Artificial Intelligence

[Brian Peacock]

Crumple has hacked pErvy's account!

[pErvinalia]

Old man yells at clouds.

[Brian Peacock]

Robot and AI rights are human rights.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Who would've thought that consuming pablum squirted out by LLM is less educational than using a regular search engine?

Since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, millions of people have started using large language models to access knowledge. And it’s easy to understand their appeal: Ask a question, get a polished synthesis and move on – it feels like effortless learning.

However, a new paper I co-authored offers experimental evidence that this ease may come at a cost: When people rely on large language models to summarize information on a topic for them, they tend to develop shallower knowledge about it compared to learning through a standard Google search.

Co-author Jin Ho Yun and I, both professors of marketing, reported this finding in a paper based on seven studies with more than 10,000 participants. Most of the studies used the same basic paradigm: Participants were asked to learn about a topic – such as how to grow a vegetable garden – and were randomly assigned to do so by using either an LLM like ChatGPT or the “old-fashioned way,” by navigating links using a standard Google search.

No restrictions were put on how they used the tools; they could search on Google as long as they wanted and could continue to prompt ChatGPT if they felt they wanted more information. Once they completed their research, they were then asked to write advice to a friend on the topic based on what they learned.

The data revealed a consistent pattern: People who learned about a topic through an LLM versus web search felt that they learned less, invested less effort in subsequently writing their advice, and ultimately wrote advice that was shorter, less factual and more generic. In turn, when this advice was presented to an independent sample of readers, who were unaware of which tool had been used to learn about the topic, they found the advice to be less informative, less helpful, and they were less likely to adopt it.

We found these differences to be robust across a variety of contexts.

[source]

[Brian Peacock]

"professors of marketing" eh?

[pErvinalia]

We've been gnashing teeth over climate change, thinking it will be our downfall eventually. When in reality it will be AI that will kill us off. 40-50 years of trying to fight climate change. We've barely had a couple of years to realise the threat of AI. And the rate it's improving, we might not have many more left to figure out an escape.

[pErvinalia]

[aufbahrung]

[Brian Peacock]

Yes, the numbers are horrendous. Which is why the companies developing these kinds of 'services' are so keen to get nation-states onboard. A portfolio of govt contracts to supply AI services is the only way to cover the costs and maintain profits - privatising the gains while socialising the losses. The perpetual theft and fabrication machines are just another way to transfer money from taxpayers to corps.

[macdoc]

[Sean Hayden]

Still, we have examples of other bubbles where the hype ultimately proved accurate anyway, eg the Internet is all that hype and more today, Amazon is ‘uge!

Couldn’t AI be the same?

[Brian Peacock]

Still, we have examples of other bubbles where the hype ultimately proved accurate anyway, eg the Internet is all that hype and more today, Amazon is ‘uge!

Couldn’t AI be the same?

Possibly. But it's somewhat held back by the hallucination problem. The 'hallucination problem' is the term they use when it's just wrong.

[Sean Hayden]

I trust the experts that these ChatGPT things aren’t all that intelligent. I just imagine there are probably a lot of smaller problems ai will solve, and at least some of them will be significantly profitable and transformative.

On the issue of real intelligence I still haven’t read anything more interesting on the subject (admittedly I don’t spend a lot of time on it) than Dennett’s essay on the frame problem: https://folk.idi.ntnu.no/gamback/teachi ... nett84.pdf Someone, or many someones have claimed to have solved it…

[aufbahrung]

Steal all the worlds cultural knowledge and then give it away pretending it's thinking for itself because you've developed a great roulette wheel to decieve the folks who are now getting all this knowledge for free, it won't end well...

[macdoc]