Technology

confabulating

I think this is a better term for it

Edit: ChatGPT == Trump[consummate bullshitter]? I feel like its "intentions" or "programming" are slightly above that but maybe not...

Edit: its interesting how a program can be written that basically replicates Trump's speech patterns in a replicable and recognizeable way. Where did Trump derive his speech pattern? Like, I know he reads Hitler speeches on his nightstand but is it only Hitler that informs his parole (individual speech patterns)?

I like hallucinations much more.

I've been using LLMs pretty extensively in a professional capacity and with the proper grounding work it becomes very useful and reliable.

LLMs on their own is not the world changing tech, LLMs+grounding (what is now being called a Cognitive Architecture), that's the world changing tech. So while LLMs can be vulnerable to bullshitting, there is a lot of work around them that can qualitatively change their performance.

They are useful when you need to generate quasi meaningful bullshit in large volumes easily.

LLMs are being used in medicine now, not to help with diagnosis or correlate seemingly unrelated health data, but to write responses to complaint letters or generate reflective portfolio entries for appraisal.

Don't get me wrong, outsourcing the bullshit and waffle in medicine is still a win, it frees up time and energy for the highly trained organic general intelligences to do what they do best. I just don't think it's the exact outcome the industry expected.

I use chatgpt to make up stuff, imagine things that don't exist for fun - like a 'pitch' for the next new Star Trek series, or to reword my much too succinct prose for a manual for a program I am writing ('Calcula' in gitlab) or ideas for a new kind of restaurant (The chef teaches you how to cook the meal you are about to eat) - but never have it code or ask it about facts, it makes them up just as easily as the stuff I just described.

It's a computer that understands my words and can reply, even complete tasks upon request, nevermind the result. To me that's pretty groundbreaking.

It writes like a high school student who is supposed to hit their word count

90% of us are having our copy graded by corporate middle managers.

I'm mostly just shocked at how bad a vast majority of white collar workers are at writing.

Because superhuman persuasion generally only works on things people don't have to change to accept.

Racist dogma is so persuasive to some because it lets them recontextualize their hardships as inflicted on them by {insert race here} without materially changing their life in any way and despite it being horseshit.

Ultimately it's not superhuman persuasion: it's extremely human. It only works when it's playing to your existing biases, connects to the lazy, gut-based feeling method of navigating life rather than logic or reason.

But if popular enough it can be extremely dangerous: because the reason that persuasion machine is wrong will not be readily apparent until after the mistakes have been made.

Because there's no money in getting people to use less. Persuasion in capitalism is about marketing. It's about convincing people to buy things they don't need.