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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.
    fasterik · 1789934540 · focus · HN ↗
    If we're including the training process and not just the final product, why shouldn't we include the billions of years of natural selection encoded in DNA sequences?
    godelski · 1789936296 · focus · HN ↗
    We do.
    There's a lot of innate knowledge but all neuroscience demonstrates how incredibly flexible the brain is. Brains constantly learn and rewire.
    Here's a few things that I think show how crazy it is AND stress those points
    - people that have had corpus callosotomy (brain cut in half) *may* be indistinguishable from a normal person. Depends on how young you were when you underwent the procedure - true for most brain injuries - can even include the frontal cortex - you can learn to ecolocate - people with Aphantasia are indistinguishable from others - people without an internal monologue are indistinguishable from those with one - people can learn to use prosthetics - even without disabilities - or look into MRI scans with tool use
    You can convince yourself that we're just organic robots (after all, there's no magic), but you would be a fool to convince yourself we're the ordinary kind.
    We are constantly learning. You aren't just born with your knowledge and it stays static. We are extremely proficient at metalearning (learning how to learn, few shot learning, zero shot learning [0,1]). Our brains are constantly rewiring, able to heal from traumatic damage.
    I could go on and on. Does information pass down through genetics? Of course! But that's far from the whole story.
    I'm tired of people trying to make AI sentient by making humans robotic. Stop trying to trivialize everything and be okay not knowing the answer to everything. You're human, you're designed to learn and explore, not sit and argue from an armchair
    [0] and I mean these in the original sense. Not in the sense that you train on a billion examples of labeled animals and then congratulate yourself on your ImageNet-1k held out test performance. That's not zero shot, that's just a test set
    [1] I can literally make up words and you'll understand them. Or use words in novel ways. That's literally how slang works and how new words come to be. Don't be a walibanut ya glufus. Read some SciFi

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