[pottspotts]

The goal posts for AI are moving quickly, and in my mind, a lot of the criticism os too shallow.

People want it to perform better than any expert human at any possible subject before it's considered "real AI". It isn't enough for critics for it to be better than the average person at virtually everything its put to the test on.

It seems like there is some resentment and almost anger at this technology, particularly with the artistic AIs like Midjourney. I can understand that more readily, but what's the real beef with ChatGPT?

[mrshadowgoose]

> It seems like there is some resentment and almost anger at this technology, particularly with the artistic AIs like Midjourney. I can understand that more readily, but what's the real beef with ChatGPT?

People seem to have a real tough time accepting that human brains might not be that special. They see things like GPT-4, and tend to fall into soothing mental traps to rationalize that innate but baseless rejection. I actually view all the sustained anger and resentment as a signal that we are making meaningful inroads into AGI, as it means that people are actually being impacted.

One of the most common mental traps is "It's just fancy autocomplete." People tend to stop there and don't proceed to consider that the veracity of that claim is irrelevant. Autocomplete or not, GPT-4 seems to be able to provide meaningful assistance to certain workflows that were previously only within the bounds of human cognition.

> People want it to perform better than any expert human at any possible subject before it's considered "real AI". It isn't enough for critics for it to be better than the average person at virtually everything its put to the test on.

It's quite amusing that some people have moved their goalposts to "well it's not a superintelligence, therefore it's worthless". Simultaneously, it's highly depressing, because it means various actors will likely achieve AGI while the rest of us are still bickering about autocomplete and Chinese rooms.

[dTal]

What we are seeing is the inevitable backlash against a program that at first glance can do literally everything you ask it to in plain English.

We don't exactly know what it can and can't do, a property which in a computer program at any rate is deeply mysterious and unusual. It initially gives the appearance of being a human which knows everything. This leads a lot of people to angrily declare that its appearance is deceptive, and in searching for words to describe in exactly what way it falls short, they incorporate flawed intuition on what it is capable of. So there's a lot of back and forth right now as we collectively swap memes to try and make sense of such a dramatic development.

[majormajor]

I think ChatGPT's user interface is particularly suited for confusion and debate about that. We've called obviously-more-specifically-purpose-built things "AI" or "enhanced with AI" or such for years, somewhat interchangeably with other terms like "deep learning" or "machine learning." There's that old saw about "it's AI until it works and then it's just an computer science" or somesuch.

And many of those things are worse at their task than a person except for speed and scaling. Can a machine be fooled by dazzle for recognizing a face in a way a human can't? Sure, but nobody is willing to pay for a human to go through everyone's photo albums...

But does ChatGPT "use AI" as a tool in the same sense that Spotify's recommendations "use AI" or is it "an AI" in the sense that it's an independent consciousness/agent?

This is the first time so many people have disagreed on that part. And that skews the debate into "a person is better" vs talking about if a person is even practical in most of the situations we'd use this.