Thread

ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector

764 points · 395 comments · lmbbuchodi

mavsman · 1789923911 · focus · HN ↗
To me, this quote just about sums it up:
> The mechanism is standard adtech. What has no precedent is running it on an AI chat product.
As someone who has been well aware of this mechanism for quite some time, I still feel icky anytime I re-read the details of it.
What a time to be alive.
1. jsrozner · 1789925147 · focus · HN ↗
  People think they're interacting with an "intelligence," when actually they're just getting a maximally optimized Weizenbaum feed. We're living through the sloppification of the human mind.
  See e.g., <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-chatbots-are-becoming-experts-changing-people-s-minds-what-s-their-secret" rel="nofollow">https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-chatbots-are-beco...
  1. ben_w · 1789927543 · focus · HN ↗
    What's the old quote from WW2?
    I couldn't help but notice how each successive headline reporting our glorious victories seemed to draw closer to Tokyo.
    Something like that.
    Well. I can't help but notice how each successive headline reporting how this "scam"/stochastic parrot/"scare quotes intelligence" seems to be solving more and more things that were but a few years ago widely regarded as being indicators of high intelligence.
    Being highly convinving is one of the things on that list.
    moth11 · 1789930566 · focus · HN ↗
    Nobody is denying that it's effective. They're denying intelligence
    A programming contest has a problem where given N < 10000, do something hard like come up with the number of primes less than N
    You can come up with all sorts of algorithms that do intelligent things. But the most effective solution is to use metaprogramming to make a massive switch statement that contains all the answers
    fasterik · 1789933091 · focus · HN ↗
    Are they denying intelligence, or are they redefining it in such a way that only humans can be intelligent? Can you come up with a definition of intelligence that would apply to crows and ant colonies, which are obviously intelligent to some degree, but not the current generation of AI systems?
    ben_w · 1789934351 · focus · HN ↗
    How many examples you need to get good.
    Don't misunderstand: I'm happy saying AI models "think" or "have learned a thing", and for in-context learning I'd call them smart even by this definition…
    …but also, any living creature that needed as many examples as machine learning currently needs, would starve to death before figuring out how to eat.
    While training, machine learning processes (not just LLMs, also applies to e.g. self driving cars), are really really stupid and only make up for this by being really really stupid really really fast.
    To what I wrote upthread: the "victories" of humanity over machine keep getting closer, but we have yet to wake up one day in great confusion as we find an entire city is no longer in communication with anyone, nor finding ourselves in a state of utter disbelief when the reports come in that the city stopped communicating because it is entirely gone.
    keypusher · 1789935594 · focus · HN ↗
    Millions of years of evolutionary knowledge hard-coded into human systems, then it still takes 15+ years of us learning by example before we start to come online and be able to generalize solutions from a limited set of examples. I'm not sure this is as strong of an argument as you think it is. It also doesn't really matter when "we are trained differently" has no direct bearing on the end result.
    ben_w · 1789935878 · focus · HN ↗
    We invented controlled fire perhaps a million years ago; at a generation gap of 25 years, that's 40,000 opportunities for evolution to pass on a mutation that does anything. Written language is around 210 generations old, the capacity to read and write isn't present in our nearest living relatives amongst the primates, and our various languages are wildly different to each other: the skill itself isn't evolved, though the capacity to learn the skill is.
    If humans learned like ML systems learn, (biblical) Methuselah would still have been failing the Sally-Anne test on his supposed deathbed at 969 years old, like some of the smaller early LLMs did.
    > It also doesn't really matter when "we are trained differently" has no direct bearing on the end result.
    The question was to ask for a definition such that AI could still count as "not smart" compared to humans. This fits.
    It's also why they're spiky intelligences, which I'm happily using right now to write code for me, but also do not trust in the slightest to identify the weeds in my garden. These submarines sure do swim fast*, but they're also very much disqualified for the Olympics.
    * <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#1980s" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#1980s

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.