Do they not understand that the example text they are using in the first image is so laughably banal that it makes an entire segment of its potential audience not want to engage at all?
Shoot me in the face if my own writing is ever that bad.
ETA: just to be clear... I am not a great writer. Or a bad one. But this is a particular kind of bad. The kind we should all try to avoid.
I see this all the time from AI boosters. Flashy presentation, and it seems like it worked! But if you actually stare at the result for a moment, it’s mediocre at best.
Part of the issue is that people who are experts at creating ML models aren’t experts at all the downstream tasks those models are asked to do. So if you ask it to “write a poem about pizza” as long as it generally fits the description it goes into the demo.
We saw this with Gemini’s hallucination bug in one of their demos, telling you to remove film from a camera (this would ruin the photos on the film). They obviously didn’t know anything about the subject beforehand.
> Part of the issue is that people who are experts at creating ML models aren’t experts at all the downstream tasks those models are asked to do.
Yep. CAD, music, poetry, comedy. Same pattern in each.
But it's more than not being experts: it's about a subliminal belief that there either isn't much to be expert in or a denial of the value of that expertise, like if what they do can be replicated by a neural network trained on the description, is it even expertise?
Unavoidably, all of this stuff is about allowing people to do, with software, tasks they would otherwise need experts for.
Well, comedians still exist, despite the fact that ChatGPT can write an endless stream of “jokes” for next to zero cost. So do musicians. I know less about poetry and CAD but I assume people who seek out those modalities aren’t going to be impressed with generic garbage. A person who seeks out poetry isn’t going to be easily impressed.
No. But then all of these products are marketed to people who are, at some domain-specific level, still towards the "but I wore the juice!" end of the scale, right?
Unskilled and unaware of it. Or rather, unskilled and unaware of what a skilled output actually involves. So, unaware of the damage they do to their reputations by passing off the output of a GPT.
This is what I mean about the writing, ultimately. If you don't know why ChatGPT writing is sort of essentially banal and detracts from honesty and authenticity, you're the sort of person who shouldn't be using it.
(And if you do know why, you don't need to use it)
Person A: Me try make this code work but it always crash! maybe the server hate or i miss thing. any help?
Person A with AI: I've been trying to get this code to work, but it keeps crashing. I'm not sure if I missed something or if there's an issue with the server. Any tips would be appreciated!
For a non-native English speaker, it's much better professionally to use AI before sending a message than to appear authentic (which you won't in another language that you aren't fluent so better to sound robotic than write like a 10 years old kid).
Person A with AI:
In the bustling world of software development, where lines of code intertwine to create the intricate tapestry of our digital lives, I find myself facing a challenge that has proven to be both perplexing and frustrating. I’ve spent over a decade honing my skills as a developer. Known for my analytical mind and commitment to excellence, I’ve navigated various programming languages, frameworks, and projects that I’m proud to have contributed to.
Recently, I stumbled upon a bug that initially seemed minor but quickly revealed itself to be a formidable adversary. It disrupted the seamless user experience I had meticulously crafted, and despite my best efforts, this issue has remained elusive. Each attempt to isolate and resolve it has only led me deeper into a labyrinth of complexity, leaving me frustrated yet undeterred.
Understanding that even the most seasoned developers can hit a wall, I’m reaching out for help. I’ve documented the symptoms, error messages, and my various attempts at resolution, and I’m eager to collaborate with anyone who might have insights or fresh perspectives. It’s in the spirit of community and shared knowledge that I hope to unravel this mystery and turn this challenge into an opportunity for growth.
It's pretty good for native English speakers at work who need/want a reverse anger translator.
Me: This is the most garbage code I've ever seen. It's bad and you should feel. It's not even wrong. I can't even fathom the conceptual misunderstandings that led to this. I'm going to have to rewrite the entire thing at this rate, honestly you should just try again from scratch.
With AI: I've had some time to review the code you submitted and I appreciate the effort and work that went into it. I think we might have to refine some parts so that it aligns more closely with our coding standards. There are certain areas that are in need of restructuring to make sure the logic is more consistent and the flow wouldn't lead to potential issues down the road.
I sympathize with the sibling comment about AI responses being overly-verbose but it's not that hard to get your model of choice to have a somewhat consistent voice. And I don't even see it as a crutch, this is just automated secretary / personal assistant for people not important enough to be worth a human. I think a lot of us on HN have had the experience of the stark contrast between comms from the CEO vs CEO as paraphrased by their assistant.
Aw thanks! I at least have the benefit of being a fluent writer.
For lots of East Asian researchers it's really embarrassing for them to send an email riddled with typos, so they spend a LOT of time making their emails nice.
> For lots of East Asian researchers it's really embarrassing for them to send an email riddled with typos, so they spend a LOT of time making their emails nice.
OK -- I can see this. But I think Grammarly would be better than this.
It does now, perhaps, for complete rewrites. I've not looked recently.
But its suggestion system, where it spots wordy patterns and suggests clearer alternatives, was available long before LLMs were the new hotness, and is considerably more nuanced (and educational).
Grammarly would take apart the nonsense in that screenshot and suggest something much less "dark and stormy night".
Thanks for saying this. Whenever Grammarly puts a red line under a slightly superflouos part of the sentence I get more and more agitated at this small nudging to robotic writing.
There's more to writing than clarity, though. Not all written communication needs to abide of the efficient/clear writing style of technical documentation FFS
But there's not much more important, stylistically, to writing an business email or document than clarity. It's absolutely the most important thing. Especially in customer communications.
In the UK there is/used to be a yearly awards scheme for businesses that reject complexity in communucations for clarity:
But anyway, you don't have to act on all the suggestions, do you? It's completely different from the idea of getting an AI to write generic, college-application-letter-from-a-CS-geek prose from your notes.
With enough repetitive suggestions asking for the same thing, it will just continuously push your writing style towards this ultra-dry writing. Plus, even in business emails it's important to show a human side in writing.
It's not like Grammarly's push for clear writing actually helps in any way. Most times it just outright suggests removing relevant info from the sentence. They just push for this service as a way to incentivise subscriptions, writing quality be damned.
I am trying to convince myself that I am not insane and everyone else is. The platform was literally down for me for a good 12 hours or so because they had an auth problem or bug. Their interface is subpar yet they are trying to convince people that this is replacing knowledge worker any minute now. I recommended to a friend that he uses chatGPT to write some English content and it did a bad job. I checked bolt yesterday and the code it produced for a very simple app was complete garbage hallucination.
I really like copilot/ai when the focus was about hyper-auto-complete. I wish the integration was LSP+autocomplete+compilation check+docs correlation. That will boost my productivity x10 times and save me some brain cycles. Instead we are getting garbage UX/Backends that are trying to fully replace devs. Give me a break.
I'm with you. I feel like I'm losing my mind. Everyone around me is talking about the looming AGI, death of the knowledge worker and how "everything" has changed. But every time I try to use these text generators I get nothing useful from them. It's like the whole world has bought into a mass hallucination.
It makes more sense when you realize that while sure, there might be slight variation in output, generally speaking the people tripping over themselves in how [current version] is so amazing aren't being totally honest about why they think it's amazing.
For them, the ability to generate so much trash is the good part. They might not even be fully aware that it's trash, but their general goal is to output more trash because trash is profitable.
It's like all those "productivity systems". Not a single one will produce a noticeable increase in productivity magically that you can't get from just a $1 notebook, they just make you feel like you are being more productive. Same with RP bots or AI text editors. It makes you feel so much faster, and for a lot of people that's enough so they want in on a slice of the AI moneypit!
Its a tool, like any other tool a software developer would use. In areas where I have a lot of repetition or need to pour through verbose (but simple) documentation, its such a game changer. I can spend 5 minutes thinking about what I want the machine to do, give it some samples of what I expect the output to be and wala, it generates it, often times 100% correct if I've got the prompt put in properly, sometimes its good enough with a bit of refinement. This is something I would normally have delegated to a junior team member or sub-contractor, but now I'm saving in time and money.
Occasionally I sink 1-2 hours into a tweaking something I thought was 90% correct but was in reality garbage. I had that happen a lot more with earlier models, but its becoming increasingly rare. Perhaps I'm recognizing the limitations of the tool, or the systems indeed are getting better.
This is all anecdotal, but I'm shipping and building faster than I was previously and its definitely not all trash.
Garbage in, garbage out. It is not going to imagine your perfect scenario and then create it for you. I take anyone saying it is garbage with a grain of salt because it is incredibly useful for me. And others think so too, so how can your bad experience negate that. It can't. If you can craft the right prompts it can make you much more efficient. Anyone saying it is going to replace whole people en masse is just part of the hype machine. But if all it does is make every human on earth 1% more efficient then that is an obscene amount of value it is creating.
They plateaued on model performance and they are hype based. They need to keep the momentum going by "releasing" stuff, so they are garbage out at the moment. Given that open weight models are so close to gpt-4, their value is exactly 0 unless they can produce a new model with a significant jump in coherence.
Them releasing this stuff actually suggest they don't have much progress in their next model. It's a sell signal but today's investors have made their money in zirp, so they have no idea about the real world market. In a sense this is the market funneling money from stupid to grifter.
I thought the same thing: the “blog post” in the example image is an example of the absolute trash that’s being spewed onto the internet by these tools. 10+ sentences and yet somehow nothing actually said.
Shoot me in the face if my own writing is ever that bad.
ETA: just to be clear... I am not a great writer. Or a bad one. But this is a particular kind of bad. The kind we should all try to avoid.