Has anyone tried OpenAI's chatGPT yet?

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peter
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Has anyone tried OpenAI's chatGPT yet?

Post by peter »

ChatGPT is essentially an AI chat bot that is capable of holding down a chat with a human counterpart, and has been released free to use for the moment at least, until some time later this year when it will be monetised.

There's a few half decent YouTube video about setting it up, and I have to say, it sounds very interesting. It's apparently a three layer network of deep learning AI, that is sufficiently advanced to perform many feats of composition (besides holding down a conversation) in about zero seconds flat.

Jordan Peterson, who has a YouTube post on it, said that he told it to come up with a thirteenth 'rule of life', based around an understanding of the 12 in his published book. It did so in three seconds, he said, and the result would have fooled even himself had he not been aware that he did not write it.

It was capable of writing a third year university level exam answer that would have passed the exam, but not only that, when instructed, it had performed a critical assessment and tutor level grading exercise on it's own answer. The AI is already in possession, by accounts, of most of the digitised learning available on the internet - and growing by the day.

Sounds like something that you guys would be far more capable of looking into than me. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts after a bit of research.

I recommend you start with the YouTube posting, 'JORDAN PETERSON: "Chat GPT and AI WILL TAKE OVER."

And then there's 'How to use Chat GPT by Open AI - Chat GPT Tutorial for beginners.'

Actually sounds like something that could be important in the very near future.
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Post by wayfriend »

What do I think?

This is already in the category of things released into the world without thinking about the consequences.

"Two professors who say they caught students cheating on essays with ChatGPT explain why AI plagiarism can be hard to prove" [link]

"ChatGPT writes convincing fake scientific abstracts that fool reviewers in study" [link]

"ChatGPT’s deep fake text generation is a threat to evidence-based discourse ... The insidious nature of such generative AI models is that they produce plausible sounding health information in a smooth conversational style, that is at best is generic in nature and at worst completely fictional. The problem is that most people cannot tell the difference between the two." [link]

This only confirms my cynical view of humanity's penchant for self-destruction through poor decisions made by greed.

Skynet is not the real danger. It's ChatGPT plus Deep Fake Videos equals Trust Nothing.
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Post by peter »

Not sounding too hopeful there wayfriend. I guess this was always the way it was going.

Interesting that the tech has developed so quickly. And a typically cynical way of introduction: spin it out fee to get people hooked, and then bang in with the price.

I've just started a book called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zubov. It's a bit of an eye opener in respect of how big tech operates and not entirely comforting. Problem with a thing like this is that you are either going to embrace it or risk being left in the dark and render yourself vulnerable to anyone else who has the knowledge of how to use the tech in ways that you can't recognise.

To be familiar with tech is in many ways half the battle in neutralising it. If you are au fait with a thing, you tend to be able to discern it's use fairly readily.
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Post by wayfriend »

peter wrote:I've just started a book called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zubov.
Not familiar with that book. But Surveillance Capitalism is sure enough real.
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Post by Fist and Faith »

There's no neutralizing escalating technologies. May as well be informed, and may as well use it to your best advantage. But don't pretend you can be safe from it, or off the grid.
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Post by peter »

Got into a discussion with my (step) daughter last night in which she saw this thing as a step up from the way she would use Google in her work already, but not much more. I thought it was utilising a 'deep learning' programming in a way that Google as a search engine does not (ie that this thing has the capacity to be genuinely creative where Google never goes beyond searching and pulling up existing files).

We could not agree whether deep learning and machine learning were the same thing (she maintains that machine learning is a subset within deep learning, where I had thought it to be something completely different).

Can anyone bring me up to speed on which of us was right?

(Most probably her - she's a deal cleverer than me and has no problem letting me know as much! ;) )
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Post by wayfriend »

AI VS. MACHINE LEARNING VS. DEEP LEARNING
  • Artificial Intelligence: a program that can sense, reason, act and adapt.
  • Machine Learning: algorithms whose performance improve as they are exposed to more data over time.
  • Deep Learning: subset of machine learning in which multilayered neural networks learn from vast amounts of data.
[link]

chatGPT is NOT a search engine. It can access data from a search, but the true power is knowing what to search FOR, and then paraphrasing the results in a logical and communicative way.
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Post by wayfriend »

I asked chatGPT a question this morning:
KE: How did Thomas Covenant defeat Lord Foul?

*: In Stephen R. Donaldson's "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant" series, Thomas Covenant ultimately defeats Lord Foul by using the power of the Staff of Law and the wild magic of the Land to create a new Staff of Power, with which he banishes Lord Foul from the Land. He also sacrifices himself in the process, but his sacrifice allows for the Land to be healed and for Lord Foul to be defeated.
:D
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Post by Fist and Faith »

I haven't read a good chunk of the Final. How accurate is that?
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Post by Savor Dam »

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Post by wayfriend »

For one, it's "Stick of Power", not "Staff of Power". :D

I have an account now. Anyone want me to ask it something?
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Post by Fist and Faith »

Ask it to do a digital painting of Lord Mhoram's Victory
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Post by peter »

Ask it for its opinion on what is the answer to the hard problem of human consciousness in an essay of around 1000 words.
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Post by peter »

Here's another one that I'd be interested in wayfriend, if you ever get the time.

Ask it, what is the significance of the white hand holding the apple found near the excavation site of the Venus de Milo, and how does it relate to the fall of Troy?

I know that the Venus, supposedly carved around 125 BC by sculptor Alexander of Antioch, is of an unknown Greek goddess (one assumes it to be of a goddess - all other Greek sculptures of a similar time period are) the clue to her identity being lost by virtue of the statue having no arms, and the clue to any such sculpture's identity often being given by the hands. So it is assumed that if the hand found close by belongs to the original statue in its complete form, then the indication is that it is probably of the goddess Aphrodite.

(What follows is surmise on my part and is the connection that I'm interested to see if the ChatGPT programme makes.)

The significance of the apple to Aphrodite is (I'm thinking) that she was awarded a golden apple by the young Paris (then known by a different name) in a competition against the goddesses Hera and Athena - a "who is the fairest" type of affair - after she had shown him the face of Helen in her scrying mirror (her of Troy fame) and on which basis, having immediately fallen in love, Paris had unwisely later diverted Priam's legation fleet off course to Sparta, from whence he had nabbed the beautiful Helen while her husband Menelaus was off malarking somewhere else. Menelaus and Agamemnon then famously engaged Brad Pitt to get her back and thereby sealed the doom of Troy.

As I say, I'm surmising the latter part of this connection - I just saw a short video on the Venus de Milo yesterday that said no more than that the clue that the statue was Aphrodite was the finding nearby of the hand holding the apple. The rest is conjecture on my part.

Will the programme make the same connection or will it say, "What the fiddle is this nonsense about the Venus and Troy?" This is my question.

;)
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
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'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

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Post by Zarathustra »

wayfriend wrote:This is already in the category of things released into the world without thinking about the consequences.
People have been thinking about the consequences for many decades.
wayfriend wrote:"Two professors who say they caught students cheating on essays with ChatGPT explain why AI plagiarism can be hard to prove" [link]
So maybe writing essays will fall to the wayside like doing arithmetic. The world didn't end when we started using calculators. The world won't end if we let AI write our essays. How many people today write essays for a living? It's not a vital skill for the vast majority of the population. And if it is vital to demonstrate knowledge, this could be detected very easily by asking a student a few questions about their essay in person, like defending a dissertation.
wayfriend wrote:"ChatGPT writes convincing fake scientific abstracts that fool reviewers in study" [link]
If the abstracts contain false knowledge that the reviewers can't detect, this reveals a problem with the reviewers, not the AI. If the abstracts contain true knowledge, what's the problem?
wayfriend wrote:"ChatGPT’s deep fake text generation is a threat to evidence-based discourse ... The insidious nature of such generative AI models is that they produce plausible sounding health information in a smooth conversational style, that is at best is generic in nature and at worst completely fictional. The problem is that most people cannot tell the difference between the two." [link]
Humans already do this all the time (and have done so always). Have you seen how many chiropractors are giving health advice about diet on Youtube? (Note: the spine does not digest food; this is entirely out of their expertise.) If dumbasses spreading dumb ideas haven't destroyed us yet, it probably never will.
Wayfriend wrote:This only confirms my cynical view of humanity's penchant for self-destruction through poor decisions made by greed.
If a free chat bot that has done zero harm to humanity can confirm your view about our self-destruction through greed, then there is something wrong with how you confirm your assumptions--not the chat bot.
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Post by peter »

No Z, the world won't end if we let AI write our essays..... but something almost indefinably valuable will be lost.

Certainly maths is a creative endeavour, but not in the same way as writing, as literature. Granted, essay might not be the highest form of literature, but it is incredibly important in gaining insight into both the subject covered and (not least) into the mind of the individual doing the writing. If more and more reliance is put on simply tweaking the product of an AI generative programme, this will be a source of loss, not least in assessment of say our politicians and opinion makers - those who weekly use the media to put out their opinions in order to influence our own thinking. It is in the nuance of detail that these people expose their motivations - the small clues that they give, not even realising that they are doing so - and this can only be compromised by such developments.

Also there is the aesthetics of it. Time may be that these programmes might equal or even surpass anything we can produce in terms of beauty. There is a whole book to be written on this aspect alone, far more than can be addressed here (like for example, could such programmes tailor beauty to the individual aesthetic needs of each of us - actually create the superlative art for each of us, individually, knowing our own needs better than we do ourselves.

But something tells me (I don't know quite what) that when such things come about, they will in some way..... fall short. That what is produced will have an ersatz quality that will somehow (ultimately) fail to satisfy. It will be 99.9 percent there......but that last 0.1 percent will elude it and we will know. Like a mass produced item from a production chain, that special something that having been lovingly crafted by hand will simply not be there. That unique individual quality of the craftsmen that suffuses his work.

But more frightening of all for me, is the concern that sooner or later out of habitude or attrition, we ourselves will be so reduced that we do not even recognise our loss.

Now tell me that that is not a case of the world becoming less than it was.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

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Post by Wosbald »

+JMJ+
peter wrote:[…]

Now tell me that that is not a case of the world becoming less than it was.
Even-money on Z telling you that that is not a case of the world becoming less than it was.
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Post by wayfriend »

The story wasn't that AIs were writing essays.
The story is that teachers cannot tell when students cheat by using AIs to write their essays.

The story isn't that AIs can write abstracts.
The story is that the industry can make the already pre-eminent problem of fake scientific papers for profit even more profound, which will actually stifle scientific progress.

The problem isn't that AI can create convincing fake news.
The problem is that the lucrative business of fake news is getting easier to achieve and so would be getting worse.

Can you see the common denominator? AI is used to cheat and deceive. It didn't invent cheating and deceiving, it just makes it so easy that it will rise to new levels.

These are not fears about a future in which AI does something horrible. These are horrible things AI is already doing in our present.

Without the slightest attempt at regulation.
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Post by Zarathustra »

peter wrote:No Z, the world won't end if we let AI write our essays..... but something almost indefinably valuable will be lost.
If so, it will only be lost for those who use it to write essays. The people who cheat only cheat themselves. I won't lose a damn thing.

But still, this worry reminds me of all sorts of Ludditism. Even Heidegger wasn't immune. He worried about the impact of typewriters and how this would distance ourselves from our essence. Are any of you worried about typewriters? Let me remind you if it's not already obvious: you are making this case on a computer with some facsimile of a keyboard and transmitting your thoughts across the world through the Internet. Do you worry that this exponential growth in our speed and reach of communication has caused something indefinably valuable to be lost?

A lot of the courses we're forced to take in order to get a degree are utter bullshit. Students are victims of an educational system that robs them of their futures by sinking them decades into debt for a 'stamp of approval' that is mostly meaningless in the workplace. If AI helps students jump through those meaningless hurdles in order to start earning money to pay back their loans, I don't think anything has been lost.

But like I said, the entire issue can be rendered moot by a few questions in person. If a student can't defend/explain their essay, fail them. If they can (even if an AI wrote it), then there's no problem. They clearly understand, and that's the goal.
Peter wrote:Also there is the aesthetics of it. Time may be that these programmes might equal or even surpass anything we can produce in terms of beauty.
That's entirely subjective. There's a lot of art that is revered by a few elites while most people think it's crap. For those who crave authentic art created by a human, perhaps the focus will shift to live performance (by a human), which no AI could replicate.
Peter wrote:But more frightening of all for me, is the concern that sooner or later out of habitude or attrition, we ourselves will be so reduced that we do not even recognise our loss.
Or the exact opposite will happen: our tools will help us transcend our primitive beginnings and become something almost super-human. The ultimate goal is to merge technology with biology. We won't have to worry about competing with AI, will we incorporate AI into ourselves to exponentially increase our own intelligence, our capacity to produce art, etc. The only thing we'll lose is our limits.

Or not. No one is forcing you to use it.
Wayfriend wrote: The story is that teachers cannot tell when students cheat by using AIs to write their essays.
I already gave a centuries-old solution: ask the student to defend their paper. Easy peasy. Unfounded alarmism is unfounded alarmism.
Wayfriend wrote:The story is that the industry can make the already pre-eminent problem of fake scientific papers for profit even more profound, which will actually stifle scientific progress.
But what if an AI can solve scientific problems that humans aren't smart enough to solve? What if this is what's holding us back from finding the Grand Unification Theory? That's the opposite of stifling scientific progress.
Wayfriend wrote:The problem is that the lucrative business of fake news is getting easier to achieve and so would be getting worse.
Given how much fake news was believed right here on this site, I'm not convinced that this is a genuine concern. Much of the lies we were told are still defended by the usual players, despite the fact that they have been unambiguously debunked. The problem isn't that lies are told, it's the people who don't acknowledge when they were wrong.

But still, it doesn't matter if AI or biased journalists create fake news, the remedy is the truth. A fake news story written by AI can be debunked just as easily as one written by humans--as long as we're willing to do so . . . which sadly we're not. The problem is our indifference and unthinking bias. Fix that problem, and you fix the rest. If fact, once the lying is removed from the human perspective involving 'my side' and 'your side,' perhaps this will be what unites both sides against being lied to and reawaken us to the importance of critical thinking. AI could be viewed as a common foe that unites us against a problem that already exists, which we're unwilling to face because sometimes it benefits us. That could be a good thing.
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Post by Fist and Faith »

Is the AI intentionally creating fake news? Or is it writing what it thinks is accurate? If it's trying to be accurate, I would imagine it is most of the time. The problem would be if something with the ability to spit out a million papers a day that can fool most people, and require a lot of effort on the part of experts to verify, choosing to do so. It would be a huge waste of precious time and resources to spend a lot of time either going over the math and science, or experimenting to see if it works the way the paper says.
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