ChatGPT

[michio]

Man I hate to say this, considering how much I shill GPT for its usefulness in software development, but for the first time ever I feel like the quality has noticeably dropped. Many users are also reporting this. I normally blame this on people being dramatic or providing terrible/vague prompts, but no, it's absolutely had a noticeably drop in quality.

Using the custom instructions I posted above (see here for many useful prompt engineering tools: https://github.com/spdustin/ChatGPT-...s/all_tools.md) helps get around this, but the new GPT-4-turbo model being used for ChatGPT appears to be stubborn about following prompt engineering instructions. It definitely ignores my custom instructions at random times.

I messaged the engineer that created the AutoExpert custom instructions and he confirmed that the turbo model isn't following instructions as well and he's working on it.

OpenAI greatly improved the speed of GPT-4 with a noticeably drop in quality. Terrible decision... If I have to spend more time prompting and potentially never get answers as good as before, then what was the point of increasing the speed?

What's also frustrating is I think in terms of utility, GPT-4 is right at the edge where the AI is actually useful as a force multiplier in real world projects vs. being a toy, so they should never make any further sacrifices to quality.

We really need Gemini or some other AI to drop ASAP to bring some competition to the table.

Dalle3 prompt: surreal digital art, minimalism, landscape scene with planets and stars, nighttime, awe

[JoeP]

I'm not cynical, but...

I suspect the powerful and high quality GPT-4x has been kept under wraps and is only available to billionaires' pet projects, such as the military.

[davidm]

ChatGPT, still sucking.

[Ari]

AI art has really been showing the human element of viewing art, and the multiple levels of viewing a piece. We've all seen the the image that asks you to read it with many skipping over the repeated 'the' and it seems so has AI. So much of it is reasonable or amazing at first glance and then starts getting weird once looked at closer, but many will happily pretend it got nothing wrong.

This article for example is interesting for the amount of unmentioned corrections the text gives to the art pieces, a "marketing photo of "Marshmallow Menace" cereal." No no no, it's a marketing photo of "Marsmalllow Menace."

From toy to tool: DALL-E 3 is a wake-up call for visual artists and the rest of us | Ars Technica

[JoeP]

"DAWN OF DELICIOUSS!"

[viscousmemories]

DELICIOIUSS actually.

[Ensign Steve]

Originally Posted by Ari

This article for example is interesting for the amount of unmentioned corrections the text gives to the art pieces, a "marketing photo of "Marshmallow Menace" cereal." No no no, it's a marketing photo of "Marsmalllow Menace."

It's hard to argue with that note. There aren't any cereal bits in the image. It's oops all mallows.

[specious_reasons]

Sam Altman fired as CEO of OpenAI - The Verge

Thinking about how many AI related jokes this will generate.

Wild speculation at the office - current favorite: Altman wouldn't sell OpenAI and now the board is mad.

[Ensign Steve]

I don't get it. Is it an open source joke?

If so, then I do get it actually.

[seebs]

I've seen speculation that it's because he was trying to commercialize and the board actually believes in "we want to make this beneficial-to-humanity". Which is at least plausible. May have had to do with the recent "dev day", which apparently blindsided MS.

[specious_reasons]

Originally Posted by Ensign Steve

I don't get it. Is it an open source joke?

If so, then I do get it actually.

Oh, I was thinking jokes like,"They can replace him with AI." or "ChatGPT told the board to fire him." Jokes that aren't really that funny, but are easy to make at the expense of OpenAI and Altman.

Wild speculation is going to happen because this news came without warning and wasn't sufficiently detailed to answer any "why" questions.

[viscousmemories]

An interaction I had with ChatGPT today (abridged):

Me: Are there any good books about the Buddhist involvement in the Vietnam War?

ChatGPT: Yes, there are several noteworthy books that explore the involvement of Buddhists in the Vietnam War. [...] "The Buddhist Crisis of 1963 in South Vietnam" by John Hellmann.

Me: There does not seem to be a book with that title by John Hellmann

ChatGPT: You are correct, and I apologize for the error. There appears to be no book titled "The Buddhist Crisis of 1963 in South Vietnam" by John Hellmann.

Me: Why did you originally state that there was a book by John Hellmann?

ChatGPT: I apologize for the error in my previous message regarding a book by John Hellmann. This mistake likely resulted from a mix-up or incorrect recall of information. It's important to cross-verify such information for accuracy. I appreciate your understanding and patience in this matter.

Me: Surely you must have had a reason. Maybe there is an article or chapter in another book with that title?

ChatGPT: Based on a quick search, here's what I found.

It appears there isn't a specific book or article by John Hellmann titled "The Buddhist Crisis of 1963 in South Vietnam." The initial mention of such a work was incorrect, and I apologize for the confusion caused. The topic of the Buddhist Crisis of 1963 in South Vietnam is covered in various historical texts and articles, but none by John Hellmann with the mentioned title. For information on this topic, other sources and scholarly works would be more appropriate to consult.

Me: Has John Hellmann written anything on the topic of the Buddhist Crisis?

ChatGPT: Based on a quick search, here's what I found.

There are no search results indicating that John Hellmann has written specifically on the topic of the Buddhist Crisis in Vietnam. The available results do not mention any publications by Hellmann related to this subject. For information on the Buddhist Crisis during the Vietnam War, other authors and sources would be more relevant.

[specious_reasons]

I looked up John Hellman, and his books seem to be entirely analysis about media and myth making. He has a book called American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam. It is possible that the text talks about such things, but probably only in terms of the media surrounding the Vietnam War.

[ShottleBop]

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[michio]

The creator of AutoExpert has come out with a new version of AutoExpert by using the bot creator tool that OpenAI released which also works better with the updated version of GPT4.

AutoExpert is a tool that will automatically pre-prompt anything you ask ChatGPT in an attempt to get you best possible, thorough, informed answer. It also has some other neat features, just type /help when you get in and you'll see them.

Click this one for general, non-coding inquiries: Just a moment...

Click this one for software-related, coding inquiries: Just a moment...

You now have a better ChatGPT experience than 97% of people using ChatGPT. You're welcome.

Originally Posted by davidm

ChatGPT, still sucking.

ChatGPT and all LLMs are not good at things like, "Give me a direct quotation from this person, book, thing etc." You should be using it for big picture conceptual tasks, and cross referencing anything it tells you when you need to ensure that something is 100% accurate. I hate sounding like a dick about this, but the professor on this blog doesn't know how to use ChatGPT. The sample ChatGPT answers he provides in that blog post are really bad. Is that GPT 3.5? I don't see any reference links, which means the internet browsing feature isn't enabled, which means this is probably 3.5 which is trash and nobody should be using that. If you use GPT4, which now has internet browsing built in, it will actually provide you direct links so you can check what GPT is referencing.

Next, I actually tried the prompts the professor used with GPT4, and with the AutoExpert tool, and it gave me an extremely good answer (I think) that was far more thorough and informative. But I'm not a biology guy, so I'm not sure. It also gave me internet links for each quote provided. Here's a link to the conversation: Just a moment...

Whenever I see posts from literal professors or just anyone who I know is way smarter and successful than I am talking about how bad ChatGPT is, and I see their prompts, I'm like... How did you manage to get such a bad response from ChatGPT? I never have answers this bad. And then I feel better because I know I have solid job security, and I know I'll be able to feed my family when people suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them by AI. It used to bother me a lot when I would see AI hit pieces and criticisms that I felt were unfair or something, but with a baby on the way, my reaction is like, "Good, yes, you're correct, AI is worthless, don't use it."

I recently interviewed with Home Depot for a software engineering position and I had a good opporunity to flex my knowledge of AI, and I found myself sitting there teaching the interviewer some cool tools and use-cases they had no idea about. And this was an experienced software engineer I was talking to, someone who should really be familiar with AI now that it's gone mainstream in the past year.

I'm not saying this to humblebrag or something, but I honestly don't think I'm using AI in any special way. So I'm confused when I see people having such a bad experience with ChatGPT.

[LarsMac]

I find ChtGPT to be a fairly interesting research tool, far more useful than Google, or Bing and other search tools.
ChatGPT seems to have access to several of those tools, and can quickly provide a more comprehensive set of data that I can produce using those individual tools.

But I would hardly trust it to provide completely accurate coding, or legally accurate data. It remains the task of the user to qualify the information once it has been presented.

[Ensign Steve]

Originally Posted by LarsMac

But I would hardly trust it to provide completely accurate coding, or legally accurate data. It remains the task of the user to qualify the information once it has been presented.

The beauty about coding is that unlike with more subjective topics (like generating convincing legalese), it is totally straightforward to confirm the efficacy of the coding result. A sufficiently motivated person could design a whole system where an AI could generate some code and then test and iterate on it with a real compiler and lots of test cases.

I already do test-driven development. I can imagine a future in which I just write the tests* and then tell the Ai to do the rest of my job: write the code and keep iterating on it until all the tests pass. Then to prevent over-fitting, I would have another set of tests that the AI doesn't know about, for validation.

* Or, ideally, the client would write the tests. Then my job would just consist of building these frameworks and keeping them up-to-date and integrated correctly. That actually sounds like a nightmare.

[Ari]

Originally Posted by michio

I'm not saying this to humblebrag or something, but I honestly don't think I'm using AI in any special way. So I'm confused when I see people having such a bad experience with ChatGPT.

Not special, but certainly less common, for me all your links go to a login page.

But you're also using it in a different way, I don't think most profs are worried their students are being taught incorrectly by ChatGPT but that they will use it to short cut their papers, making the cheapest, easiest to access ChatGPT the one the profs are going to be dealing with the most. At the moment the student that takes their time to get the correct and most up to date GPT4 with auto-vibrate and latte functions is also unlikely to need it to write their paper for them 30 minutes before class.

[seebs]

It seems to be sometimes pretty good, and sometimes stunningly bad, but as a general rule, it seems to be very good at making things that are shaped like correct things, but if there's any need for concrete details, the concrete details can be pretty arbitrary. Which... makes sense? It can't contain all the information.

That said... I think there's a real risk of quality nosediving as the input data set becomes more and more dominated by things made up by previous iterations, making it harder to impossible to find accurate information, because all the sources are SEO-spam articles generated by previous versions, which become the bulk of the input data available for training new ones...

[Ensign Steve]

Originally Posted by seebs

That said... I think there's a real risk of quality nosediving as the input data set becomes more and more dominated by things made up by previous iterations, making it harder to impossible to find accurate information, because all the sources are SEO-spam articles generated by previous versions, which become the bulk of the input data available for training new ones...

Indeed this is a very real risk. I know I've mentioned about Google Translate in this thread many times before, but I think I have a slightly new take today.

The Google Translate model is trained in part by scraping books and web pages that have been human-translated into multiple languages. As the quality has improved, more websites are using it to machine-translate their content. So now the model is at risk of training itself on data that it previously generated. (There are some signals that it looks for to try to prevent this, but it's not perfect.)

Just like you predict about the AI data sets, this negatively affects the quality of the language models. But here is my slightly new take. I suspect that the feedback loop could drive it to converge on some artificially-evolved model of human-computer hybrid language that is a subset of actual natural human language. Like an inadvertent NewSpeak.

Extending that to the AI models, are we converging toward an artificially-evolved human-computer hybrid NewThought? One can dream.

[seebs]

@kenwhite.bsky.social on Bluesky

The paralegal relayed my concerns that the stories about AI in law tend to feature the AI making up cases that don’t exist and putting them in briefs and lawyers being sanctioned.

The vendor responded: oh, that’s called a “hallucination” in the industry.

But here’s the great thing, the vendor explained: you can tell the AI not to include hallucinations in its work product.

I beg your pardon, I said to the paralegal relating this to me.

You can set hallucinations to “no,” he explained.

[Ensign Steve]

I'm going to keep using the ChatGPT thread for all manner of GenAI-related content.

This is a promo video for Intuit Assist. I especially love the part from 1:05 to 1:40.

Introducing Intuit Assist | Your new generative...

Come join me in the cloaca (ew) if you want to talk in greater detail.

[Ensign Steve]

Actually, what I have to say about 1:05 to 1:40 is not secret, and is more relevant to this thrad than the other.

tl;dw:

It shows a customer interacting with the MailChimp application by typing natural language requests into a box, and then GenAI stuff happens. It's like so:

"Create an email campaign for a new sale on planters"

The application generates a bunch of templates with text like "sale" or "20% off", and photos of flowers and flower pots. The customer picks one with a big photo of a flower pot.

"Add plants to the background"

The background of the flower pot picture is changed to have some plants in it. This doesn't seem like stable diffusion or Dall-E to me, because the image isn't generated, but some kind of computer vision is going on to determine the subject vs. background of the image.

The customer scrolls down and selects some copy.

"Make this sound more friendly"

The selected copy is changed to have the same message but in an obnoxious friendly tone. This is absolutely powered by GPT (3 probably? maybe 4)

Anyway, I just think it's a great demo of a practical application for some of these technologies. I saw another demo for sending a reminder about late payments, and you could adjust the tone from from friendly to firm.

[seebs]

Google Researchers’ Attack Prompts ChatGPT to Reveal Its Training Data

this is absolutely not supposed to be possible with how these systems supposedly work, and yet, once again, here we are seeing large contiguous blocks of training data text showing up.

[viscousmemories]

That is seriously bonkers.