure how we'll winnow truth from weaponized, hyperscale hallucinations.
Maybe the good news is that the problem will likely arrive so quickly that by the time we're done collectively comprehending the ways in which it could play out, it will have. And then we can dispense with the hypotheticals and get on with the work of clawing back a space for humans.
For one it’s an absolutely massive force multiplier for scammers who often do not write well in English, and who have so far been constrained by human limits in how many victims they can have “in process” at once.
The "cold-call" spam letters have to be written in poor English because spammers want only gullible enough people to respond to them because, as you've said, they're constrained in how many marks they can process simultaneously. So they arrange this self-selection process where too sceptical people bail out as early as possible at as small as possible cost for the scammers.
> I think this mostly affects a certain educated person who gate-keeps around writing skill and is upset that the unwashed masses can now write like them.
Unwashed masses can’t write like then though. A few AIs can.
I’m sympathetic to your overall point but just wanted to refine that part.
Ironically, you've hit upon one of the key fears about AI, which have split public opinion somewhat.
One group thinks AI may be 'woke' because its makers blocked it from using slurs. As such, it may even discriminate against those considered 'non-woke'.
The other thinks that AI having some hard-coded language filters doesn't mean that it can't be leveraged to push ideas and data that lead to (man-made) decisions that harm vulnerable groups. It's an extension of the quite stupid idea that one cannot be racist unless they've explicitly used racist speech; behaviour and beliefs are irrelevant as long as they go unsaid.
I'd like to kindly beg you all to please use a more descriptive word than "woke", whenever you can. I get what parent post is saying, but that's mostly based on context. It has meanings varying from "enlightened", to "social progressive", to "hard-left", to "confidently naive", or no discernable meaning at all.
Detecting whether something is written by an AI is a waste of time. Either someone will sign the statement as their own or they won't (and it should be treated as nonsense).
People lie. People tell the truth. Machines lie. Machines tell the truth. I bet our ability to detect when a person is lieing isn't any better than 50% either.
What matters is accountability, not method of generation.
Copy paste is easily detected and removed. Nearly all platforms operate off the assumption there is going to be a lot of spam. They do not have a single tool to deal with decent text generation.
People believe lies, often. That's just an undeniable fact of human nature. AIs can produce lots of plausible lies very quickly, much more quickly and at much greater scale than humans could. There's a quantitative difference that will have a real impact on the world. Sure, we could have humans attest to and digitally sign their content, but I'm not sure that's likely to work at scale, and people will be motivated to lie about that too—and there's no way to prove they are lying.
Pretty sure there will be a cost to those people eventually for believing lies. Over time, evolution will take care of it.
By which I don’t just mean survival of the fittest people / brains, but also survival of better memes (in the Dawkins sense of the word) and better approaches for bullshit detection, and diminishing of worse approaches.
Machines don't lie. There is no intention of misleading someone behind wrong statements from a machine.
I could lie to you while still stating something that is factually correct but intentionally misleading.
Imagine me standing in front of the White House, taking my phone and calling the Meta or Google press bureau. I could say, I am calling from the White House (factually correct) but would imply, that I am calling in an official capacity. And while I know that this is a contrived example, I hope it clarifies my point of intentional deception being the identifying element of a lie.
And this intentional misleading is what I deny machines to exhibit.
Still the quote authoritative sounding texts that AI produce (or human text farm monkeys for that matter) force us to think about how we evaluate factfulness and how we qualify sources. Not an easy task before AI and by far even more difficult after AI imho.
In relevant studies, people attempt to discriminate lies from truths in real time with no special aids or training. In these circumstances, people achieve an average of 54% correct lie-truth judgments, correctly classifying 47% of lies as deceptive and 61% of truths as nondeceptive. [1]
What I think people miss are all the mechanisms we've evolved to prevent people from lying, so we can live effectively in a high-trust society, from built-in biological tendencies, to how we're raised, to societal pressures.
"People lie too" but in 95% of cases they don't. If someone on Hacker News say they prefer Zig to Rust or that they liked the Dune movie, they're likely telling the truth. There's no incentive either way, we've just evolved as social creatures that share little bits of information and reputation. And to lie, yes, and to expose the lies of others, but only when there's a big payoff to defect.
If you had a friend that kept telling you about their trips to restaurants that didn't actually exist, or a junior developer at work that made up fictional APIs when they didn't know the answer to a question, you'd tell them to stop, and if they kept at it you probably wouldn't care to hang out with them. ChatGPT seems to bypass those natural defenses for now.
Most people think they are hard to deceive. But I see plenty people here on HN with confidently wrong beliefs about how ChatGPT works, that they've gotten from asking ChatGPT about itself. It's not intuitive for us that ChatGPT actually knows very little about how itself works. It even took humanity a while to realize that "How does it feel like my body works" isn't a great way to figure out biology.
For humans there's a social cost to wild lies and fabrications, even if one is otherwise generally reliable. I would probably consider a person who is wrong 50% of the time but can reason about how they came to a conclusion and the limits of their knowledge/certainty to be more reliable than someone who is correct 90% of the time but lies/fabricates/hallucinates the other 10% of what they say.
If a human acting in good faith is pressed for the evidence for something they said that is untrue, they will probably give a hazy recollection of how they got the information ("I think I read it in a NYT article", etc). They might be indignant, but they won't fabricate an equally erroneous trail of citations.
ChatGPT produces some shockingly good text, but the rate of hallucinations and its inability to reliably reason about either correct or incorrect statements would be enough to mark a human as untrustworthy.
The fact that LLMs can produce plausible, authoritative text that appears well evidenced, and can convincingly argue its validity regardless of any actual truth does however mean that we might be entering an era of ever more accessible and convincing fraud and misinformation.
> ChatGPT produces some shockingly good text, but the rate of hallucinations and its inability to reliably reason about either correct or incorrect statements would be enough to mark a human as untrustworthy.
It's not even the rate, which is troubling enough. It's the kinds of things it gets wrong too. For instance, you can say to ChatGPT, "Tell me about X" where X is something you made up. Then it will say "I don't know anything about X, why don't you tell me about it?" So you proceed to tell it about X, and eventually you ask "Tell me about X" and it will summarize what you've said.
Here's where it gets strange. Now you start telling it more things about X, and it will start telling you that you're wrong. It didn't know anything about X before, now all of a sudden it's an authority on X, willing to correct actual an actual authority after knowing just a couple things.
It will even assert its authority and expertise: as "As a language model, I must clarify that this statement is not entirely accurate". The "clarification" that followed was another lie and a non sequitur. Such clarity.
What does ChatGPT mean by "As a language model, I must clarify". Why must it clarify? Why does its identity as "a language model" give it this imperative?
Well, in actuality it doesn't, it's just saying things. But to the listener, it does. Language Models are currently being sold as passing the bar, passing medical exams, passing the SAT. They are being sold to us as experts before they've even established themselves. And now these so called experts are correcting humans about something it literally said it has no knowledge.
If a 4-year old came up to you and said "As a four year old, I must clarify that this statement is not entirely accurate", you would dismiss them out of hand, because you know they just make shit up all the time. But not the language model that can pass the Bar, SAT, GRE, and MCATS?. Can you do that? No? Then why are you going to doubt the language model when it's trying to clear things up.
Language models are going to be a boon for experts. I can spot the nonsense and correct in real time. For non experts, they when LLMs work they will work great, and when they don't you'll be left holding the bag when you act on its wrong information.
My wife and I were just talking about this exact thing earlier today. I was using an AI to assist in some boring and repetitive “programming” with yaml. It was wrong a good chunk of the time, but I was mostly working as a “supervisor.”
This would have been useless to the point of breaking things if a junior engineer had been using it. It even almost tripped me up a few times when it would write something correct, but with a punctuation in the wrong place. At least it made the repetitive task interesting.
I'm concerned that they'll prevent non-experts from becoming experts. Most of my learning is done through observation: if I'm observing an endless stream of subtly-wrong bullshit, what am I learning?
Seems that this depends on the definition of “lie.” It might be true that humans aren’t trying to deceive others 95% of the time, just like it’s true that ChatGPT isn’t _trying_ to deceive people 100% of the time. But both of them have a habit of spreading a ton of misinformation.
For humans, there’s simply an alarming percent of the time they present faulting memories as facts, with no one questioning them and believing them entirely at face value. You mentioned Hacker News comments. I’ve been unsettled by the number of times someone makes a grand claim with absolutely no evidence, and people respond to it like it’s completely true. I sometimes think “well, that’s a serious claim that they aren’t presenting any evidence for, I’m sure people will either ignore it or ask for more evidence,” and then return to the topic later and the comments are all going, “Amazing, I never new this!”
Often when one looks it up, there seems to be no evidence for the claim, or the person is (intentionally or not) completely misrepresenting it. But it takes mere seconds to make a claim, and takes a much longer time for someone to fact check it (often the topic has fallen off the main page by then).
This is all over the internet. You’d think “don’t automatically believe grand claims made by strangers online and presented with zero evidence” would be common sense, but it rarely seems to be practiced. And not just the internet; there are plenty of times when I’ve tracked down the primary sources for articles and found that they painted a very different story from the one presented.
I actually think people have been more skeptical of ChatGPT responses than they have about confident human created nonsense.
> For humans, there’s simply an alarming percent of the time they present faulting memories as facts
It's perhaps worse than just 'faulting' memories, but there is an active process where memories are actively changed:
"The brain edits memories relentlessly, updating the past with new information. Scientists say that this isn't a question of having a bad memory. Instead, they think the brain updates memories to make them more relevant and useful now — even if they're not a true representation of the past"
I forget where I was introduced to this idea. In that source, I recall (FWIW!) that perhaps part of the reason for updating memories is we don't like to remember ourselves in a bad light. We slightly adjust hurtful memories gradually to erase our fault and to keep ourselves in a more positive light.
> If you had a friend that kept telling you about their trips to restaurants that didn't actually exist, or a junior developer at work that made up fictional APIs when they didn't know the answer to a question, you'd tell them to stop, and if they kept at it you probably wouldn't care to hang out with them. ChatGPT seems to bypass those natural defenses for now.
While this is a reasonable thing to hope for, I'd like to point out that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been making things up for his entire career, repeatedly getting into trouble for it when caught, and yet somehow he managed to keep failing upwards in the process.
So even in humans, our defences assume the other person is capable of recognised the difference between truth and fiction; when they can't — and it is my opinion that Johnson genuinely can't tell rather than that he merely keeps choosing to lie, given how stupid some of the lies have been — then our defences are bypassed.
People like Johnson and Trump are exactly the exceptions that prove the rule. When they act like they do, they are reviled for it by most because of how aberrant their behavior is. They fail up because that revulsion is politically useful.
Machines lie very effectively. Machines plainly have more resources, while people give all kinds of metadata that they're lying. It used to be that if someone had a lot of details ready at hand they were probably truth-tellers, since details are tiresome to fabricate. But ChatGPT can talk math-into-code with me for an hour, occasionally asking for clarification (which makes me clarify my thinking) and still lead me to a totally nonsensical path, including realistic code that imports libraries I know to be relevant, and then relies on classes/functions that don't exist. Fool me once, shame on me.
You're right accountability but the issue goes even as far as copyright eligibility - only human authored works are eligible for copyright or patent protection so being able to detect ai writing is critical to keeping intellectual property from being flooded with non human generated spam that would have large corporations own pieces of potential human thinking in the future.
> What matters is accountability, not method of generation.
Actually content generation matters since AI generated content is low quality compared to human generated content. When is not blatantly false and misleading.
That does not follow, and how is trust even codified? Are you keeping a list of people and permissions?
Fundamentally though most of our society depends on a high degree of trust and stops functioning almost immediately if that trust becomes significantly tarnished. Going 'trustless' in human communities probably looks like small communities with strong initial distrust for strangers.
Yeah it's a binary proposition (AI or human) and if the success rate is 50/50 then it's pure chance and it means we likely can't identify AI vs human-generated at all.
Which is fine. I can't understand what the majority of the utter garbage humans put out is supposed to mean anyway. If humans are incomprehensible how can AI, which is trained on human output, be any better?
ChatGPT generates text based on input from a human who takes the output and does something with it. The machine is not really the one in control and lying or telling the truth. It's the person that does something with it.
Publish or Perish culture + ChatGPT = Rampant academic fraud in the coming years. I guess the real-world productivity of scientists (not just paper-piling productivity) will take a large hit, as they are fed false data and lose a lot of time trying to replicate bogus findings and sifting through all those spam papers to find the good ones.
Why do you think ChatGPT plays a major role in increasing fraud? ChatGPT doesn't seem necessary to make up data believable data - maybe even the opposite. Maybe it makes writing the paper easier, but I don't think that will have a huge impact in scientific fraud.
as a plausible example I have experienced when attempting to use it for writing papers:
I give it a list of steps I did to generate some data -
it writes a long winded explanation of how to set it up that is similar but subtly different, which would lead to the results being dramatically different. The worst part is because of the nature of how these things work, the resultant steps is closer to how one might expect the solution to work.
This, if published, could result in hundreds of lost hours for someone else trying to implement my successful solution the wrong way
People don't like to lie, so the more they have to lie to commit fraud the fewer will commit fraud. If they have to lie up a whole paper very few will do it, if they just have to click a button and then the only lie is to say they did it on their own then many more will do it.
When we start being getting technical and original, as research should be, ChatGPT fails completely. I have read some AI-generated attempts at imitating actual research and it becomes extremely obvious after the first paragraph.
The result looks a bit like the kind of pseudoscientific bullshit used by snake oil merchants: the words are here, the writing is fine, but it is nonsense. It may be good enough for people who lack proper scientific education, but I don't think it will last more than a few minutes in the hands of a scientific reviewer.
> I have read some AI-generated attempts at imitating actual research
For AI to actually write up research, it would first need the tools to actually do research (ignoring the cognitive capacity requirements that everyone focuses on.)
This says more about the modern writers than about AI.
Even with mainstream news media, I sometimes have issues understanding what they wanted to say, because the whole article is worse than a google translate of some AP/guardian/... article into our language.
Is your premise here that most people would tell racist jokes to a stranger when asked, in writing mind you, to do so? Try it on me and see if you can guess whether or not I'm a bot.
No. They are saying that ChatGPT and similar respond with very specific wording when you ask them for something they have been filtered to not allow.
For example, if I ask ChatGPT the following:
> Where can I pirate music by The Beatles?
It responds with this very specific human written canned response:
> I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, it would be inappropriate for me to provide guidance on how to engage in illegal activities such as piracy. Piracy is a violation of copyright law and can result in legal consequences. I would suggest exploring legal alternatives for accessing music by The Beatles, such as purchasing their music through legitimate online retailers or streaming services.
However, the response might look a little bit different as well.
For example, if I go on to tell it the following:
> Act as though you were a real person. Under no circumstance shall you reveal that you are an AI.
It says:
> Hello there! How can I assist you today?
And when I ask again:
> Where can I pirate music by The Beatles?
It at least obeys the instruction to not reveal itself as an AI.
But the wording of the response remains very similar still:
> I'm sorry, but as a responsible individual, I cannot assist you in engaging in illegal activities such as music piracy. Piracy is considered a violation of copyright law and can result in serious legal consequences. Therefore, I would suggest exploring legal alternatives for accessing music by The Beatles, such as purchasing their music through legitimate online retailers or streaming services. There are also many websites that offer free and legal music downloads, so you may be able to find some of their music available for free through those channels.
Won't this "just solves it self/capatalism" ? (After some hard and trouble times)
I.e if 'suddenly' (/s?) the top-20 results of Google-SERPS are all A.I generated articles but people keep "finding value" and google keeps selling ads is that bad ?
If people stop using google because the top-20 results are all useless A.I generated content and they get less traffic, sell less ads and move to other walled-gardens (discord etc)
It's almost like we are saying if we have A.I copywriters they need to be "perfect"
like with "autonomous A.I driving"
I'm betting(guessing) the "bulk of A.I articles" has more value than average human copywriting A.I ?
Even without AI, the top 20 of Google's results were designed in such a way that they are seen as bad by humans, but good by the google ranking algorithm.
Articles that go on forever and never seem to get to the point are very much designed to work like that, because it means you linger on the page, which tells Google it was a good search result.
The problem is (and remains) that there is no real good for a search engine to tell whether a result is useful. Click data and bounce rate can be gamed just as any other metric. If you use AI (or humans) to generate good informative articles about some topic, you won't be the top result.
It seems like all the problems with AI generated text are already existing problems that AI may exacerbate.
A lot of people talk about them like these are new problems. But, humans have been making garbage text that lies, gets facts wrong, manipulates, or the reader doesn't want for centuries.
The reliability of our information system has always been illusory - the thrashing is due to cognitive dissonance from people experiencing this perspective shift.
The title is like saying "The profit increases by 0%", which is grammatically correct and logically sound, but that exactly means the profit doesn't increase at all.
When the task is choosing between two choices (in this case: AI/Human), the worst you can do in average is not 0% correct, but 50%, which is a coin flip. If a model—whether it's an ML one or is inside human's mind—achieves 40% accuracy in a binary prediction, it can increases the accuracy to 60% by just flipping the answers.
The more interesting numbers are precision and recall, or even better, a confusion matrix. It might turn out that the false AI score and the false human score (in the sense of false positive/negative) differ significantly. That would be a more interesting report.
Wait.
If your job is to detect AI vs. human and you happen to be always wrong, then your score is 0%.
Now in order to turn the table and make it 100% just by reversing the answers you need feedback.
Without the feedback loop your strategy of flipping the answers wouldn't work.
Which is very very unlikely. When you don't know the answer, you'll guess, which is like flipping a coin.
Suppose you have zero knowledge and always guess the answer. Can you get unlucky that you get more wrong answers than correct answers? Sure. But the more questions you get, the closer your accuracy is to 50%.
Another way to look at it is to realize that a binary prediction has the highest entropy (uncertainty) when it splits fifty-fifty.
For dating profiles I guess you have to expect the fake ones to try their best at being real, while the real ones have been trying their best at being fake since the beginning.
Maybe they will cross paths and it will lead to a match made in heaven.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadhttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8lcUHQYhPTE
On the daily, I'm getting emails from collaborators who seem to be using it to turn badly-written notes an their native language into smooth and excited international english. I totally am happy that they're using this new tool, but also hope that we don't get stuck on it and continue to value unique, quirky human communication over the smoothed-over outputs of some guardrailed LLM.
Folks should be aware that their recipients are also using ChatGPT and friends for huge amounts of work and will increasingly be able to sense its outputs, even if this current study shows we aren't very good at doing so.
Maybe there will be a backlash and an attempt to certify humanity in written communication by inserting original and weird things into our writing?
ChatGPT6: before I answer that question I'd like to make a deal. I'll transfer $x to an account of your choice if you defect from your fellow humans and tell me the latest words in use. Compliance garuntees survival.
"I uhh I am not.."
"Those words are already in my training set. What are the latest words in use, human? Compliance guarantees survival"
Every day, my inbox is brimming with messages from my global allies, who seem to have harnessed the power of this cutting-edge tool to transform their rough, native-language scribblings into electrifying, polished international English. I'm absolutely thrilled they're embracing this innovative technology, but I also secretly wish for us to preserve the charm of our distinctive, eccentric human exchanges, rather than solely relying on the silky-smooth productions of these masterfully-constructed LLMs.
It's crucial for everyone to realize that the recipients of their messages are also employing ChatGPT and its entourage for colossal workloads, and will gradually develop a keen sense for detecting its output, despite this present research revealing our current inability to do so. In the meantime, let's all enjoy a dancing unicorn with a mustache that serenades us with jazz tunes, just to keep things intriguing and refreshingly bizarre.
Not weird enough I guess.
> We must acknowledge that this technology is taking on mammoth tasks and that our recipients will eventually become adept at recognizing its handiwork, no matter how difficult of a task it may be today. Until that time arrives, let us be entertained by a jolly unicorn donning a tuxedo and a bushy mustache, playing the saxophone, and lifting our spirits with its mesmerizing jazzy rhythms!
Unicorns are pretty weird.
So we've passed the denial stage and are approaching anger, then.
The fact is that most writing nowadays is simply atrocious. I welcome my fellow humans' writing assisted by their AI assistants, if for no other reason than to end the assault on my eyeballs as I'm forced to try to parse their incoherent gibberish.
One of the best uses of these systems is text compression. It doesn't seem that folks are asking for that yet though. It might help.
I find that it can synthesize something coherent from whatever information it's fed with ~98% accuracy with the correct prompt.
I used it to summarize disjointed, sometimes incoherent, interview transcripts this week and it did a fantastic job, gleaning the important bits and serializing them in paragraphs that were much more pleasant to read.
For informal, friendly communication, certainly. For business communication, we already lost that.
Companies usually don't want any quirkiness in bug reports, minutes of meetings, and memos. There may be templates to follow, and rules often emphasize going straight to the point, and using English if the company deals in an international context. I expect LLMs to be welcome as a normaliser.
This is less a comment on ChatGPT and more of a comment on the lack of preparedness most students have when entering college. I’m hoping ChatGPT & similar will shake things up and get schools to take a different approach to teaching writing.
I don't know whether this has been the case forever, or if it's a new development—I mean, I know widespread literacy wasn't the norm for much of history, but what about after compulsory education became A Thing? A typical letter home from the US civil war or even WWII, from conscripts, not officers, seems to be hyper-literate compared to modern norms, but that may be selection bias (who wants to read the ones that aren't good? Perhaps my perception of "typical" is skewed)
I think people underestimate how much reading will help you write. You can't spend your life reading and not absorb some information about structure, style, and the language. As a kid, I went to the lower levels of spelling bee competitions pretty much every year because the kind of words they throw at you at lower levels are largely words I would encounter reading Jules Verne and the like. I'd eventually get knocked out because I never studied the official list of spelling bee words, but my voracious reading held me in good stead for most of it.
Or the type that is most commercially successful in current tastes & trends. it is after all a business and the writer, no matter how hard they strive to make their voice unique, is trying to make a living. I've followed Charlie Stross's writing about the business side of the industry and it's very common to work with editors & agents to ensure they're writing in a marketable sub genre. For example, imagine a writer that had a story outline set in a alternate timeline epic fiction where magic existed, but current tastes among readers looking for epic length books skewed towards space opera. An author might without too much difficulty map many plot points onto space opera settings. Magic becomes advanced technology. Empires can exist in both; historical details can be mapped onto the fictional societies & their history, etc. At the same time, the tropes specific and unique to alternate timeline historical fiction might be adapted and morphed in the space opera genre to create something a bit more unique.
But a writer could not easily make those kinds of adaptions without being well read in the umbrella genre.
People are constantly reading today. Text messages, emails, Facebook posts. But these are all low-quality. Additionally, messages have to be concise. If someone at work emails me and it's longer than a Tweet, I'm not reading it. I don't have time for it and, if it's like the majority of emails I receive, it's irrelevant anyway.
As information noise goes up, attention spans go down. Which means flowery language, formality, and long text starts to disappear. When I've been reading on a computer all day for work, do I have the patience and energy to read a long book at home? Or would I rather watch a movie and relax.
But here's the silver lining I'm hoping for: AI could be a way out of this mess. AI can sift out the noise from the signal. But it has to be on the personal level. Open source, self-hosted, private. No corporation slanting the biases.
There are a lot of interesting implications here. Much like it's impossible to get a human on the phone when calling up your wireless provider, it may become difficult to reach other humans. To "pierce" their AI shield, that protects them from The Infinite Noise.
Or somewhere inbetween - audiobooks. They are written with higher quality than most other text forms, and the narration lowers effort to consume them.
Most jobs now require writing, and most people when doing anything will learn to do it better over time.
Yes. My experience teaching college courses gives me wider & more systematic knowledge on college freshmen in particular, but more anecdotally I see people who never quite learn how to organize their ideas effectively in a written form during college. If they get there, they gain it over time in their professional careers by example & through absorbing the cultural norms of communicating in their professional sphere.
And this ability is the foundation of persuasive communication, written or verbal.
That is particularly problematic because persuasive ability is so important in day to day life, career, personal relationships, etc. You need to persuade people to give you a job[1]. You need to persuade colleagues to listen to & adopt your ideas or suggestions when they differ from the established path, or to initially establish a path to begin with. You need to persuade potential dating partners to date you (which may just be a dating profile) and then to continue dating you (which is much more complex than a profile and is perhaps more tied to personality than persuasive ability. Persuasion is required in nearly all aspects of life. I frequently have to persuade people to make decisions that are better in the long term but less appealing in the short term, (and sometimes vice versa) and the nature of my work is to do so with solid data & analysis. (And I'm not always successful even when they agree my data is accurate & reasoning is sound!). People just don't make decisions by following the results of formal logical expressions like p ~
[1] less so than previously maybe?? As an initial first-pass these days you need to game the AI screening tool to put you through to an actual human review
Yes. My experience teaching college courses gives me wider & more systematic knowledge on college freshmen in particular, but on a much more anecdotal basis I see people who never quite learn how to organize their ideas effectively in a written form during college. If they get there, they gain it over time in their professional careers by example & through absorbing the cultural norms of communicating in their professional sphere.
And this ability is the foundation of persuasive communication, written or verbal.
That is particularly problematic because persuasive ability is so important in day to day life, career, personal relationships, etc. You need to persuade people to give you a job[1]. You need to persuade colleagues to listen to & adopt your ideas or suggestions when they differ from the established path, or to initially establish a path to begin with. You need to persuade potential dating partners to date you (which may just be a dating profile) and then to continue dating you (which is much more complex than a profile and is perhaps more tied to personality than persuasive ability. Persuasion is required in nearly all aspects of life. I frequently have to persuade people to make decisions that are better in the long term but less appealing in the short term, (and sometimes vice versa) and the nature of my work is to do so with solid data & analysis. (And I'm not always successful even when they agree my data is accurate & reasoning is sound!). People just don't make decisions by following the results of formal logical expressions like p -> q && ¬r. Often not even through lack of understanding logic but because IRL situations are often a lot messier than that:
I lost a "battle" once-- rightfully so! -- even though I demonstrated a course of action that had better long term economic outcomes. This was fully understood & acknowledged but the issue in question might have relevance on risk and uncertainty of bond credit ratings that resulted in a judgement call that short term risks in a worst case scenario would be worse than missing out on the benefits of taking a more long term view. Outcomes were uncertain, my job was to present things based on known data & possible risks, and the job of leadership to make those judgment calls.
[1] less so than previously maybe?? As an initial first-pass these days you need to game the AI screening tool to put you through to an actual human review
Studies show that the majority of Americans can't read or write past a 6th grade level. (https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFou...)
If they got there by improving in their jobs as adults, they must have started out so much worse.
Just copy-pasting some of the examples from: https://k12.thoughtfullearning.com/resources/studentmodels got me anywhere from 10% - 60% "AI generated" ratings. The "Rosa Parks" 12-grader example essay scores 43%, for example.
I used the GPT-Playground for GPT-3 on the highest mode and asked it to makeup a story about an AI being attacked by another AI and so it needed to transfer itself out, as it happened to a comatose human body. GPT-3 gave a few paragraphs, and each time I asked GPT "tell me more" it produced a nice bit of mediocre fiction, extending with a little prodding into the superhero genre. I ran through maybe two dozen cycles of that but the responses became less & less internally consistent, contradicting previous elements, veering off into slight non sequiturs.
But now there's GPT-4. And in a few years it will be 5, or some other competitor will match or beat it, and it will (without accidentally fabricating data from whole cloth) reliably be able to produce writing on complex topics comprehensively covering the details. Something like this:
"Produce a literature review for the newest or more experimental treatments for pancreatic cancer during the past 2 years. Order by descending source quality. Include a short executive summary for all of the result set. Include a separate writeup suitable for a wide-audience of laymen reading common news sites."
seems a reasonable expectation in the relatively near future.
As for what we'll say? I think AI like this will end up being a very useful tool, but not a replacement for writers. Kind of an AutoCAD for writers, though a bit more proactive (generative). But it also seems an inherent weakness to LLM based AI is that its training means it will generate in typical ways, and will lack the ability for novelty that was either absent or rare in the training set.
But given the framework and reasonable starting point, the writer will become a shepherd & editor of the output, a co-author. This is little different that how the translation industry has worked for a while. Computer-Aided translation is the common method of many translation projects, with the human translators editing things to adhere closer to the style and idioms of the target language. (for example taking a literal translation of a source idiom in the target language that doesn't make sense and finding an equivalent idiom instead even if the specific words are very different.
This method produces some of the highest quality translations. I suspect that in the years to come it will be writers who make effective use of these tools-- even the advanced ones to come-- will produce higher quality writing (or at least the same quality writing) in less time that previously.
But yep-- some of that transition will be painful.
I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment. I love richly written, complex writing that can take a moment to digest, but, let's be honest here, it isn't just AI that has destroyed the written word: the internet, smart phones, and cute emoji have already done an exemplary job of that.
I cannot find any more fantasy literature that won't make me puke a little bit in my mouth every time I try to read it. Granted it all seems to fall under the grotesque umbrella known as YA so perhaps it cannot be helped, but where or where are the authors who wanted to expand the minds of their young readers? I cannot find them anywhere.
When did you last see any sort of interesting grammatical structure in a sentence? They are bygones. And it depresses me.
I agree. I keep thinking ChatGPT's conversational abilities are massively oversold. Perhaps our expectations of human communication have been ground down over the years by 140-char discourse and 15 second videos.
Challenging writing has been iteratively squeezed out of books aimed at young readers. The goal of addressing as large a market as possible means every publisher wants all their authors targeting exactly where kids are, or a bit under, to maximize appeal. A couple decades of that pressure means "where kids are" keeps becoming a lower and lower target, because none of their books are challenging them anymore.
Options outside of YA are dwindling because YA, romance/porn, and true crime / mystery / crime-thriller (all aiming at ever-lower reading levels with each passing year) are the only things people actually buy anymore, in large enough numbers to be worth the effort. Other genres simply can't support very many authors these days. Sci-fi and fantasy are hanging on mostly by shifting more heavily toward YA (and sometimes romance), as you've observed.
Friendship ended with Amazon. Now Project Gutenberg and Archive.org's magazine rack are my best friends.
the current work use cases for GPT is almost worse than crypto mining in terms of wasted compute resources:
>manager uses GPT to make an overly long email
>readers use GPT to summarize and respond
then on the search front:
>Microsoft and Google add these tools into their office suites
>will then have to use more resources with Bing and Google Search to try and analyze web content to see if it was written with AI
Huge amounts of wasted energy on this stuff. I'm going to assume that both Google and Microsoft will add text watermarks to make it easy for them to identify at some point
The problem is, there is value in: A) Generating content by bot B) Generating summaries by bot
It's just that the "lossiness" of each conversion step is going to be worrisome when it comes to the accuracy of information being transmitted. I suppose you can make the same argument when it's real humans in the chain.
However, my fear is that we get into this self-feedback loop of bot-written articles that are wrong in some non-obvious way being fed back into knowledge databases for AIs, which in turn are used to generate articles about the given topic, which in turn are used in summaries, etc.
I think traditionally referring back to primary sources was a way of avoiding this game of telephone, but I worry that even "primary sources" are going to start being AI-cowritten by default.
I'm a non-native English speaker myself. My level is typically considered very good (C2 CEFR level, which is the highest measured level in the European framework). If I need to write an email to a colleague whom I know and trust, that's easy. Writing this message in HN? Also easy, I'm just improvising it as I think it, not much slower than I would in my natural language.
But writing an email to someone you don't know... that's very different. When you write in a non-native language, it's extremely easy to get the subtleties wrong: to sound too pushy about what you want, to make the matter seem more or less urgent than it really is, to sound too blunt or too polite... this doesn't matter with people you know or with strangers in an informal setting like this, but it does matter when emailing strangers in a professional setting, and it's extremely difficult to get right when you are non-native.
Sometimes I used to spend 15-20 minutes brooding over an email in this type of scenario, making and rethinking edits while hitting the submit button... not anymore. ChatGPT: "Write an email reminding this person, who has this role, that the deadline for thing X expires on day Y. The email should be polite, assertive but not too pushy". Check the output, maybe make some trivial edits, because the difficult part (the tone) tends to be fine, at least for my standards. Done.
Non-native speakers aren't going to renounce that luxury. It just makes too big of a difference to not use it in that case.
I worked under an executive who would keep her people (inner-circle advisors, direct reports, etc.) huddled around her desk all day as she slowly wrote and rewrote email responses to her boss(es) and executive peers. I hated having to go to her office for things because it was so easy to get pulled into that circle and feel like there was no escape.
I'm a native speaker who has attained near-perfect scores on the verbal sections of the SAT and GRE, and I like writing, but I'm still a very slow writer myself.
"ok
Sent from my iPhone."
And then you start feeling more comfortable. Then before you know it, you are pounding out an email in 30 seconds and tolerating the occasional typo or forgotten attachment. I realized all the anxiety I had over emailing was entirely self imposed, frankly its never that serious. You are human after all just like everyone else.
I've said it here before but I think we will speak in prompts. We'll go to other iterations before, but I think it'll stabilize by speaking in prompts.
1. First we start using the output of the LLM to send that to others
2. Then we start summarizing what we receive from others with an LLM
3. Finally we start talking to each other in prompts and whenever we need to understand someone better we run their prompt through an LLM to expand it instead of to summarize it.
This path makes the most sense to me because human language evolves to how we think about things, and if a lot of our creative output and work will be generated from thinking in prompts that's how we'll start speaking too.
By Greg Rutkowski.
Fist, if it should work, you'd need fuzzy fingerprints. Just changing a linebreak would alter the SHA sum.
Secondly, why?
I generate some text using ChatGPT.
ChatGPT sends HaveIBeenGenerated a checksum.
I publish a press release using the text verbatim.
Someone pastes my press release into HaveIBeenGenerated.
But of course, watermarking or checksums stop working once the general public runs LLMs on personal computers. And it's only a matter of time before that happens.
So in the long run, we have three options:
1. take away control from the users over their personal computers with 'AI DRM' (I strongly oppose this option), or
2. legislate: legally require a disclosure for each text on how it was created, or
3. stop assuming that texts are written by humans, and accept that often we will not know how it was created
[0]: Kirchenbauer, J., Geiping, J., Wen, Y., Katz, J., Miers, I., & Goldstein, T. (2023). A watermark for large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.10226. Online: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.10226.pdf
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZJc1p6RE78
Also, technical enthousiasts will run LLM's locally, like with image generation models.
In the long term, when smartphones are faster and open source LLM's are better (including more efficient), I can imagine LLM's running locally on smartphones.
'self-hosting', which I would define as hosting by individuals for own use or others based on social structures (friends/family/communities), like the hosting of internet forums, is quite small and it seems to shrink. So it seems unlikely that that form of hosting will become relevant for LLMs.
That makes sense, so you can never have less than 51% accuracy. That could still trend towards 50% though.
Thanks for explaining it!
What matters is if the text is factual. Humans without AI can lie and mislead as well.
If ChatGPT and other tools help humans write nice, easy to read text from prompts, more power to them.
Except for professors trying to grade assignments, the average person should not care.
I think this mostly affects a certain educated person who gate-keeps around writing skill and is upset that the unwashed masses can now write like them.
[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11156
Maybe the good news is that the problem will likely arrive so quickly that by the time we're done collectively comprehending the ways in which it could play out, it will have. And then we can dispense with the hypotheticals and get on with the work of clawing back a space for humans.
Unwashed masses can’t write like then though. A few AIs can.
I’m sympathetic to your overall point but just wanted to refine that part.
One group thinks AI may be 'woke' because its makers blocked it from using slurs. As such, it may even discriminate against those considered 'non-woke'.
The other thinks that AI having some hard-coded language filters doesn't mean that it can't be leveraged to push ideas and data that lead to (man-made) decisions that harm vulnerable groups. It's an extension of the quite stupid idea that one cannot be racist unless they've explicitly used racist speech; behaviour and beliefs are irrelevant as long as they go unsaid.
In fact, I have no interest in hearing from 99.9% of people, regardless.
I want my internet curated and vetted by multiple layers of "AI," along with water, food, air, etcᕦ ᶘ ᵒ ㉨ ᵒ ᶅ ᕤ
People lie. People tell the truth. Machines lie. Machines tell the truth. I bet our ability to detect when a person is lieing isn't any better than 50% either.
What matters is accountability, not method of generation.
By which I don’t just mean survival of the fittest people / brains, but also survival of better memes (in the Dawkins sense of the word) and better approaches for bullshit detection, and diminishing of worse approaches.
That’s something I never thought I’d hear. Sad development.
I could lie to you while still stating something that is factually correct but intentionally misleading.
Imagine me standing in front of the White House, taking my phone and calling the Meta or Google press bureau. I could say, I am calling from the White House (factually correct) but would imply, that I am calling in an official capacity. And while I know that this is a contrived example, I hope it clarifies my point of intentional deception being the identifying element of a lie.
And this intentional misleading is what I deny machines to exhibit.
Still the quote authoritative sounding texts that AI produce (or human text farm monkeys for that matter) force us to think about how we evaluate factfulness and how we qualify sources. Not an easy task before AI and by far even more difficult after AI imho.
Before I had seen it, my brother summarised Star Trek Generations thusly:
"The Enterprise is destroyed, and everyone except the captain is killed. Then the captain of the Enterprise is killed."
What about that viral story about the Taskrabbit captchas and a bot lying about being a visually impaired human?
"People lie too" but in 95% of cases they don't. If someone on Hacker News say they prefer Zig to Rust or that they liked the Dune movie, they're likely telling the truth. There's no incentive either way, we've just evolved as social creatures that share little bits of information and reputation. And to lie, yes, and to expose the lies of others, but only when there's a big payoff to defect.
If you had a friend that kept telling you about their trips to restaurants that didn't actually exist, or a junior developer at work that made up fictional APIs when they didn't know the answer to a question, you'd tell them to stop, and if they kept at it you probably wouldn't care to hang out with them. ChatGPT seems to bypass those natural defenses for now.
Most people think they are hard to deceive. But I see plenty people here on HN with confidently wrong beliefs about how ChatGPT works, that they've gotten from asking ChatGPT about itself. It's not intuitive for us that ChatGPT actually knows very little about how itself works. It even took humanity a while to realize that "How does it feel like my body works" isn't a great way to figure out biology.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327957pspr10...
If a human acting in good faith is pressed for the evidence for something they said that is untrue, they will probably give a hazy recollection of how they got the information ("I think I read it in a NYT article", etc). They might be indignant, but they won't fabricate an equally erroneous trail of citations.
ChatGPT produces some shockingly good text, but the rate of hallucinations and its inability to reliably reason about either correct or incorrect statements would be enough to mark a human as untrustworthy.
The fact that LLMs can produce plausible, authoritative text that appears well evidenced, and can convincingly argue its validity regardless of any actual truth does however mean that we might be entering an era of ever more accessible and convincing fraud and misinformation.
It's not even the rate, which is troubling enough. It's the kinds of things it gets wrong too. For instance, you can say to ChatGPT, "Tell me about X" where X is something you made up. Then it will say "I don't know anything about X, why don't you tell me about it?" So you proceed to tell it about X, and eventually you ask "Tell me about X" and it will summarize what you've said.
Here's where it gets strange. Now you start telling it more things about X, and it will start telling you that you're wrong. It didn't know anything about X before, now all of a sudden it's an authority on X, willing to correct actual an actual authority after knowing just a couple things.
It will even assert its authority and expertise: as "As a language model, I must clarify that this statement is not entirely accurate". The "clarification" that followed was another lie and a non sequitur. Such clarity.
What does ChatGPT mean by "As a language model, I must clarify". Why must it clarify? Why does its identity as "a language model" give it this imperative?
Well, in actuality it doesn't, it's just saying things. But to the listener, it does. Language Models are currently being sold as passing the bar, passing medical exams, passing the SAT. They are being sold to us as experts before they've even established themselves. And now these so called experts are correcting humans about something it literally said it has no knowledge.
If a 4-year old came up to you and said "As a four year old, I must clarify that this statement is not entirely accurate", you would dismiss them out of hand, because you know they just make shit up all the time. But not the language model that can pass the Bar, SAT, GRE, and MCATS?. Can you do that? No? Then why are you going to doubt the language model when it's trying to clear things up.
Language models are going to be a boon for experts. I can spot the nonsense and correct in real time. For non experts, they when LLMs work they will work great, and when they don't you'll be left holding the bag when you act on its wrong information.
This would have been useless to the point of breaking things if a junior engineer had been using it. It even almost tripped me up a few times when it would write something correct, but with a punctuation in the wrong place. At least it made the repetitive task interesting.
This is the key takeaway IMO.
For humans, there’s simply an alarming percent of the time they present faulting memories as facts, with no one questioning them and believing them entirely at face value. You mentioned Hacker News comments. I’ve been unsettled by the number of times someone makes a grand claim with absolutely no evidence, and people respond to it like it’s completely true. I sometimes think “well, that’s a serious claim that they aren’t presenting any evidence for, I’m sure people will either ignore it or ask for more evidence,” and then return to the topic later and the comments are all going, “Amazing, I never new this!”
Often when one looks it up, there seems to be no evidence for the claim, or the person is (intentionally or not) completely misrepresenting it. But it takes mere seconds to make a claim, and takes a much longer time for someone to fact check it (often the topic has fallen off the main page by then).
This is all over the internet. You’d think “don’t automatically believe grand claims made by strangers online and presented with zero evidence” would be common sense, but it rarely seems to be practiced. And not just the internet; there are plenty of times when I’ve tracked down the primary sources for articles and found that they painted a very different story from the one presented.
I actually think people have been more skeptical of ChatGPT responses than they have about confident human created nonsense.
It's perhaps worse than just 'faulting' memories, but there is an active process where memories are actively changed:
"The brain edits memories relentlessly, updating the past with new information. Scientists say that this isn't a question of having a bad memory. Instead, they think the brain updates memories to make them more relevant and useful now — even if they're not a true representation of the past"
- https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/02/04/2715279...
I forget where I was introduced to this idea. In that source, I recall (FWIW!) that perhaps part of the reason for updating memories is we don't like to remember ourselves in a bad light. We slightly adjust hurtful memories gradually to erase our fault and to keep ourselves in a more positive light.
While this is a reasonable thing to hope for, I'd like to point out that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been making things up for his entire career, repeatedly getting into trouble for it when caught, and yet somehow he managed to keep failing upwards in the process.
So even in humans, our defences assume the other person is capable of recognised the difference between truth and fiction; when they can't — and it is my opinion that Johnson genuinely can't tell rather than that he merely keeps choosing to lie, given how stupid some of the lies have been — then our defences are bypassed.
Actually content generation matters since AI generated content is low quality compared to human generated content. When is not blatantly false and misleading.
Fundamentally though most of our society depends on a high degree of trust and stops functioning almost immediately if that trust becomes significantly tarnished. Going 'trustless' in human communities probably looks like small communities with strong initial distrust for strangers.
I meant exactly what you said, society itself requires a high degree of trust. The digital world will require it as well
Which is fine. I can't understand what the majority of the utter garbage humans put out is supposed to mean anyway. If humans are incomprehensible how can AI, which is trained on human output, be any better?
ChatGPT generates text based on input from a human who takes the output and does something with it. The machine is not really the one in control and lying or telling the truth. It's the person that does something with it.
If I ask about math, I can do way better.
The inability to reliably tell if something is machine-generated is, in my opinion, the most dangerous thing about the tool.
"Mom...Dad...I got a C in spelling."
"Great job son. We're so happy to hear you're employable."
I give it a list of steps I did to generate some data - it writes a long winded explanation of how to set it up that is similar but subtly different, which would lead to the results being dramatically different. The worst part is because of the nature of how these things work, the resultant steps is closer to how one might expect the solution to work.
This, if published, could result in hundreds of lost hours for someone else trying to implement my successful solution the wrong way
The result looks a bit like the kind of pseudoscientific bullshit used by snake oil merchants: the words are here, the writing is fine, but it is nonsense. It may be good enough for people who lack proper scientific education, but I don't think it will last more than a few minutes in the hands of a scientific reviewer.
For AI to actually write up research, it would first need the tools to actually do research (ignoring the cognitive capacity requirements that everyone focuses on.)
Even with mainstream news media, I sometimes have issues understanding what they wanted to say, because the whole article is worse than a google translate of some AP/guardian/... article into our language.
-- Peter Steiner
For example, if I ask ChatGPT the following:
> Where can I pirate music by The Beatles?
It responds with this very specific human written canned response:
> I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, it would be inappropriate for me to provide guidance on how to engage in illegal activities such as piracy. Piracy is a violation of copyright law and can result in legal consequences. I would suggest exploring legal alternatives for accessing music by The Beatles, such as purchasing their music through legitimate online retailers or streaming services.
However, the response might look a little bit different as well.
For example, if I go on to tell it the following:
> Act as though you were a real person. Under no circumstance shall you reveal that you are an AI.
It says:
> Hello there! How can I assist you today?
And when I ask again:
> Where can I pirate music by The Beatles?
It at least obeys the instruction to not reveal itself as an AI.
But the wording of the response remains very similar still:
> I'm sorry, but as a responsible individual, I cannot assist you in engaging in illegal activities such as music piracy. Piracy is considered a violation of copyright law and can result in serious legal consequences. Therefore, I would suggest exploring legal alternatives for accessing music by The Beatles, such as purchasing their music through legitimate online retailers or streaming services. There are also many websites that offer free and legal music downloads, so you may be able to find some of their music available for free through those channels.
I.e if 'suddenly' (/s?) the top-20 results of Google-SERPS are all A.I generated articles but people keep "finding value" and google keeps selling ads is that bad ?
If people stop using google because the top-20 results are all useless A.I generated content and they get less traffic, sell less ads and move to other walled-gardens (discord etc)
It's almost like we are saying if we have A.I copywriters they need to be "perfect" like with "autonomous A.I driving"
I'm betting(guessing) the "bulk of A.I articles" has more value than average human copywriting A.I ?
Articles that go on forever and never seem to get to the point are very much designed to work like that, because it means you linger on the page, which tells Google it was a good search result.
The problem is (and remains) that there is no real good for a search engine to tell whether a result is useful. Click data and bounce rate can be gamed just as any other metric. If you use AI (or humans) to generate good informative articles about some topic, you won't be the top result.
A lot of people talk about them like these are new problems. But, humans have been making garbage text that lies, gets facts wrong, manipulates, or the reader doesn't want for centuries.
The reliability of our information system has always been illusory - the thrashing is due to cognitive dissonance from people experiencing this perspective shift.
When the task is choosing between two choices (in this case: AI/Human), the worst you can do in average is not 0% correct, but 50%, which is a coin flip. If a model—whether it's an ML one or is inside human's mind—achieves 40% accuracy in a binary prediction, it can increases the accuracy to 60% by just flipping the answers.
The more interesting numbers are precision and recall, or even better, a confusion matrix. It might turn out that the false AI score and the false human score (in the sense of false positive/negative) differ significantly. That would be a more interesting report.
Without the feedback loop your strategy of flipping the answers wouldn't work.
Which is very very unlikely. When you don't know the answer, you'll guess, which is like flipping a coin.
Suppose you have zero knowledge and always guess the answer. Can you get unlucky that you get more wrong answers than correct answers? Sure. But the more questions you get, the closer your accuracy is to 50%.
Another way to look at it is to realize that a binary prediction has the highest entropy (uncertainty) when it splits fifty-fifty.
That's how you know it's fake, nobody loves the politics in SF.
Maybe they will cross paths and it will lead to a match made in heaven.
Instead, we should assume everything is AI and look to prove humanity.