[throwaway99111]

>My fear for improving AI has nothing to do with malicious AI or humans being optimized away, it's something that might be possible today, and if not, then probably tomorrow or whenever everyone gets to use GPT4: using these programs to generate highly effective propaganda, and propaganda distribution strategies, to convince people that the accumulation of power is good, or at least, to tell people whatever it is they need to be told to optimize for those in power to stay and accumulate more power.

So, this is potentially a crackpot theory, but hear me out. I've noticed that a lot of the hype runners, posts claiming their businesses are optimizing this with chatgpt, or they've replaced most of their coding with chatgpt outputs have been generally accounts here that were created in 2021 or later. While before the last couple of months, you should generally assume good faith on HN and elsewhere, the fact is mass astroturfing now is very much possible on HN and elsewhere with chatGPT, and why wouldn't OpenAI want to hype their product and get as many users on board? They certainly could and would not be noticeable. You don't need nefarious political goals if you're just trying to sell something. You just need to create enough hype and illusion to grow your product. SV companies have done it before, and now it's automated, to a degree.

One explanation (beyond basic confirmation bias) is that a lot of people joined the crypto wave and knew the orange site was the place where tech people hung out, and a lot of those types ditched crypto and are riding the AI wave, but I really cannot be sure anymore.

[ChatGTP]

I kind of feel you, everything seems really hyped, more than it should be. I mean I still don't even have any idea what ChatGPTs actual use case is besides look super impressive. It seems like it can do a bunch of stuff, sometimes really well, other times spectacularly bad. It's not an a true AGI, but it's kind of marketed like one.

I think we're all completely baffled by it? I mean the thing can talk right? So we're all fired?

[suslik]

I tried GPT4 yesterday to write a relatively small python ML/data analysis CLI tool. It makes the development much faster, sure, very impressive, yes - but it makes dumb mistakes as well (such as writing True where it should be False etc). The tricky bits I had to write myself. The code it generates is suboptimal - the quality really feels like a representation of an average github profile.

It is really nice to let it write down all the boilerplate, I was more productive than ever, but,at least in this iteration, I doubt it will take our jobs away. So yeah, the hype is somewhat overrated.

[JonChesterfield]

Boilerplate is a pretty good approximation of the noise in the signal to noise sense. It reminds me of a demo where eclipse would write some tens of lines of java and then fold them away so you don't have to look at them.

If the effect of this tech is largely to generate language cruft that didn't strictly need to exist in the first place it'll do wonders for people's tolerance of said cruft.

Moderately interesting from a language design perspective.

[komali2]

As per usual everyone else keeps coming up with the ideas that when I hear, I think, "damn, seems obvious, wish I had thought of that." Sometimes it's because it's a good idea, sometimes because it's an idea that will probably get funding, which makes it a good idea :P

Examples:

1. Ingesting a shitload of unread emails after you come back from vacation, then telling you briefly what important things you missed

2. The same idea but for slack

3. Ingesting request-for-cost response emails from various suppliers and outputting the data in a machine-readable way so it can be easily ingested by another API

4. Generating "individual" lesson plans based on student needs (I've heard 5 different pitches around this, majority for language learning)

5. student tutor chatbot

There's some other ideas that were too stupid (or more probably, too innovative for dumb old me to comprehend) to remember.

At the very least it has people thinking and being imaginative, which I think is pretty cool. I like getting into political debates with the thing.

[ChatGTP]

To be honest, at least for 1 and 2, they seem like issues that shouldn't be happening, you're working at a place that spends too much time on slack and too much time on email (I guess? I don't have this problem), so rather than maybe have that addressed, which is what we did where I work, we'll just continue bad habits because of the bot?

3. Ingesting request-for-cost response emails from various suppliers and outputting the data in a machine-readable way so it can be easily ingested by another API

Interesting, what do you work on? I've heard of such wizardy.

Using it for teaching and lesson planning? Really ? I mean I know it might be considered mostly right but I'm not sure if I'd be using it unless I had a very good grasp on the subject matter, is this a good thing for students to be using ?

Not trying to tell you it's not worth using, but it seems funny to have a model trained and running that's cost billions of dollars to be used for a lot of random tasks. It is literally a really expensive Clippy?

[komali2]

> is this a good thing for students to be using ?

Absolutely not without a teacher there anyway, which basically defeats the purpose.

For older students, I think it's a relatively nice alternative to Wikipedia. I asked it some complicated questions about some obscure bits of political theory and it put me onto some authors that were I not already such a freak, I probably wouldn't have known.

> Interesting, what do you work on? I've heard of such wizardy.

This wasn't really a product, just someone at a hardware startup I was doing some work for improving their workflow. It's not really a good long term solution I think, each supplier has a relatively standard format, so eventually you just tweak your API intake to handle the various formats. I actually never looked at the intake code, maybe it just grabs by keywords, who knows, point is, overkill to bring in chat GPT. Probably quite tedious to manage the emails, it sounded like a one off experiment to avoid the boredom of tweaking email greppers. Chat GPT was 100% accurate in transforming the data though, over probably a set of less than 100 emails.

> It is literally a really expensive Clippy?

I mean we probably won't hear about the really good ideas until those ideas hit funding rounds, right? I'm always careful to be arrogant about this kind of things because I don't want a famous dropbox comment attributed to my name, lol.

[ChatGTP]

All good points, cheers for the discussion.

[biztos]

> a place that spends too much time on slack and too much time on email

That describes most large companies.

While I agree it’s an obvious use case, the first startup to reliably extract the signal from the noise of daily communication at big organizations will make huge piles of money.

And whoever can do the same for Europeans while pretending to comply with GDPR, and probably a bunch of other related smaller markets. China without accidentally mentioning 1989 or cartoon bears. And so on.