ChatGPT Is Dumber Than You Think

While I personally wouldn’t go so far as to describe current LLMs as “a solution in search of a problem” like cryptocurrency has famously been described as, I do think the description rings true in an overall economic/business sense so far. Was there really a great crying need for new ways to cheat on academic essays? Probably not. Will chatting wi... See more

Chiang’s view is that large language models (or LLMs), the technology underlying chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, are useful mostly for producing filler text that no one necessarily wants to read or write, tasks that anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”. AI-generated text is not delightful, but it could perhaps be useful i

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ChatGPT didn’t say much that was useful at all. But—as the students reflected in their conversation after reading ChatGPT’s analysis—neither did they. One student noted that they were just saying “formulaic, buzzwordy stuff” rather than tackling the issue with fresh thinking. They were unnerved by how closely the empty shine of ChatGPT’s answer mir... See more

Another good read: Ted Chiang on why Ai isn’t going to make great art, for The New Yorker . I rather liked this analogy:

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way t

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