(2022-12-06) Thompson On Bullshit And AI-generated Prose

Clive Thompson: On Bullshit, And AI-Generated Prose. *There’s a word for prose and speech that exist mostly just to fill the space: bullshit. Recently, OpenAI released “ChatGPT”, a quite remakable chatbot. It’s built atop GPT-3

the problems begin when you require ChatGPT to be factually accurate

Stack Overflow is a site where people post — and answer — questions about coding. But people started posting answers that had been written by ChatGPT, and many were incorrect; worse, they were often wrong in a subtle way.

The heads of Stack Overflow got so frustrated they made a blanket ban on any answers created by the ChatGPT

AI like GPT-3 cannot reason very well because it doesn’t seem to truly know any facts

Which leads to the real problem: The bot always sounds confident, even when it’s talking out of its ass.

*Whatever question you ask, it’ll merrily Dunning-Kruger its way along, pouring out a stream of text.

It is, in other words, bullshitting.*

when someone is bullshitting, they don’t care about whether what they’re saying is true or not

It is probably no accident that the industries who’ve most enthusiastically adopted “AI generated content” are the ones where bullshit — human authored bullshit — is historically common: Content marketing, PR, certain tech firms, and the more brackish, clickbaity tide-pools of blogging and journalism.

Now, with this critique out of the way, allow me to say: I actually really dig generative models — so long as you’re not relying on them for facts.

I’d love to have an AI that could give me the gist of scores of documents, white papers and blog posts, so I could figure out which ones to read more closely. I wouldn’t need the summaries to be perfect; I’m only going to truly rely on material I read directly myself.

Also, I could also imagine text-generators being useful for helping people structure a piece of writing.

When people feel “frozen” or “stuck” with a blank page, the problem — I’ve often observed — is they have difficulty in figuring out “where to begin, where to end, what to put in the middle” … or, structure.