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by adamsmith143 1301 days ago
>Computers can confabulate at full speed for gigabytes at a time.

This I think is the actual problem. Online forums will likely be filled with AI generated BS in the very near future, if not already.

>"The statistically-most likely conclusion of this sentence" isn't even a poor approximation of truth... it's just plain unrelated. That is not what truth is. At least not with any currently even remotely feasible definition of "statistically most likely" converted into math sufficient to be implementable.

It's not necessarily clear that this isn't what Humans are doing when answering factual questions.

>And I don't even mean "truth" from a metaphysical point of view; I mean it in a more engineering sense. I wouldn't set one of these up to do my customer support either. AI Dungeon is about the epitome of the technology, in my opinion, and generalized entertainment from playing with a good text mangler. It really isn't good for much else.

By the same logic how can we allow Humans to do those jobs either? How many times has some distant call center person told you "No sir there is definitely no way to fix this problem" when there definitely was and the person was just ignorant or wrong? We should be more concerned with getting the error rate of these AI systems to human level or better, which they already are in several other domains so it's not clear they won't get to that level soon.

1 comments

"By the same logic how can we allow Humans to do those jobs either?"

First, since you can't see tone, let me acknowledge this is a fair question, and this answer is in the spirit of exploration and not "you should have known this" or anything like that.

The answer is a spin on what I said in my first post. Human failures have a shape to them. You cite an example that is certainly common, and you and I know what it means. Or at least, what it probabilistically means. It is unfortunate if someone with lesser understanding calls in and gets that answer, but at least they can learn.

If there were a perfect support system, that would be preferable, but for now, this is as good as it gets.

A computer system will spin a much wider variety of confabulated garbage, and it is much harder to tell the difference between GPT text that is correct, GPT text that is almost correct but contains subtle errors, and GPT text that sounds very convincing but is totally wrong. The problem isn't that humans are always right and computers are always wrong; the problem is that the bar for being able to tell if the answer is correct is quite significantly raised for me as someone calling in for GPT-based technologies.