Comment by cdrini

Comment by cdrini a day ago

16 replies

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This has to be the most annoying hacker news comment section I've ever seen. It's just the same ~4 viewpoints rehashed again, and again, and again. Why don't folks just upvote other comments that say the same thing instead of repeating the same things?

And now a hopefully new comment: having a word frequency measure of the internet as we're going into AI being more used would be IMMENSELY useful specifically _because_ more of the internet is being AI generated! I could see such a dataset being immensely useful to researchers who are looking for the impacts of AI on language, and to test empirically a lot of claims the author has made in this very post! What a shame that they stopped measuring.

Also: as to the claims that AI will cause stagnation and a reduction of the variance of English vocabulary used, this is a trend in English that's been happening for over 100 years ( https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2019/09/why-is-vocabulary-s... ). I believe the opposite will happen, AI will increase the average persons vocabulary, since chat AIs tends to be more professionally written than a lot of the internet. It's like being able to chat with someone that has an infinite vocabulary. It also makes it possible for people to read complicated documents well out of their domain, since they can ask not just for definitions but more in depth explanations of what words/sections mean.

Here's to a comment that will never be read because of all the noise in this thread :/

appendix-rock a day ago

They want to display how they’re truly intelligent (unlike LLMs) by checks notes rehashing opinions that they’ve read millions of times online.

Sound familiar to anyone?

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  • wbillingsley a day ago

    I wonder whether future generations will be ingrained with a Truman Show fear that maybe only the few thousand people they meet are real and everything else is generated background noise.

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    • Cthulhu_ a day ago

      I already get this when I look at e.g. youtube comments.

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actionfromafar a day ago

I read, but I can't say I like it. :-D People will ELI5 everything to understand it, no hard word understand necessary, up-goer-five-style, then "de-compress" it into floral (Amorphophallus Titanum scented) GPT speak when sending responses back out.

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vlan121 a day ago

You haven't read the whole thing. It says that: or that could benefit generative AI.

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  • cdrini a day ago

    I did read it :) not sure how that line applies here, can you expand?

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advael a day ago

On a meta level I agree that having this kind of dataset with "before and after" would be pretty interesting. On an object level I do not predict that this would increase the overall diversity of language usage - and in fact it would be extremely surprising if this was even possible due to some general mathematical properties of neural networks - nor would "more professional writing," though I do agree with this characterization of the way AI-generated text sounds. The more I work with LLMs and encounter them in the wild, the greater my confidence that I can tell when something was generated, with the exception of B2B marketing copy and communications from HR departments or state agencies

On the level of meta-discourse you seem to want to also speak to: Dang even when people have the Official Corporate Approved Perspective (in particular, the claim that it's "like being able to chat with someone that has an infinite vocabulary" is probably the silliest delusional AI hype I've heard all week) and the most upvotes in the thread they still think they're an embattled ideological minority. Starting to think that literally zero people in the modern world don't have or affect a victim complex of some kind

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  • cdrini a day ago

    Haha I'm pleasantly surprised to see my comment at the top, I genuinely thought it would drown to the bottom! Not due to disagreement, just due to sheer volume and being posted rather late in this posts lifespan. Anyways my meta comment wasn't that I disagreed with all the other comments, I was just frustrated at how repetitive they were of one another. When I go to leave a comment, I do a pass reading through all or most of the comments to make sure someone hasn't left a comment in the same vein, and it was just frustrating to go through people saying almost verbatim the same thing others were saying! If your comment isn't adding something new why leave it? I'm all for healthy disagreement :) Also not sure what part of my post sounds like it's from an "embattled ideological minority".

    But speaking of healthy disagreement, as to "chatting with someone that has an infinite vocabulary", I'd love to hear any counterarguments you might have; or was calling it "silly and delusional" meant to be your argument? :P I think it's a pretty uncontroversial statement seeing as eg ChatGPT very likely knows every word in the English language.

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    • advael a day ago

      The most ridiculous aspects for me were the anthropomorphizing (Reminds me of that one Sam Altman interview a bit) and the use of "infinite", which both doesn't really work on vibes (as many have noted, while I'm sure chatGPT has been exposed to every word, its pattern of communication is very "regression to the mean" among them), but also is silly if taken literally, because unless we're counting like some quirky technically-grammatical combinatoric compounding that we in practice infer the meaning of from composition of what we identify as separate individual words (like just hyphenating a bunch of adjectives and a noun or something) there's not really an argument for there being "infinite vocabulary" in the same sense that there is for "infinite possible sentences" because being a valid word requires at least that someone can meaningfully comprehend what is meant by it, and coordination requirements of this nature tend to truncate infinities

      The case for ChatGPT doing significant coinage that sticks isn't particularly strong either, partially from theory and partially because I'd think I'd've heard a lot of complaints about it by now, and the ones on hackernews would be repetitive to the point of seeming unavoidable (we agree on that for sure)

      Anyway, re: the silliest hype I've heard all week, I'm mostly just trying to find humor in what has been a pretty bad hype wave for someone who's pathologically bad at sounding like the kind of nontechnical hype guys that pervade any tech hype wave but is nonetheless mostly seeking out jobs in this field because it's what my expertise is in. Incredibly awful job market for a lot of people I realize, but it feels like a special hell I get for getting into ML research before it was (quite so) cool. I'm trying to fight the negativity but I've gotten screwed over a lot lately, but I don't have anything against you personally for being silly on hn

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      • cdrini 3 hours ago

        Ah ok so anthropomorphizing and the phrase "infinite vocabulary" sounds impossible. I agree infinite vocabulary is a bit murky, and mathematically incorrect. If I wanted to be more mathematically correct I could say complete vocabulary, but I think that's actually a little less understandable to people. I did not mean infinite vocabulary in that it coins new words, just infinite as in very large to the point of being incomprehensibly large by a single individual. As per anthropomorphizing, I think the word "chat" is the most anthropomorphizing I did, so don't agree with you on that one.

        Ah mate sorry to hear that, the market is tough right now. I will say objectively I believe there's very little in my comment that's hype-y. I think using AI while reading documents out of your comfort zone, and asking it questions can expand your vocabulary. I've personally tried it, it's helped me read papers not in my field, it's helped me find papers for better research. I can understand how someone can disagree with that, but calling it hype sounds to me more like a response to an invisible enemy/to "all the ones who hyped before" than to an actual concrete response to this specific case. And I think that mentality could put you in a potential catch-22 mental loop that will leave you constantly dissatisfied with anything AI or ML, by constantly seeing this invisible enemy where it might not be present. Anyways, stay positive and best of luck with the job hunt!

        Edit: and it looks like my comment has now fallen deep into the depths of the comment thread, never to be heard from again! See, I told you I was an embattled ideological minority ;)

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    • mark-r a day ago

      Sure, ChatGPT knows every word in the English language (and probably quite a few that ain't). But how likely is it to use them all?

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      • cdrini 3 hours ago

        Now that's an argument! Agreed, it won't use them of its own accord, but the fact that you can ask it about words, or ask it even to break down important words in a new field, or give it a paragraph from a paper not in your field and have it explain the jargon, I think that's how it can help someone grow their vocabulary.

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BiteCode_dev a day ago

Also it breaks the languagr barreer, you can now read the Chinese internet if you want, or chat transparently in Arabic. That's going to be interesting.

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  • Cthulhu_ a day ago

    At the moment though (and ever since decent online translation services were a thing), it feels one-way, that is, people from that side of the internet coming to the anglosphere internet moreso than anglosphere people going internet-abroad. I may be wrong.

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    • BiteCode_dev a day ago

      As a Frenchman, I learned very quickly that my language sphere market and resource pool is so much smaller than the English one that it's 10 times less effective to do anything in it.

      I understand the position.

      The only exception would be China, but the GFW is probably not helping.

      LLV might lower the cost of that so much that it will become more interesting to do so.

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