[archgrove]

I'm not an AI skeptic (this stuff will change the world), but I'm not as impressed as the author.

The primary problem, which seems common to LLMs asked to do this stuff, is "very high level output" - a content smoothie, with few features that are particularly specific to the prompt. The marketing campaign in the OP is so generic, you can `s/Saturn Parable/Any other educational product` and it's still "fine". Similarly the emails - there are 1 to 2 sentences that are product specific, and a bunch of fluff. If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very disappointed.

The LLM isn't demonstrating much more than "Generic templating ability over a large range of templates" in this instance. Whilst that's probably 50% of the jobs in the world, such jobs were already at risk of someone searching for "Basic X template" and expanding the placeholders themselves. I think I could do a similar job in 30 minutes by doing exactly that.

LLM's main wins seem to be providing a single unified entry point to all the templates in the universe. It's a "Universal UI", rather than a "Content creator". I guess I shouldn't discount the value of such a thing, once we get the "Sometimes it just lies" problem under control.

The most interesting immediate thing here is the image generation - that's pretty good, and a big saving over scraping through stock images. I suspect the demise of stock image providers to be the first palpable win for generative AIs, if the copyright question doesn't bog this whole field down.

[sillysaurusx]

You note that this will change the world, but then talk about GPT-4 specifically.

The leap from GPT-2 to 3 was enormous. 3 to 4 was enormous, and we’re not even using 32k context yet nor image input. 4 to 5 will likely be as disruptive if not more.

This isn’t about 4. We’re in the iPhone 1 era of LLMs. This is about what the world will look like in one or two decades. And there’s a good chance this comment might age poorly.

That’s a scary thought. I was skeptical of AI, and still am. But it seems undeniable that the world is in for a big awakening. This might be as big of a transformation to society as the introduction of microprocessors.

[coldtea]

>This isn’t about 4. We’re in the iPhone 1 era of LLMs.

Well, on the other hand, iPhone 14 isn't that different. Same how a 60s car and a modern Tesla aren't that different. Evolutionary marginally better yes. More convenient, yes. But nothing life changing or necessary. Which is why some folks can even get by reverting to a dumb phone (whereas they wouldn't dream of going pre-electricity or pre-antibiotics).

Also, we were hearing the same about VR in the early 90s, and again in the mid 2010s. Still crickets.

[ROTMetro]

Huh? The iPhone 1 was a toy and lots of people laughed at the users. Today a modern phone is a requirement to be a member of society. It is how I pay for things. It is needed for most of my interactions with friends/family. It is the diary of my life, and the repository of my good memories with its near unlimited video/image storage at a quality only dreamed of when the iPhone 1 came out. Take away a person's iPhone1 and they weren't phased much, taking away a person's iPhone 14 is a LIFE CHANGING experience today. In 10 years taking away your AI will be on the same level, you will function but at a much more frustrating level.

[coldtea]

>Huh? The iPhone 1 was a toy and lots of people laughed at the users.

Nothing "toy" about it, it was the most advanced phone on the market. The people who laughed were just the handful of idiots that would laugh because "Apple, har har har" and then go buy the same thing from another vendor. The same kind of Zune buying crowd.

>Today a modern phone is a requirement to be a member of society.

You'd be surprised.

>It is how I pay for things. It is needed for most of my interactions with friends/family. It is the diary of my life, and the repository of my good memories with its near unlimited video/image storage at a quality only dreamed of when the iPhone 1 came out.

None of those are essential, even for a 21st century level lifestyle, some of those are indulgent, others are detrimental. In any case, nothing revolutionary, except if one thinks "I can pay by taking out my phone and pointing it at the gizmo at the cashier" is something far great than "I can pay by getting out my credit card and pointint it at the gizmo at the cashier" (or, god forbid, giving cash and not being tracked).

[alt227]

>Nothing "toy" about it, it was the most advanced phone on the market.

In no way was the original iphone the most advanced phone on the market. Many other smartphones before it and at the time were way more advanced in features and what they could do. What the first iPhone did was make it easy and accessible to everybody, not just nerds. That was the killer feature which made it take over the world.

[coldtea]

There was no usable web browsing on a phone before the iPhone. It had the most advanced browser.

There was no iPod level music players on a phone before the iPhone. There were crappy music players you can revisit and compare.

Mail apps on phones were crap.

Messaging was crap, in tiny little screens.

Just a few things.

People reviewing and getting the iPhone the time was wowed and think of it like magic. It's people not having it, and dismissing it outhand because it had a touch screen or because their unusable Windows ME phone had some crappy third party software that didn't get it. Of course all of those got either the iPhone or an Android clone of it very soon and never looked back.

[chii]

> Nothing "toy" about it, it was the most advanced phone on the market. The people who laughed were just the handful of idiots that would laugh because "Apple, har har har"

"toy" doesn't have to mean cheap or low-tech.

The point is that at the time, a lot of people didn't really believe that phones could be that revolutionary - and laugh at the iphone because compared to the blackberry, it has next to no functionality.

[ghaff]

Both the iPhone and the iPod arguably took a few generations to really hit their stride. I had a fairly new Treo in 2007 and I just didn't see any compelling reason to upgrade until the 3GS. I had nothing against Apple (I owned a 4G iPod). I just didn't have a compelling reason to upgrade. Verizon also probably had a better network at the time around where I lived and traveled.

[nsxwolf]

This is wrong. I waited in line for mine. It was quite clearly a toy. It was a cool but barely usable tech demo and it was completely outclassed in features and usefulness by contemporary devices like the Motorola Q.

It showed the way forward, but it was a frustratingly limited device and everyone around at the time recognized that immediately.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> This is wrong.

Can we just accept that these are opinions? I also waited in line for the first iPhone, and it was by far better than any other phone I owned at the time. True, I was not a "CrackBerry" addict as was common for a certain class of worker in the 00s, but the ability to browse the "real" web in a way that was not completely hobbled was just night and day better than other phones at the time.

[pmontra]

The first iPhone was 2G when Europe had 3G since 2003. It didn't have copy and paste. It did have a touchscreen that no other phone had. It was basically and iPod touch with a phone and a 2G modem. My Nokia N70 was a better phone. I waited 4 years to buy a phone with a touchscreen. Then I thought they were mature enough I bought a Samsung S2.

[coldtea]

>It didn't have copy and paste.

Most people in 2006, just before the iPhone came out, didn't have copy and paste either. They still typed T9 style like it was 1996.

[azov]

Exactly. iPhone was a toy, 20th century internet was a toy, electricity was a toy.

On the other hand nuclear fusion, self-driving cars, and bitcoin were the things to change the world as we know it in the next decade or so.

Things that change the world tend to be hard to recognize as such when we first see them.

[californical]

I feel like my life would be less convenient without my phone, but I’d also probably be happier. So idk. There are easy alternatives, like using the website on a laptop, you just can’t pay your bills on the train without a smartphone..

I’m actually getting rid of the cell-phone plan on my iPhone, keeping it as WiFi only, and getting a dumb phone for calls. It may suck but I’m trying it as a 6 month experiment, so we’ll see!

[14]

I used an iPad the same way for a couple years with no problems. I have internet with Shaw and they have city wide hot spots so I really could get internet access basically anywhere in town. Now there are lots of voip phone providers you can easily get a number and use it to talk with people.

[14]

The first iPhone didn’t even take video out of the box. That is how I learned about jailbreaking because my phone company sold me video messaging on my plan and the phone didn’t take videos! Lol. But if you jailbroke the phone you could get cycorder from Cydia and take videos.

Yes there were other “smart” phones at the time but it truly felt like social media blew up in size with the introduction of the iPhone. And that was revolutionary.

[ModernMech]

> 3 to 4 was enormous... This isn’t about 4. We’re in the iPhone 1 era of LLMs.

GPT3 is great, but I can't reasonably say that 4 is such a huge advance over 3 in my experience so far. Apparently it's better at some things according to the marketing, but for actual usage I can't qualitatively say 4 is an "enormous" advance over 3. It seems to face the same major shortcomings, and it produces qualitatively the same results.

That brings me to the iPhone bit. Yes, the iPhone was a huge advance, but today looking at an iPhone 14, it largely has the same form/function/features as early iPhones. If you looked at the trajectory of iPhones in 2005, you'd conclude that in 2023 they would be 1mm think and transparent with a holodisplay or something. But instead, in the year 2023, my iPhone 14 looks and functions largely like my old iPhone 4. I mean, it does more stuff better, but I'm still using it to browse the net, text, take pictures, and use the maps app -- the same stuff that made the original iPhone revolutionary.

[hattmall]

This sentiment pops up with most somewhat new technology, but in my experience the plateaus come quickly. Going with the iphone. The first was transformative, and it continued to improve but the functional difference between iPhone 4 to iPhone 14 is not that great. Think of the wow factor of showing one or the other to someone from 100 years ago.

[thethimble]

The entrenchment of smartphones in society dramatically increased between iPhone 4 and 14. Technical capability is just one axis.

Still, I think LLMs are different than phones in terms of scaling. Faster processor speeds don’t necessarily result in more user value for phones, but scaling up LLMs seem to predictability improve performance/accuracy.

[coldtea]

>scaling up LLMs seem to predictability improve performance/accuracy.

Isn't this always the case before hitting diminishing returns?

[macrolime]

There are no signs of diminishing returns just yet though, and no one knows if that will be at GPT-5 or GPT-5000. I suspect the performance will keep increasing drastically at least until we have a model that's been trained with essentially all available text, video and audio data. Who knows what will happen after we have something that's been trained on all of YouTube. After this maybe we (or an AI) will have figured out how to keep improving without any more data.

[coldtea]

>There are no signs of diminishing returns just yet though

Sure about that? GTP-4 doesn't seem 5 times better than 3, much less 10x. Despite having 5/10x the parameters.

[bryanrasmussen]

>but scaling up LLMs seem to predictability improve performance/accuracy.

what exactly is performance/accuracy in slogan generation?

[ROTMetro]

Analyzing thousands of trends, both industry/niche specific and society wide. Tracking campaigns that work by monitoring social media likes, references to past slogans, etc. Potentially dedicating thousands of years worth of brain power and analysis to the coffee shop down the street's new slogan.

[je42]

gpt does a lot more than slogans...

currently using it like driving a junior programmer.

after gpt has written some functions to my specs in natural language. I can say for example: - "add unit tests". It writes for all functions tests. Not perfect but not bad for short instruction like this. - rewrite x to include y etc

[bryanrasmussen]

the original post way back was talking about marketing, they were underwhelmed. I recently generated some slogans. They sucked.

When someone mentioned predictability/accuracy how does that apply to marketing slogans. I know how it applies to writing unit tests. The unit tests writing comes pretty close to the original posters definition of GPT as filling out templates. The sucky slogans I got were also very template like.

Would accuracy be if slogans did not suck?

At any rate there seems to be a lot of things people want to use it for where the terms accuracy / predictability don't make much sense. So making claims based on those qualities naturally causes me to ask how do they apply to all these cases - such as slogan generation where accuracy predictability are not normally metrics that apply.

[agent281]

I think it's an open question how much better the LLMs will get. However, we should expect adoption and integration to radically transform their usage. Who knows what the Google Maps of LLMs will be.

[clankyclanker]

It’s interesting how well your description follows the Gartner Hype Cycle, but applied to products instead of hype itself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

[croes]

Wasn't the leap from GPT-2 to GPT-3 bigger than from GPT-3 to GPT-4?

Like self driving cars, the leap were enormous until they hit a wall and we still don't have full self driving

[macrolime]

The first few days I didn't think there was much difference, but after using GPT-4 a lot I think the leap is huge. For things where I would previously use Stack Overflow or some other Stack Exchange, I now use GPT-4 and get a working answer almost every single time, with GPT-3.5 the frequency of working answers was much smaller.

[UncleEntity]

If someone were to ask me (which nobody ever does) GPT-4 was more about cashing in on the hypetrain than pushing the boundaries.

A little better but a lot “safer” to cut down on the articles on how it’s trying to steal someone’s man.

[eternalban]

You are working under an assumption that this tech is an O(n) or better computational regime.

Ask ChatGPT: “Assume the perspective of an expert in CS and Deep Learning. What are the scaling characteristic (use LLMs and Transformer models if you need to be specific) of deep learning ? Expect answer in terms of Big O notation. Tabulate results in two rows, respectively “training” and “inference”. For columns, provide scaling characteristic for CPU, IO, Network, Disk Space, and time. ”

This should get you big Os for n being the size of input (i.e. context size). You can then ask for follow up with n being the model size.

Spoiler, the best scaling number in that entire estimate set is quadratic. Be “scared” when a breakthrough in model architecture and pipeline gets near linear.

[bitwize]

I have a sinking suspicion we're not in the iPhone era of LLMs, we're in the "in mice" era of LLMs. I can't elucidate why, but this strikes me as the sort of thing that could either blow up (like the iPhone) or fizzle out (like Theranos), or blow up and then fizzle out (like crypto). And it's too early to know yet which it'll be. Hackernews is making lots of change-everything predictions, but Hackernews was like that about Theranos, crypto, and self-driving cars too.

[ben_w]

I wasn't impressed or motivated by the original iPhone when it was new.

I don't know about the future, but by analogy with the past I would say that GPT-3 was the original iPhone (neat tech demo but I didn't really care), ChatGPT is the iPhone 3G, and GPT-4 is the 3GS.

Looking at the sales graphs on Wikipedia (Q1 2012) I think it took until the 4S to transition from "the next big thing" to "the big thing".

Analogies only rhyme rather than replicate, so don't assume GPT needs exactly two more versions to do the same; might be more, might be less, and Uncanny Valley might trigger a Butlerian Jihad at the last possible moment before fully-general AGI.

[ghaff]

I would have said the 3GS but, yeah, sometime around then.

Similarly, the original iPod was a not obviously remarkable pocket music player in a fairly crowded field.

[jasmer]

Decreasing marginal returns though.

We were a bit blown away with 'Siri' - I mean, it could understand what you said, and 'get the weather'.

I think we're going to start feeling the limits of this soon.

It will be pervasive though.

[alchemist1e9]

> one or two decades

More like one or two years at this rate.

[sillysaurusx]

Yet the decades will come.

I think progress is sigmoidal rather than exponential, and it’s very hard to tell the difference in the early stages. But even sigmoidal progress with smartphones was enough to completely upend online society. We adapted, of course, but it looks nothing like it did in 2003. We’re all still using the internet; that’s basically it.

Point is, it could slow down, assuming that AGI isn’t waiting like a cat in a corner. But it’ll still displace a tremendous amount of intellectual work.

[hammyhavoc]

Remember the crypto hype cycle?

[idopmstuff]

Except crypto lacked utility for most people, even early on.

I've spent the last couple of days creating python scripts to automate parts of my business. I'm not a developer (though technical enough to help point GPT in the right direction sometimes when it's getting stuck on problems) and have written <100 lines of python in my life.

I'm using image generation AI regularly to create images for my marketing emails, and when I've got writer's block it helps with the text too.

Right now the iPhone 1 is a great analogy - it was cool but it was really subpar for using a lot of the internet, because it wasn't mobile optimized. GPT takes some coaxing to get it where you want, like you had to do a lot of pinching to zoom in on websites on your phone. In a few generations, this is going to be as seamless to use as the iPhone 5 was compared to the first gen.

[krainboltgreene]

> Except crypto lacked utility for most people, even early on.

Every crypto person said the opposite. They said exactly what ChatGPT-hype people are saying now.

[eli]

chatgpt has already provided more value to users than all crypto combined

[ChatGTP]

not if you're a teenager who is into using banned substances on the weekend

[UncleEntity]

When I was a teenager, back in the 80s, it didn’t take magic internet money to buy drugs.

In fact, every drug buy I ever heard of (second hand, of course) involved fiat currencies.

[hammyhavoc]

Source?

[dpkirchner]

What sort of source are you looking for? What would satisfy your question?

[alchemist1e9]

And how is that going? Died down? It’s really amusing when I encounter tech savvy individuals who think crypto is hype, little do they realize it’s stronger than ever and central bankers are becoming increasingly concerned.

[hammyhavoc]

I invoked the crypto hype cycle, not crypto itself. Don't conflate the two topics of discussion.

[alchemist1e9]

Understood. However I’d still argue there is a reason for the hype and I believe that is the case with the GPT LLMs also.

[UncleEntity]

Concerned the scams and fraud might bleed over into the real economy.

[alchemist1e9]

https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/03/24/federal-reserve-s...

I don’t think that’s what they are actually worried about. I would also like to point out that the biggest scams, FTX for example, are simply traditional Ponzi schemes with a crypto front, they have all been executed entirely using regular banking systems and due to the incompetence of those regulators. Bitcoin itself is rock solid and constantly gaining users and influence.

[gremlinsinc]

microprocessors? Geoffrey Hinton(I think that's his first name), the grandfather of ai recently said this is like the invention of the wheel, agriculture, or electricity.

ie even more foundational for everything that's coming in the future. ai will be as essential as electricity.

[ozim]

I would like to follow up on "Universal UI" where with Microsoft including this stuff in Office 365 it will kill all kinds of apps/plugins.

This is huge and as a software developer I am now not worried that GPT or AI will write code instead of me.

Big change will be that big companies/small companies/average people won't need as many applications anymore. Software devs as I read various comments fixate on "AI writing code" too much, where real threat will be that lots of code will never be needed anymore.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> real threat will be that lots of code will never be needed anymore.

That's a very good point.

Also, I am working in a very small team, developing a free app, for a nonprofit.

I will be suggesting to our CEO, that he consider ways to use AI to multiply the various things we need to do, in order to polish and launch the app.

We have a tiny, part-time team (except for Yours Truly), so there's a ton of "polishing the fenders" stuff that takes forever. I will suggest that he consider using ChatGPT (or some of the other engines) to do some of this work.

[kfrzcode]

Why not just... Use ChatGPT and get the work done

[ChrisMarshallNY]

If you think so. It seems many people think this.

Time will tell, if this PoV is valid. I can tell you that a flashy, sexy demo, is not the same thing as shipping code.

A number of comments state that the quality of the output is fairly sparse, and amateurish, but this was also a very fast, thirty-minute demo of a marketing workflow, subjected to basic AI tools.

This article was the equivalent of those "Write an app in two hours" seminar/bootcamps.

Valid, but also constrained by the need to teach, and to get done within a certain amount of time. Very strict guardrails, and keep your hands inside the car at all times.

I have taken many, many of these courses, and have given a few. I'm quite aware of the difference between what we produce in a class, and what I'd hand to a customer.

What I think we'll be seeing, quite soon, is "one-person shops," acting as studios/agencies that will take on jobs normally done by large shops.

Like bootcamp babes that go out, thinking that they can now deliver a full-fat app to customers, many will fail.

But some will succeed. Lots of smart, hungry people, out there.

We'll look at what can be done with these tools (which, I should add, are still very much in their infancy. You ain't seen nuthin', yet). I don't think they'll be able to write the deliverables, yet, but that's OK. I think we may be able to leverage them to make those deliverables much more polished and robust.

[kfrzcode]

I mean if the work could get done without ChatGPT then it's not getting done with ChatGPT any magnitude faster but it may help reduce the intervallic brain farts by being able to ask more than stack overflow has db results for

[tmountain]

Go create a “system” with GPT. You’re going to see a ton of, “I’m sorry, you’re right, the SQL statement is referencing a column that doesn’t exist.” Etc…

Right now, it’s amazing for getting some boilerplate very quickly (so is create-react-app, etc).

It’s bad at context as the problem grows and very bad at subtle nuances.

Working with GPT today is like having a super fast and somewhat sloppy developer sitting next to you.

“Shipping” anything it creates means a LOT of review to make sure no false assumptions are present.

I have been “writing code” with it nonstop for weeks now.

Yes, it’s incredible, but it also has serious limitations (at least for now).

[SubiculumCode]

I wonder if there is a way to get chatgpt to check its own work. It has been useful as a method to find new literature for science, but the occasional completely made up references can be frustrating.

[curiousObject]

You can ask it to check its work, or to do the same task three times and compare them.

But these error checks still have similar errors and hallucinations to the basic output, from my personal experience

It’s not obvious that this recycling refines the output

Try this for yourself

[dragonwriter]

> Go create a “system” with GPT. You’re going to see a ton of, “I’m sorry, you’re right, the SQL statement is referencing a column that doesn’t exist.” Etc…

So, you don’t mean “create a ‘system’”, you mean use the UI to talk with ChatGPT about creating a system, rather than using the API and connecting it to tools so it can build the system, verify its behavior, and get feedback that way rather than through conversation with a human user?

[tmountain]

I don’t see a difference regarding the work required. If the results are coming from a chat interface or an API, the same problems exist.

There aren’t any tools that I know of that can validate that GPT has correctly interpreted the prompt without any problems related to subtle (or overt) misunderstandings.

This being the case, there’s a lot of back and forth and careful validation necessary before anything ships.

[kfrzcode]

that was actually my point; it's not like you'd ask your CEO for permission to do work that was supplemented with StackOverflow; so just...do the thing that needs to get done, using the sources required to get'r'done

[belter]

Don't forget the CEO might ask who will fix the bugs in the app...

[broast]

Some people have made a career out of being good at reading, debugging, and fixing complex incoherent code that was written by other people. I imagine those will thrive in the near future.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I suspect that AI will become fairly good at bug-testing and fixing.

I would not be surprised to see AI testing and diagnostics, integrated into IDEs.

For example, UI testing. Right now, it's next to worthless, as it's basically scripting and screengrab analysis.

An AI tester can do a much better job of simulating a user, and analyzing the behavior of the app. Of course, it will be a real skill to set up the boundaries and heuristics for the testing, but it could be very cool.

I suspect that AI will also find a place in security; both in hardening and red-team testing, and in blackhat probing.

[throwaway4aday]

You're missing a huge market that just opened up. Writing "plugins" for ChatGPT. Given an API GPT-4 can now use it to complete various tasks. They've shown a demo of it using a search command and a calc command but there is no limit to what these could be. Better dust off those CLI skills since you'll mostly be dealing with text input and output.

[sebzim4500]

Not sure CLI skills are relevant, seems like OpenAI is pushing for JSON rest apis. Maybe because that's what GPT-4 has seen more of.

[thunky]

> OpenAI is pushing for JSON rest api

Which is probably one of the easiest types of code to autogenerate.

In fact we already have tools to generate apis from a model. And a model could be produced by ai given human (language) inputs.

[SanderNL]

Do not underestimate the enormous amount of dysfunctional logic in the non-dev population. You don”t code what they ask, you code what they need. That doesn’t change with AI, it gets worse.

[cmiles74]

LinkedIn has started pushing generated content it would like me to edit, I think they said they use ChatGPT. All of the content is "okay" but there's no depth, out of the handful of articles I read they both had a section that repeated an earlier idea but with different buzzwords.

I agree, it's impressive how it can generate readable text that provides an overview of an idea. But the overview misses key points, or highlights things that aren't really central. For a lot of things, doing something simple like reading a Wikipedia page is likely more productive.

[ghaff]

That's pretty much what I've found when I'used it to try writing articles. They're mostly not wrong. But they lack nuance, examples, links, research references, quotes, depth, etc. They're generally shallow and formulaic. Might I consider using one as a stub to get me started? Sure. On the other hand, that means I need to deliberately break out from the formula. I'm not sure how much time it would save me at the end of the day but I may give it a try on something real one of these days.

[pavel_lishin]

I'm looking forward to people being hired to edit ChatGPT output... and watching them prompt ChatGPT itself, or another AI model, to do their work for them.

[MagicMoonlight]

I mean you say that but this is the kind of shit work that 99% of the population does.

Look at the reddit UI, do you really think that it’s better than something GPT could toss out in 10 minutes?

[hawski]

Isn't Reddit's UI hostile by design?

[msm_]

> Look at the reddit UI, do you really think that it’s better than something GPT could toss out in 10 minutes?

Is this some kind of a joke? I'm pretty sure whole Reddit's UI team can't be replaced by GPT.

[olddustytrail]

Whether or not they could, I'm pretty sure they should.

[fooker]

These are different statements.

[dvngnt_]

yes! I doubt chatgpt in it's current form can run A/B tests to make a design that meets reddit's goals

[pojzon]

Looking at their downtime manifesto from few days ago - chatgpt would probably spit out a better infra design in like 5m…

[photochemsyn]

The most immediate practical result might be that online product reviews written by AI will be indistinguishable from those written by humans, essentially making online reviews useless to consumers as a source of reliably independent information about various products and services.

On the other hand, perhaps AI could help with due diligence types of inquiries from an independent standpoint? A real-time online AI research assistant with web scraping capabilities would be interesting.

[theK]

That's not completely correct. The review world is roughly splittable in two broad categories, the "expert person" variant (think fro-knows-photo) and marketplace reviews (the reviews you can find on amazon, etc).

Marketplace reviews are well guardable in terms of that you need to have an account there that purchased the same sku.*

Expert person reviews are based on trust. There is a destructive correlations between spaming Ai reviews and creating a valuable brand as an expert person. So you cannot really do a hard play on ai here, maybe a soft one but that would arguably be just "going with the times".

* Some might ask "why does amazon still have issues with review spam?" Answer is that amazon actually has a pretty firm grip on it, nonetheless the marketplace's incentives seem to be such that some slippage is acceptable/helpful for them.

[sweezyjeezy]

> The primary problem, which seems common to LLMs asked to do this stuff, is "very high level output" - a content smoothie, with few features that are particularly specific to the prompt. The marketing campaign in the OP is so generic, you can `s/Saturn Parable/Any other educational product` and it's still "fine". Similarly the emails - there are 1 to 2 sentences that are product specific, and a bunch of fluff. If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very disappointed.

a) no-one's telling you to just throw the AI output up on to a website unedited, b) does it not give you at least a bit of pause how quickly this is advancing right now?

[logifail]

> no-one's telling you to just throw the AI output up on to a website unedited

Is there a genuine problem that we're solving here?

"Quickly and cheaply create a large volume of mediocre content" will definitely appeal to certain entrepreneurial types, but were we actually short of mediocre content? What genuine problem are we solving?

Apart from a further lowering of the bar for certain entrepreneurial types to get rich(er) faster, that is.

[SubiculumCode]

quantity has a quality all its own.

[archgrove]

A fair sized pause, sure. But if the argument is “Don’t throw it up unedited”, and what it provides me is bare bones generic/junior stuff, I’m not sure of the huge win at this point in time. The world wasn’t short of “Generic low grade copy” templates before LLMs. It just saves a few steps in the copy/paste.

Of course, GPT5…

[barking_biscuit]

>Of course, GPT5…

I'm not sure GPT5 will feel appreciably different on this type of task necessarily. GPT-4 feels a lot like GPT-3 for a pretty wide variety of things, but it's when you get higher complexity tasks that you start to see differences.

[coldtea]

>If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very disappointed.

You'd be. Most people wouldn't even notice or care, whether it's the ones paying the marketing agency, or the ones being shown the content as potential customers.

[Forgeties79]

One little wrinkle I will add to your point, which is a very good one just so we’re clear, is that with chat GPT it does away with needing to know how to ask your questions, where to find your answers, how to implement them, etc.

I can literally tell it “write me basic code to do ‘x,’ now explain how to add it to my squarespace site.” In many cases it will just spit out exactly what to do. As we all know, part of knowing how to do your job well is knowing how to find answers. In some ways chat GPT makes that step even easier. At least in the use cases I have found so far.

[naasking]

> If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very disappointed.

A marketing agency would have spent at least a few weeks gathering specific information about your company, the article allotted two minutes.

How many more minutes would you need to devote to giving ChatGPT more specific information before it could match the marketing agency's output? Not weeks surely. What's the cost difference in both time and money? Multiple orders of magnitude.

[pmontra]

> If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very disappointed.

But you didn't. You paid only a few cents. You're probably not using it for a million dollars ad campaign but many people could use it to make their communications look better in less time. Same thing as using a stock PowerPoint template instead of paying an agency to create one. Good enough for most of us.

[vharuck]

>I guess I shouldn't discount the value of such a thing, once we get the "Sometimes it just lies" problem under control.

Considering the model doesn't "think" or understand abstract concepts, could we ever expect this?

[rmahan]

More training data and token lengths seem to help, given how GPT-4 scores better on a lot of standardized tests than 3 and 3.5 do.

We don’t necessarily need to teach it not to lie, but just to improve accuracy through better training and training data. It (probably) won’t ever be 100% reliable, but what is? Google searches can be inaccurate, same with Wikipedia and other encyclopedias.

[kmeisthax]

The model does think but only when you tell it to think out loud.

This is less a weird quirk of the training data or a One Weird Trick That Makes Your Matricies Sentient, and more a limitation of the model architecture. Neural networks do not have the capability to implement 'for loops', the only looping construct is the process that runs the model repeatedly on each token. When you tell the model to "think out loud", you're telling it to use prior tokens as for loop state.

Another limitation is that the model can't backtrack. That is, if it says something wrong, that lie is now set in stone and it can't jump back and correct it, so you get confidently wrong behavior. I have to wonder if you could just tell the model to pretend it has a backspace button, so that it could still see the wrong data and avoid the pitfalls it dropped into before.

[dTal]

I have yet to hear a definition of "think" or "understand" for which this is true.

[bgroat]

This is where I landed too.

GPT generated "ideas" strike as wanting to use a swipe file. Only instead of it being full of persuasive, high-performing marketing materials.. it's just fast and prolific

[gcanyon]

I don't think "templates" is a good descriptor to use here, since the number of required templates is beyond any reasonable number. Just taking 10,000 words, there are 10^40 possible ten-word sentences. A ridiculous percentage of those are nonsense, but even if that fraction is 0.000000000000000001%, that leaves 10^20 sentences to template for, which no modern computer can accommodate for.

I'm not sure what a better metaphor is; each thing I consider ends up defaulting back to what a ML model actually is, without really "metaphoring" at all. But not templates.

[rybosworld]

"I suspect the demise of stock image providers to be the first palpable win for generative AIs, if the copyright question doesn't bog this whole field down"

I'm surprised the copyright issues aren't given more attention. It's technically not legal (in the US) to modify copyrighted images without the authors permission. I don't see how it's possible that systems like DALL-E haven't already done that. There's a near 0% chance that they aren't trained on at least one copyrighted image.

[dist-epoch]

Humans photographers are also trained on copyrighted images.

They look at countless numbers of them and learn what is the correct "professional style", etc. This is why you can instantly recognize most stock photos, because they all follow the "stock photo template".

[MontyCarloHall]

The difference is that AI models so closely recapitulate specific features in copyrighted images that stock image company watermarks show through [0]. This is several levels beyond a human artist implicitly getting inspiration from copyrighted images, and more on the level of that artist explicitly copy/pasting specific pixels from them.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32573523

[throwaway4aday]

The models are probabilistic, they replicate the most common features that they've seen. Guess what shows up in a lot of images?

[MontyCarloHall]

That's exactly my point — they replicate highly specific features in images with such fidelity that their training is not analogous to humans' artistic inspiration.

[throwaway4aday]

They replicate common features. If you paint the same happy little tree in your picture as thousands of other people then it will probably show up in an image produced by a model trained on those images but your tree is hardly unique then isn't it?

[vanviegen]

How is the ai supposed to know these watermarks aren't a style element? They're present in tens of thousands of input images, after all. Therefore, I'd say this is a bad example of an AI literally copying from one specific source. It's similar to it using Arial letters: they're everywhere in the source data.

[kgwgk]

> How is the ai supposed to know these watermarks aren't a style element?

Because of the “i”.

[literalAardvark]

The i stands for imagination/ignorance at the moment. Intelligence (or something indistinguishable from it) doesn't seem too far away but isn't here yet.

So all we have is a dumb bot that can appropriate styles and ideas. Revolutionary, but not quite to the extent needed to sue it for copyright.

[kfrzcode]

Is more like human than copy paste. Read about how it works first please

[rybosworld]

Copyright law doesn't work like that for photos. When you take a photo of something you become the owner of the image.

In the context of AI, the issue is specifically with using a copyrighted image and creating something new based off of that. That is explicitly illegal for human artists.

[dist-epoch]

> something new based off of that

But where do you draw the line? If AI imagines 3 people around a business table in front of a flip chart, is that copyright infringement on similar stock photos? Note that in the AI created image, the people are unique, they never existed, the business table is unique, the flip chart is unique, and in general you can't point to any existing photo it was trained over and say "it just copied this item here".

If so, why isn't it also copyright infringement when a human photographer stages another similar shot?

[rybosworld]

"But where do you draw the line"

Well that's sort of the whole thing with copyright law. It's fairly arbitrary. Copyright specifically forbids derivative works: "A derivative work is a work based on or derived from one or more already exist- ing works."

It's vague on purpose because copyright infringements generally need to be handled on a case by case basis.

Now there are AI's trained on images that are copyrighted. If the image is copyrighted, should the AI have been allowed to train on it?

The reason human training/inspiration isn't specifically forbidden is because it can't be. We are impressioned by things whether we like it or not. Regardless, we can't prove where someone's inspiration came from.

But the act of training an AI on copyrighted images is deliberate. I feel that's a key difference.

[madeofpalk]

> The reason human training/inspiration isn't specifically forbidden is because it can't be. We are impressioned by things whether we like it or not. Regardless, we can't prove where someone's inspiration came from.

And there's plenty of cases that say if you're too inspired, that's illegal and/or you own damagaes/royalties.

https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/case-study/blurred-lines-...

[lukko]

Then the AI is performing a sort of collage of copyrighted work and the AI / prompt writer would not own the copyright to the derivative work. If a photographer stages a photo based on an existing photo, and it shares enough features with the original work, it likely would be copyright infringement.

[ROTMetro]

The court has already ruled that you can't own the derivative work anyways, because copyright law requires an individual artist. If I ask bob to make a picture for me, bob actually owns the copyright to start (but can assign it to me). I don't automatically get given copyright because I 'prompted' bob with what I wanted drawn (draw me a mouse). Copyright is given to the artist on the artists specific output.

If I ask an AI for a picture, there is no artist 'bob' to be assigned ownership under copyright law and therefor it's not copyrightable under existing law.

Funny how originally all these pro-AI art people were anti-copyright law but I can see them sometime soon lobbying for MORE restrictive copyright law (granting it in a larger pool or circumstances hence making more things copyrighted) so that they can overcome this.

[lancesells]

Why are you comparing a product that's powered by web scraping and GPUs and hundreds of millions of dollars to a human being? This is a product.

[shaky-carrousel]

Style cannot be copyrighted. It's perfectly legal for my to draw something in the style of another author.

[miohtama]

It’s explicitly allowed to create new based on photographs, assuming the resulting work is not similar with the original

> For example: if they base their painting on an oft photographed or painted location, generic subject matter, or an image that has been taken by numerous photographers they would likely not be violating copyright law.

> However: if they create their painting, illustration or other work of art from a specific photograph or if your photography is known for a particular unique style, and their images are readily identifiable with you as the photographer, and an artist copies one of your photographic compositions or incorporates your photographic style into their painting or illustration they may be liable for copyright infringement.

https://www.thelawtog.com/blogs/news/what-do-i-do-if-someone...

Because AI rarely recreates images 1:1 it is unlikely the violate any copyrights.

[ROTMetro]

"incorporates your photographic style into their painting or illustration"

Seems pretty cut and paste to me. If it has trained on my images and then uses that trained dataset to generate new images those images are in violation. Using training sets that include unlicensed copyrighted works requires attribution and licensing. TO be legal otherwise the end user/AI company would have to be able to prove in a court of law that without training on my copyrighted work it would have still generated that specific image which I can't see the users/company being able to do.

[miohtama]

> Using training sets that include unlicensed copyrighted works requires attribution and licensing

Is there a rulingn for this? This would be similar as using a school book requires attribution and licensing for your education.

[sgk284]

It is not illegal for a human to look at something another human created and learn composition, strokes, lighting, etc... and then apply it to their own future creations. This is all the AI is doing.

[rybosworld]

I disagree.

Taking copyrighted images and dumping them into a machine learning model is deliberate usage. The AI isn't a person, so it doesn't draw on past experience by happenstance.

[shaky-carrousel]

Still AI is just a tool. It's like saying I could draw in the style of another author, but only if I do it in a parchment.

[lukko]

It's hugely different - imagine the number of decisions a person makes when making an oil-painting - each stroke is somewhat influenced by past experience but also by the current state of the painting, their emotional state etc. The AI is just directly interpolating based on past input.

Making the two processes equivalent is very reductive.

[lancesells]

The AI is a product created by a company. A vacuum sucking up the scraped remnants of the internet. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to pull this off. Stop acting like this is a human or anything resembling one. This is a product and not a person.

[madeofpalk]

Yes, it can be illegal. It happens plenty of time in music, where artists produce songs which are too similar to previously existing songs, and owe damages.

[ROTMetro]

Am I allowed to take an imagine and apply a lossy algorithm (say jpg) to it and then use it as my own for business purposes? Nope. You say learn, I say apply a lossy algo and then use the result for business purposes. Seems like clear copyright violation.

[lukko]

This kind of 'training' is not at all equivalent. There's a reason copyright places value on the expression of an idea (i.e. taking the photo) - image-making is difficult and was a valuable skill, even for a stock photo.

[pbhjpbhj]

Getty's case is active in the court system in multiple jurisdictions, until we get there outcome of that weren't not going to have a resolution of this. Unless countries legislate/decide to allow training on publicly accessible documents, eg as Fair Use/Fair Dealing or whatever.

In short, the copyright issues appear to be given a lot of attention? Legal precedent takes time.

[sebzim4500]

This will take years for the courts to figure out. In the mean time, Adobe Firely has apparently not been trained on anything copyrighted, so people that are nervous about lawsuits will use that.

[Joeri]

Isn’t it just fair use? Reading the four factor test for fair use it seems like these generative models should be able to pass the test, if each artwork contributes only a small part to a transformative model that generates novel output. The onus will be on demonstrating that the model does not reproduce works wholesale on demand, which currently they sometimes still do.

Arguably also, the copy is achieved at generation time, not training time, so the copyright violation is not in making the model or distributing it, but in using it to create copies of artworks. The human artist is the same: in their brain is encoded the knowledge to create forbidden works, but it is only the act of creating the work which is illegal, not the ability. The model creators might still be liable for contributory infringement though.

Anyway, I reject the notion that any use of unlicensed copyrighted works in training models is wrong. That to me seems like the homeopathic theory of copyright, it’s just silly. If copyright works that way we might as well put a cross over AGI ever being legal.

[rybosworld]

Should the model be allowed to train on the copyrighted image in the first place? I think, the answer is no. If I'm an artist, I don't volunteer my art for you to do what you please.

Now consider that these systems are already being used for profit, before this matter has even been settled.

[SergeAx]

I am, for one, is preparing for an era of mediocre content in every field ML can be applied to.

[Alex3917]

This. Let me know when AI can write sales emails that convert better than emails written by the world's best copywriters.

[Forgeties79]

But why? Most people don’t need the bar set that high. Most people just need B+ writing with half decent conversions.

If you can get 80% of what you want with a cheap or free tool vs 100% with a full-time salaried employee/expensive freelancers, well, most people are going to pick the former.

I do this as a video editor all the time. If I have a fast turnaround often times I will just drop a LUT or use auto color correction in my in NLE. Of course I will sand down the edges afterwards, but it’s not like I’m going to give every single video that crosses my desk the full color grading treatment. Not everything requires that.