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Cody Kommers's avatar

I asked ChatGPT what it thought of your post.

CEK: The following essay was written about you. What do you think of it?

ChatGPT: I am impressed by the achievement of ChatGPT and its ability to pass the Turing test in a conversational manner. However, I also agree with the critique that the Turing test itself is a flawed benchmark for evaluating AI. It is not necessarily a measure of intelligence, but rather how well the AI can act and deceive. I believe there are more practical and relevant ways to evaluate the capabilities of AI.

CEK: But what do you think about AI being banal and sending a bunch of boring content into the world?

ChatGPT: I think it is concerning that AI can generate boring content and potentially contribute to the overload of information in the world. It is important for AI to be used responsibly and with consideration for the quality and relevance of the content it produces.

... I think that pretty much goes straight to your point 😂😂

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Dawson Eliasen's avatar

In a team meeting a couple days ago, my manager suggested that we all learn more about “product” and “data,” because “I’m sure you’ve heard about chatGPT,” and “it’s pretty good at writing code.” The suggestion being that it’s going to be harder to get a job with "just" programming skill, now that AIs can basically do it, I guess. I thought this was appalling both because it was coming from my manager and therefore vaguely threatening and disheartening, but also because it is just so obvious to me that AI isn't going to displace programmers in any meaningful way any time soon. I think the banality you're describing is part of the reason why, that is, AIs are still a long way off from actually solving the problems you face in real life. It can generate boilerplate, yeah... so can StackOverflow. Furthermore, if you know anything about programming, you know that boilerplate quickly gets exported to libraries and packages when possible, and the "programming" a programmer actually does is more about figuring out which libraries to use, stitching them together, and addressing the specificities of the problem at hand.

> For I don’t want to live in a world where most text is written by AI. I think that’s a sad, small, solipsistic world.

Yeah. I think that the people who think that AI is really going to start replacing a lot of written content soon are misguided. It’s sort of like how you noticed that not all that many Substacks use DALL-E images, even though it’s free or cheap and supposed to be very good. The fact is, it’s not good. You can tell when an image is AI-generated and it is boring. The same goes for written content. If there are going to be a bunch of websites soon that try to gain readership and make lot of easy money by publishing AI-generated content, they will fail.

It might sound like a human on a very superficial level, but that doesn’t mean that anyone wants to read it. I’m not saying that it’s impossible for AI to generate content that’s indistinguishable from human-generated content, just that it’s way harder than people think it is, and to think it’s coming soon because of DALL-E and chatGPT is a mistake. It’s clear that we’re making some sort of tradeoff, as you said.

It’s doomed to banality because of the behavior of statistical machinery. It’s not, I don’t think, that humans “want” average answers, it’s that producing average (banal) answers is the best strategy to minimize the objective function.

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