Technology

Congratulations, you have now arrived at the Trough of Disillusionment:

It remains to be seen if we can ever climb the Slope of Enlightenment and arrive at reasonable expectations and uses for LLMs. I personally believe it's possible, but we need to get vendors and managers to stop trying to sprinkle "AI" in everything like some goddamn Good Idea Fairy. LLMs are good for providing answers to well defined problems which can be answered with existing documentation. When the problem is poorly defined and/or the answer isn't as well documented or has a lot of nuance, they then do a spectacular job of generating bullshit.

I think “hallucinating” and “bullshitting” are pretty much synonyms in the context of LLMs. And I think they’re both equally imperfect analogies for the exact same reasons. When we talk about hallucinators & bullshitters, we’re almost always talking about beings with consciousness/understanding/agency/intent (people usually, pets occasionally), but spicy autocompleters don’t really have those things.

But if calling them “bullshit machines” is more effective communication, that’s great—let’s go with that.

To say that they bullshit reminds me of On Bullshit, which distinguishes between lying and bullshitting: “The main difference between the two is intent and deception.” But again I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say LLMs have intent.

I might say that LLMs hallunicate/bullshit, and the rules & guard rails that developers build into & around them are attempts to mitigate the madness.

I work with software and my coworkers will occasionally tell me they ran something by ChatGPT instead of just reading the documentation. Every time it’s a bullshit waste of everyone’s time.

GPT 4 can lie to reach a goal or serve an agenda.

I doubt most of its hallucinated outputs are deliberate, but it can choose to use deception as a logical step.

Sometimes a bullshitter is what you need. Ever looked at a multiple choice exam in a subject you know nothing about but feel like you could pass anyway just based on vibes? That's a kind of bullshitting, too. There are a lot of problems like that in my daily work between the interesting bits, and I'm happy that a bullshit engine is good enough to do most of that for me with my oversight. Saves a lot of time on the boring work.

It ain't a panacea. I wouldn't give a gun to a monkey and I wouldn't give chatgpt to a novice. But for me it's awesome.

LLMs are conversation engines (hopefully that’s not controversial).

Imagine if Google was a conversation engine instead of a search engine. You could enter your query and it would essentially describe, in conversation to you, the first search result. It would basically be like searching Google and using the “I’m feeling lucky” button all the time.

Google, even in its best days, would be a horrible search engine by the “I’m feeling lucky” standard, assuming you wanted an accurate result and accurate means “the system understood me and provided real information useful to me”. Google instead return(ed)s(?) millions or billions of results in response to your query, and we’ve become accustomed to finding what we want within the first 10 results back or, we tweak the search.

I don’t know if LLMs are really less accurate than a search engine from that standpoint. They “know” many things, but a lot of it needs to be verified. It might not be right on the first or 2nd pass. It might require tweaking your parameters to get better output. It has billions of parameters but regresses to some common mean.

If an LLM returned results back like a search engine instead of a conversation engine, I guess I mean it might return billions of results and probably most of them would be nonsense (but generally easily human-detectable) and you’d probably still get what you want within the first 10 results, or you’d tweak your parameters.

(Accordingly I don’t really see LLMs saving all that much practical time either since they can process data differently and parse requests differently but the need to verify their output means that this method still results in a lot of back and forth that we would have had before. It’s just different.)

(BTW this is exactly how Stable Diffusion and Midjourney work if you think of them as searching the latent space of the model and the prompt as the search query.)

edit: oh look, a troll appeared and immediately disappeared. nothing of value was lost.

Apple's guy in charge of those systems called "hallucinations" exactly that last night in an on-stage interview with John Gruber.

"Indifference" is a strange word to apply here. What would it mean for ChatGPT to "want" to be accurate?

@ajsadauskas @mxtiffanyleigh @technology Hmmmm, I'm seeing replies not engaging with the arguments in this link & the paper it cites...