Artificial Intelligence discussion

Well, the big flaw with ChatGPT integration with Bing is that the chatbot isn’t actually really interacting with the search results. And if you ask it something that contradicts what was in the training data, it uh…kinda starts trying to gaslight you sometimes.

Currently, none of these chatbots are really properly integrated with anything else. It’s always “it’s thing and a chatbot” not, “this thing is a chatbot”.

An AI driven search engine might be an improvement, but it might also just be the same old same old.

Uh…also, can I say that if we get bogged down into “but AI can’t lie or gaslight you, it has no active intent” shit, that would also count as a derail? If we’re using the colloquial meanings of the term “the AI generates a false statement” is equivalent to the AI lying and an AI arguing with you because the training data was out of date and refusing to give any ground is functionally equivalent to an attempt to gaslight, so using terms like this should be acceptable.

Edited by Zendervai on Dec 13th 2023 at 8:39:25 AM

The problem I've found is that AI suggestions aren't any better or clearer than just finding a relevant page (especially for programming stuff). Also, I keep clicking on the damn bing chatbot by accident; I've just been really lazy about changing my default search engine at work...

AI, as it is now, is extremely poorly suited to being an information sharing chatbot or integrated into one.

Which could very easily convince a lot of people that AI assisted search engines are just not worth the hassle because, to be blunt, the Bing chatbot sucks. It’s not a good chatbot (like, it argues with people on a regular basis, and it still does) and it’s not integrated into the search engine well at all, so it almost invariably spits out a content farm site and highlights the wrong part of the page so it gives you something useless.

This is also the reason the attempts to integrate Chat GPT into other stuff isn’t…really working out very well. Because it’s not designed for that and it just kinda makes anything it’s integrated with into “here’s the program and it has a chatbot now that sometimes comes off like it hates you” and not “here’s an AI assisted program.”

If you have to basically fight the AI to get it to give you what it wants, it’s not a good AI. It’s fine if it’s just supposed to be able to fake a conversation, but a lot more development is needed before the LLM approach is really useful for anything but chatbots.

Edited by Zendervai on Dec 13th 2023 at 9:21:00 AM

I think Copilot is based on that, but it's a little better about not spitting out nonsense. It's just really damn aspirational with wanting to guess field names for classes.

I once saw it list like fifty items ending in Porting Number Porting Number Porting Number.

I have been using Chat GPT fairly extensively recently, but I dont use it to obtain information. I do my own research on a topic (or I go by my own knowledge), reduce what I want said down to a series of bullet points, and then I use the bullet points as prompts for the AI. Generally, I get about a page long essay for each one or two line prompt. Then I edit the result for style and accuracy. That's a lot of work to do, but it still ends up saving me time and effort.

Chat GPT is a copy writer, not a researcher.

Uh, can I ask what you do that for?

I'm writing a book.

I've sometimes used ChatGPT to ask elaborate questions about a topic in situations where looking up information from numerous sources to combine it all together would take way longer. For example, a few days ago I asked it about how High Dynamic Range color works on computers. Later, I'd discover a photographer's website that cleared up details I missed by, tbh, providing a better explanation (that didn't contradict anything ChatGPT said, as what it said still fits naturally into the other things I've learned).

I use the paid version, which is smarter than the free version. I think the ability to combine knowledge of multiple subjects from many sources, and come up with elaborate answers to elaborate questions that require knowledge from multiple fields, is its best feature, and part of what makes it useful.

That’s your philosophy thing, right? I have to be honest, I don’t really get the point of using an AI on that. If I read a book of philosophy, it’s because I want to know what they have to say and how they connect the different aspects and elements of it together. If it’s all been filtered through some program, I don’t have any guarantee it’s really what you think and a lot of it is likely to be “close enough” stuff that’s in the ballpark of what you think but that isn’t really the exact thing, which means I’m not getting your thoughts, it means I’m getting a second-hand account of your thoughts from a source that doesn’t really understand anything.

It also sounds like that approach to writing is likely to make it pretty disjointed and like the different parts of the book won’t connect together properly because it’s not like the AI has any idea is one big project.

Like, that’s the thing. Why should I read a book of philosophy when the person who wrote it used an AI that heavily? I have no guarantee whatsoever that I’m actually getting your thoughts on the topic, and I have no reason to pick your book over the books of everyone else who is doing the same thing. How one engages with philosophy and the history of it is intensely personal and it’s one of those fields where even ghostwriting garbles up the point of it because then I’m just getting what the ghostwriter thinks for most of it and not the quote unquote “author”.

Edited by Zendervai on Dec 13th 2023 at 11:12:14 AM

I agree with that. Humans have life experiences and thoughts. AI can never have those by definition.

The current AI, yes. "AI of any stripe can never have thoughts and experiences" is a whole different kettle of fish.

Yeah, my point is more that I don’t understand the point of a book of philosophy if it’s being written in large part by a computer program doing a lot of paraphrasing.

If an AI can write a book of philosophy entirely on its own, I’d be interested in reading that, but if it’s like “hey, this is my book of philosophy, I basically had something else write it for me”, that’s not interesting.

I don't believe the selling point of DeMarquis' book is that ChatGPT was used, only that DeMarquis used ChatGPT as a means to speed up the writing/editing process which conveys his points.

But the use of Chat GPT makes it a harder pitch for me to be willing to read it, specifically because of the field it’s supposed to be in.

Using chatbots like that causes some pretty distinct weak points (such as losing the voice of the original author and different sections not connecting together) which is a huge problem for something as personal as philosophy.

Edited by Zendervai on Dec 13th 2023 at 11:44:22 AM

Are we uhm, actually sure that Demarq is writing a book on philosophy ?

He said in the philosophy thread that he is writing a book about “the intersection of philosophy, psychology and politics, starting with Descartes and ending with polarization.”

Ah, now I remember that.

Not to make this too personal, but while I can get using an AI like chatgpt for meaningless busywork and fluff for work or something like that (though it begs the question of why we even have those types of tasks as necessary if theyre so meaningless that an AI output is acceptable, but i digress), using it for anything actually creative or personal like writing your book seems ill-advised at best.

Not only does that mean its most likely going to be uninteresting, but at best it means you're just being an editor for an AI and its not really your book anymore. Moreover, what separates a book like that from all the other AI generated books that are flooding amazon right now (to the point they instituted a completely meaningless submission cap to try and stimy it)?

Edited by Draghinazzo on Dec 13th 2023 at 2:10:51 PM

The research Demarq puts in it ?

Well, on things like Copilot, because the important part of coding is the business logic and the problem solving you're doing, not so much the minutiae of code itself. That's why libraries are so common, after all, and why things like Lombok (a Java library that lets you just slap on a few lines of annotations and generates aaaaaall the necessary boilerplate for you) exist.

The AI is kinda the same—why have a developer spend ten minutes writing out every test case if an AI can infer from what's already there and the test name what to do? Turns it into a minute or two of proofreading and making small changes.

I think Drag was talking more about stuff like fluff emails to check in that have no substance which people have suggested could be done by AI. Except you don’t need to do that at all.

Not so much things where you can actually explain why they matter in the first place.

My question is much more direct, in the current state why would I ever read a book that made substantial use of AI writing...

When I can just go directly to the source and ask Gemini to GPT-4 to tell me a story about what I want to read about directly.

Not that I have much intrest in getting them to make a story for me to read right now as is, but the point stands...

I can just skip the middleman and go to the source instead.

Maybe, but I was focused more on the "AI output is acceptable" part.

Yeah, this is the biggest thing about AI written or heavily AI assisted books.

There's literally no reason or incentive to spend money on them. You can get something just as good by just using the same AI generator with a similar prompt. The scarcity with novels and the reason people buy them is because if you want to read a Xiran Jay Zhao book, you have to read a Xiran Jay Zhao book. An AI facsimile is going to not have the draw that reading the original books would. Why would I want to read "Steel Dowager" when Iron Widow is right there? I don't want to read something that's similar but worse and that has very little personality in the writing, I want to read the actual sequel because I want to know that Xiran Jay Zhao wants to say next, not what some AI thinks makes grammatical sense as coming next.

The other element of scarcity is that writing a book is time consuming and takes a lot of work, so not everyone can or wants to do that.

So combine the draw of specific authors with how you can just use an AI to replicate something and how AI writing isn't copyright protected, you end up with...literally no demand for buying AI generated books. Like, there's no way around it. The supply will massively outstrip the demand to the point that most people will probably stop bothering with AI books since...even that small amount of effort is a huge waste of time if there's never any return on it.

It's been suggested that there'll be a big market for AI books, but that's just the worst of supply side economics thinking. Just because a product exists doesn't mean a market exists for the product and when you can choose between "buy a dozen AI generated books for $5 a pop" and "pay $5 to access the AI that made the books for a month and you can generate 40 books", one of those is going to be way more popular than the other.

Edited by Zendervai on Dec 13th 2023 at 2:46:32 PM

I am going to go a step further, and argue that at least personally, even if I was dealing with an AI that could write just as good as a person, that had the full set of human experiences... I would rather just interact with the AI itself...

Part of what makes a book work, is that there is a scarcity to the original person... I cant just.... you know go interact with them, I cant get them to tell me personaly a story.... the book is how we overcome that scarcity, how we spread the existance of that person and there ideas around to a greater audiance.

An AI is not really fundamentally bound by this limitation, even if its sentient, there is no reason that it couldn't hold interaction with way more people at once then a human ever could.... and like....

At least personaly in that case even if I was wanting to engage in fiction, I would be more interested in roleplaying with it.... If it was philosphy, I would rather ask it my personal nagging questions.... and so on... rather then just read a static unchanging work.

I hope this makes sense....

I also know that it may not be a majority oppinion, but like its my personal thoughts on the mater....

Edited by Imca on Dec 14th 2023 at 4:58:13 AM