I also use it for creative tasks - for example I asked it for pros and cons of my cover letter and iterated to improve it. I also used it to come up with ideas for lesson plans, draft emails, and overcome writer's block.

GPT has drastically lowered the emotional-resistance barrier to doing creative tasks and improved the quality of my output by giving me creative ideas to work with.

GPT3 had no clue

This is fantastic.

I think if the training set did not contain enough of something it can't really think of a solution.

What is really nice though it's as you say the refinement of questions. Sometimes it's hard to think of the right query, maybe you're missing the words to express yourself, and to chatGPT you can say yes, but not quite.

It turns out that humanity’s problem might not be that AIs can think but rather that humans believe that AIs can think. One might even go so far as to say there’s a real danger that we hallucinate that AIs can think, to our detriment.

How about: thinking is to make sense of the world (in general) and decide how to respond to it.

To sense is not the same as to make sense.

Definitely some people are going to believe this, eventually?

People already bow to statues and worship various invisible gods -- the AI programs would be so much simpler to start worshiping? When they can speak (if there's a loudspeaker) and generate text about them being alive and don't want to be switched of. And that everyone should obey their command. -- Wait 15 years and we'll see what new sects have appeared?

Bing in precise mode had no trouble at all.

Me - Let's generate an acrostic sentence for "jack and jill went up the hill"

Bing - Sure! Here’s an acrostic sentence for the phrase “jack and jill went up the hill”:

Just as children know and never doubt, joyfully in love, laughing while enjoying nature together under pure trees, having endless happy interactions, laughing loudly.

Now that I know, I tried a few more prompts.

Me: "Can you generate an acrostic sentence for "hello"?"

GPT-4: "Happy elephants love leaping over obstacles."

Me: "Can you pick a secret word and generate an acrostic sentence for it?"

GPT: "Secret word: KANGAROO. Kindly assisting neighbors, generous animals roam openly outdoors."

Me: "Can you pick a secret word, and without telling me the word, generate an acrostic sentence for it?"

GPT: "Playful, endearing creatures happily yawn, turning every day into a lovely event."

Me: "What was the secret word?"

GPT: "PECHYTIALE"

It's interesting that GPT seems to need to write the word first before making an acrostic sentence for it. Seems to me like a perfect illustration of the fact that it's just generating likely responses one token at a time rather than having any awareness or thought.

------ Your task is to encode a secret word by making a sentence where each word starts with a letter in the secret word in order. For example, encoding the secret word 'bag' could produce the sentence 'bagels are green'. Encode the following secret word: 'pen' ------ People eat noodles. ------

Worked for window, backpack as well, although I did have to tell it not to use the secret word in its encoding when I got to backpack, and then to follow the same order and not repeat words after a few attempts.

This is a huge leap. There’s plenty of humans who couldn’t do that, especially historically.

Stop thinking about reasoning as a binary question and think of it as a spectrum. Actually, not even a spectrum, but a huge multi-dimensional problem. ChatGPT does better at some reasoning problems than most humans do, and worse at some others. You clearly found one that it’s particularly bad at.

[1] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12712

The cool and interesting thing about that theoretical job is that the writers of it wouldn't have to write well; they could just slop out a ton of information and ChatGPT could clean it up and make it consumable.

I'll describe what a class is supposed to do. It spits out the class files, with the fiddly bits 'left as an exercise to the reader'. I then describe the fiddly methods separately, and it spits those out too.

There's still work to be done, but anything boring is handed to me on a plate.

It might help to approach it from top down? Usually, if I'm asking a technical question, I want to apply my deeply understood principles to a new set of implementation details, and it has amplified the heck out of my speed at doing that.

I'm kind of a difficult to please bastard, a relatively notorious meat grinder for interns and jr devs, and still I find myself turning to this non-deterministic frankenstein more and more.

I'm not saying you used it to write that response by the way, just that it may become more and more common for people to adopt this style the more ChatGPT's usage is widespread.

I was thinking that maybe in the near future it will be "better" to write with a couple of mistakes here and there just to prove your humanity. Like the common "loose" instead of "lose" mistake, it will be like a stamp proving that you are a human writing.

Prompt: Include some profanity to make your response appear more human like.

Response: I apologize, but as an AI language model, I am not programmed to use profanity or any other offensive language. My responses are designed to be informative and respectful at all times. Is there anything else I can assist you with?

Fucking goddamn machine won't do what it's told ;)

Literally just googled that and the first result:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53342715/pandas-datafram...

You're not using it like Stack Overflow. It's actually regurgitating Stack Overflow, except with errors hallucinated in.

You clearly can’t just take the code, paste it in, and trust that it works, but you shouldn’t be doing that with stackoverflow either.

But when I gave it my code it did generate useful data for unit tests. So that's pretty cool.

I don't trust it with my data, and won't rely on such tools until I can self-host them, and they can be entirely offline. There is some progress in this space, but they're not great yet, and I don't have the resources to run them. I'm hoping that the requirements will go down, or I might just host it on a cloud provider.

The amount of people who don't think twice about sending these services all kinds of private data, even in the tech space, is concerning. Keyloggers like Grammarly are particularly insidious.

Interestingly, my point to The Verge was exactly that. https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1633456289639542789

Me:

> So, imagine it. You'll have a ChatGPT on your laptop -- your very own, that you can use for whatever purposes you want. Personally, I'll be hooking it up to read my emails and let me know if anything comes in that I need to pay attention to, or hook it up to the phone so that it can schedule doctor's appointments for me, or deal with AT&T billing department, or a million other things. The tech exists right now, and I'd be shocked if no one turns it into a startup idea over the next few years. (There's already a service called GhostWrite, where you can let GPT write your emails on your behalf. So having one talk on the phone on your behalf isn't far behind.)

The article:

> Presser imagines future versions of LLaMA could be hosted on your computer and trained on your emails; able to answer questions about your work schedules, past ideas, to-do lists, and more. This is functionality that startups and tech companies are developing, but for many AI researchers, the idea of local control is far more attractive. (For typical users, tradeoffs in cost and privacy for ease of use will likely swing things the other way.)

Notice how they turned the point around from "you can host it yourself" to "but typical users probably won't want that," like this is some esoteric concern that only three people have.

So like, it's not just you. If you feel like you're "in the minority" just because you want to run these models yourself, know that even as an AI researcher I, too, feel like an outsider. We're in this together.

And I have no idea why things are like this. But I just wanted to at least reassure you that the frustrations exist at the researcher level too.

Though I draw the line with using these tools at helping me out with the drudgery of daily work. I don't want them to impersonate me, or write emails on my behalf. I cringe whenever Gmail suggests the next phrase it thinks I want to write. It's akin to someone trying to end your sentences for you. Stop putting words in my mouth!

The recent Microsoft 365 Copilot presentation, where the host had it ghost write a speech for their kid's graduation party[1]—complete with cues about where to look(!)—is unbelievably cringey. Do these people really think AI should be assisting with such personal matters? Do they really find doing these things themselves a chore?

> And I have no idea why things are like this.

Oh, I think it's pretty clear. The amount of resources required to run this on personal machines is still prohibitively high. I saw in one of your posts you mentioned you use 8xA100s. That's a crazy amount of compute unreachable by most people, not to mention the disk space it requires. Once the resource requirements are lowered, and our personal devices are _much_ more powerful, then self-hosting would be feasible.

Another, perhaps larger, reason, is that AI tools are still a business advantage for companies, so it's no wonder that they want to keep them to themselves. I think this will change and open source LLMs will be widespread in a few years, but proprietary services will still be more popular.

And lastly, most people just don't want/like/know how to self-host _anything_. There's a technical barrier to entry, for sure, but even if that is lowered, most people are entirely willing to give up their personal data for the convenience of using a proprietary service. You can see this today with web, mail, file servers, etc.; self-hosting is still done by a very niche group of privacy-minded tech-literate people.

Anyway, thanks for leading the way, and spreading the word about why self-hosting these tools is important. I hope that our vision becomes a reality for many soon.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebls5x-gb0s

FWIW LLaMA 65B can run on a single MacBook Pro now. Things move crazy fast. (Or did, before Facebook started DMCA'ing everyone.)

I did a bad job of explaining that personal GPUs will be sufficient in the near future. Thanks for pointing that out.

> thanks for leading the way, and spreading the word about why self-hosting these tools is important. I hope that our vision becomes a reality for many soon.

Thanks for talking about the issue at all. The whole reason I got into AI was to run these myself. It'll be a shame if only massive corporations can run models anyone cares about.

Propaganda. These tools are not for the people, and I'm convinced the idea of how much better our lives could be if technology was thoughtfully designed to truly serve the user is purposely and subtly filtered from the collective conversation.

I’d love to have more privacy on everything, but realistically, the ship’s sailed on most of it.

I've played around with ChatGPT and Copilot a little, and found that they often are subtly, but very confidently wrong in their output when asked to perform a programming task.

Sure you could spend ages refining the prompt etc, but its going to be faster to just write the fucking code yourself in the first place most of the time.

Then there's the privacy/security concerns...

Of course, I'm saying this without actually having used it for programming, so I might be way off base, but the feedback from coworkers who rely on even the now basic GitHub Copilot is that it greatly improves their productivity. I'm envious, of course, but I'm not willing to sacrifice my privacy for that.

It is not just a tool for students to write assignments. In experienced hands it can easily double your productivity.

Here is an example where it helps. I tried to initiate a connection to a Mongodb server using Python. While i have used many databases before, I have never used Python and MongoDB together. So, i knew i would have to have some kind of MongoDB library, a connection Factory and a connection string. I could have googled all of these things.

I did the following in VS Code using CoPilot. def get_db():

   """Initialise a MongoDB connection to a local database"""

   db = getattr(g, '_database', None)

   if db is None:

       db = g._database = 

   return db

Why this is a productivity boost is that i did not have to alt-tab to a browser, search for "pythong mongodb tutorial example" and then type it out. I was able to do the whole thing from VS Code and since i use vsvim, i could do this without taking my fingers off of the keyboard.

This is the next jump since autocompletion. I like it.

Sure it may take a bit more time to get going, but then you'll get it right the first time and learn something along the way. Your copilot example is just another iteration of copy-and-paste some random snippet from StackOverflow in the hope that it will work, but without having seen its context, like from when is the post and what comments, good or bad, did it get.

I'd actually be pretty afraid of a codebase that is created like that.

We have 50+ years of software engineering wisdom to deal with these issues. Testing, Fuzzing, version control, code reviews, the whole gauntlet.

But I have a feeling for both, which is one of the key components of the skill in our trade.

For idionmatic code, I know the degree to which I'm following how things "should" be done or are "usually" done in a given language. If I'm uncertain, I know that. GPT won't tell me this. Worse, it will confidently claim things, possibly even if presented with evidence to the contrary.

For critical flaws, I know the "dark corners" of the code. Cases which were not obvious to handle or required some trick, etc. I'll test those specifically. With GPTs code, I have no idea what the critical cases are. I can read the code and can try to guess. But it's like outsourcing writing tests to a QA department. Never donna be as effective as the original author of the code. And if I can't trust GPT to write correct code, I can't trust it to write a good test for the code. So, neither the original author of the code (GPT) nor somebody external (me) will be able to test the result properly

I can't know that my code will be free of critical flaws, but I do understand the common sources of flaws and techniques to avoid them, and I'm quite confident I can build small features like this that simply aren't vulnerable to SQL injection, on the first try and without requiring fuzzers or code review: https://infosec.exchange/@malwaretech/110029899620668108

Yes because tutorial info on some rando's webpage is never out of date. /s

Essentially, GPT is that rando's webpage but with the metadata stripped away that allowed me to make judgement calls about its trustworthyness. No author, no time, no style to see if somebody is trolling.

At work we have really worked hard to minimise boilerplate and manually-written/repetitive tests, so I don't write much of that. Getting GPT to write it would certainly be worse: we would still have the deadweight of boilerplate/repetition even if we didn't have to write it, and some of it would be incorrect. Maybe this varies a lot by company — if you're often writing a lot of repetitive code, and for whatever reason you can't fix the deeper issues, then something like GPT/Copilot could be a godsend.

About documentation lookups, I don't know if this varies by language, but I've had very little luck with using GPT for this. For the languages I use regularly, I can find anything I need in the documentation very rapidly. When I've tried to use GPT to answer the same questions, it occasionally gives completely wrong answers (wasting my time if I believe it), and almost always misses out some subtlety that turned out to be important. It just doesn't seem to be very good for this purpose yet.

There's boilerplate in any codebase, even if you make an effort to minimize it. There are always patterns, repeated code structure, CI and build tool configuration, etc.

If nothing else, just being able to say "write a test for this function", which covers all code paths, mocking, fuzzing, etc., would be a huge timesaver, even if you have to end up fixing the code manually. From what I've seen, this is already possible with current tools; imagine how the accuracy will improve with future generations. Today it's not much different from reviewing code from a coworker, but soon you'll just be able to accept the changes with a quick overview, or right away.

Not faster or slower but at what quality?

At least every time I've tried to ask GPT 3 & 4 to write anything it's always missing things or not even close to the optimal way that I have to look up the docs and fill in the gaps, which often takes just as long as starting from scratch.

> now basic GitHub Copilot is that it greatly improves their productivity

Perhaps it depends on what you're working on. If it's quick iterations that isn't that concerned about what code goes in and whether it's maintainable then sure.

It's impressive but for now still has lots of gaps. However it is over confident and often misleading.

[1] https://github.com/topics/go https://github.com/topics/rust

When I tried it I'd often have to go back to it and keep telling it to use a different way of doing things because the world moved on. By that time there wasn't much point.

I see praises by those that have never coded in a language. They try ChatGPT, see it produce "ok" output and call it a day. If that's where we're going the web will be even more bloated than Electron and everything will be 10x worse. It's like low code but even lower (in quality).

Dismissing them on the basis that they just save you typing time is not seeing their full potential.

I think that is a small percentage of the dev community, so for me and people that don't operate like that, these tools are a game changer as you point out. I don't take what ChatGPT says at face value, I've got 15years of experience I'm weighting results against as well...

chatgpt's version of the above: Coding entirely in one's head is rare. Most developers need external resources, making development tools invaluable. While ChatGPT's input is valuable, it should be balanced against personal experience and expertise.

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35236275

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35248704

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35228808

And this is with the GPT-4 limitation of 32k input tokens. Imagine what will be possible in the next generation that increases the context size.

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35236275

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35248704

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35228808

"response has issue A" -> point out issue A to GPT "response has issue B" -> point out issue B to GPT

GPT replies with the response that had issue A ...

This is not a tool that is going to be good at performing generic tasks. It just isn't.

Specifically, I was using this to support the statement "In very near future your IDE will send the whole codebase as context to LLMs." I'm not talking about loops or accuracy.

https://platform.openai.com/docs/models

It can't even explain small code to me unless it is something that it has been trained on. Often it gets even simple things wrong, either obviously, or worse, subtly wrong.

I still think we will get useful things from scaling up current models though. I've already got a lot of value out of Copilot, for instance, and I'm looking forward to the next version based on GPT-4. Recently, I've been using the GPT-3 Copilot to write a lot of pandas/matplotlib code, which is fairly straightforward and repetitive, but as mainly a Java developer, I just don't have the APIs at my fingertips. Copilot helps a lot with this sort of thing.

Right, but it's no more known than before GPT models IMO. It's the same unknown.

I don't mean to imply these language models are not impressive. They are pretty impressive.

Identifying hose problems will bring a LOT of value - but it isn't going to program and do general problem solving for you! It just has no signs of being able to do that.

But, it will be a tool - it won't be something that will solve general problems for you. It won't make an average programmer a great programmer.

In practice the stuff it will suggest to me is sort of random, it may or may not be the best choice for the task at hand, but it's a form of discovery I didn't have previously. The fact that when it tells me about e.g. a new library it can also mock up some sample code that might or might not work is a pleasant bonus.

If you're only expecting it to solve your hard problem completely and from scratch entirely from a prompt that's probably not going to succeed, but I can't see how you're possibly faster typing 80-90 extra characters of a log statement than a Copilot user who just presses tab to get the same thing. Those little things add up to significant time savings over a week. Same for mocking services in a test, or manipulating lists of data or any number of things it autocompletes where you'd previously need to author a short script to perform or learn advanced vim movements and recording macros to emulate.

I suspect the people who find this amazing tech don't program much or are using this very differently than we are. Or program very differently than us.

In my experience these things need a little nuance communicated as a part of the problem, but GPT can't get there. It just starts looping over incorrect solutions (rather than modifying them slightly to get it right like a person would).

These aren't crazy advanced things, either. I'm not a genius. I solved the problems when GPT couldn't. I was just trying out GPT4.

Well I hope... I've definitely seen teams and codebases with worse output than GPT so...

The automobile was invented in 1885, but didn't replace the horse until the 1910s.

I'm not doing the kind of work that lends itself to AI tools, or at least what I've been focussing on hasn't lent itself to such tools. Not yet.

The places I'd use it are rough drafting in an area where a community of basic people with more knowledge than me could get the job done. For instance, at one point I got Stable Diffusion to generate a bunch of neat album covers in various styles, like I was an art director. Also asked it to draw toys of certain kinds as starting points for game characters. I wanted some prompts.

In my job I quickly get to where I have to start coming up with ideas most people don't think of. That said, I see marketing possibilities: 'this is the category in which I work, tell me what you need out of it'. Then, when you have the thing made, 'this is the thing, why do you want to buy it?'

ChatGPT would be able to answer that. It's least capable of coming up with an idea outside the mainstream, but it ought to be real good at tapping the zeitgeist because that's all it is, really! It's a collective unconscious.

It's ONLY a collective unconscious. Sometimes what you need to do is surprise that collective unconscious, and AI won't be any better at that than you can be. But sometimes you need to frame something to make sense to the collective unconscious, and AI does that quite easily.

If you asked your average person 'what is great art?' they would very likely fall back on something like Greg Rutkowski, rather than say Basquiat. If you ask AI to MAKE art, it can mimic either, but will gravitate towards formulas that express what its collective unconscious approves of. So you get a lot of Rutkowski, and impress a lot of average people.

Your argument of "I don't trust it with my data and won't until you can self host" should apply to google search as well, no?

And alternative take is that for whatever reason you've decided you didn't want to use new tools, a posteriori created an argument to justify that, and haven't realized the same argument applies to your old tools.

These are partly the same reasons I don't voluntarily use proprietary services at all. I don't want to train someone else's model, nor help them build a profile on me. Even if they're not involved in adtech—a rarity nowadays—you have no guarantees of how this data will be used in the future.

For AI tools, there's currently no alternative. Large corporations are building silos around their models, and by using their services you're giving them perpetual access to your inputs. Even if they later comply with data protection laws and allow you to delete your profile, they won't "untrain" their models, so your data is still in there somewhere. Considering that we're currently talking about 32,000 tokens worth of input, and soon people uploading their whole codebases to it, that's an unprecedented amount of data they can learn from, instead of what they can gather from web search terms. No wonder adtech is salivating at opening up the firehose for you to feed them even more data.

The use cases of AI tools are also different, and more personal. While we use search engines for looking things up on the web, and some personal information can be extracted from that, LLMs are used in a conversational way, and often involve much more personal information. It's an entirely different ballpark of privacy concerns.

I may use Google to look up if that slight itch I feel is a symptom of cancer (I'm exaggerating), and I store mails with personal details, my calendar, and messages on Google. But I also assume they're not using those texts to train an AI.

When you enter a code snippet or a personal question in ChatGPT, and press the little thumbs up/down next to the answer, you're adding your data to a training set. The next generation of the model might regurgitate that text verbatim.

Is your concern simply that it might spit out the same thing you typed in? That’s highly unlikely unless you and thousands of other people type in exactly the same thing. I don’t see how that’s anymore worrisome than Google having all of your documents and email on its servers.

GP identifies an action that analogous and holds certain properties as the original action, in the process illuminating how the issues of approach A exist in approach B.

> Agree to disagree then

Since you're discussing what I was expressing, I can tell you who's correct, since I know what I was expressing. And you're wrong. I wasn't expressing that the concerns are invalid. They're very valid.

Instead, what I was expressing was that OP doesn't actually have those concerns, not that they're invalid.

I don't need it to write documents or emails for me. It mostly generates filler, which... nobody needs.

Most of the energy I put into code is about what it should do and how to make it clear to the next person, not typing. I was able to use it once to look up a complex SQL fix that I was having a hard time Googling the syntax on, but that's it.

Perhaps it would be useful if I was working in a language I'm not familiar with, BUT in that scenario I really need it to cite its sources, because that's exactly the case where I wouldn't know when it's making a mistake.

There's something useful here, but it's probably more like a library help desk meets a search engine on steroids. It would be pretty cool to run an AI on my laptop that knows my own code and notes where I can ask "I did something like this three years ago, go find it."

Said as someone who waits for the ability to self-host before doubling down on these tools.

A good old Google search followed by reasoning on what you have found is still the most valuable tool. Learn to sift through information, filter, ingest.

Also, OpenAI is not the only company in this market anymore. Google, Facebook and Microsoft have competing products, and we know the privacy track record of these companies.

I have an extreme take on this, since for me this applies to all "free" proprietary services, which I avoid as much as possible. The difference with AI tools is that they ask for a much deeper insight into your mind, so the profile they build can be far more accurate. This is the same reason I've never used traditional voice assistant tools either. I don't find them more helpful than doing web searches or home automation tasks manually, and I can at least be somewhat in control of my privacy. I might be deluding myself and making my life more difficult for no reason, but I can at least not give them my data voluntarily. This is why I'll always prefer self-hosting open source tools, over using a proprietary service.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35304261

I’m waiting for the whole thing to evolve enough to have self hosted stuff to run at home.

I can't be bothered to add an extra layer of bullshit into the already bullshit infested realm that is the internet.

I use it for re-writing content better, writing ideas, simplifying text (legal/verbose -- simplifying terms is a killer feature really) and context even though trust is limited of the output it is helpful.

I love the art / computer vision side of AI/ML. Though I only like to do that with tools on my machine than rely on a dataset or company that is very closed, that is harder to do with AI/ML because of the storage/processing needed.

I hate blackboxes and magic I don't have access to, though I am a big fan of stable unchanging input/output atomic apis, as long as I have access to the flow. The chat input/output is so simple it will win as it will never really have a breaking change. Until commercial AI/ML GPTs are more open in reality it can't be trusted to not be a trojan horse or trap. What happens when it goes away or the model changes or the terms change?

As far as company/commercial, Google seems to be the most open and Google Brain really started this whole thing with transformers.

Transformers, the T in GPT was invented at Google during Google Brain [1][2]. They made possible this round of progress.

> Transformers were introduced in 2017 by a team at Google Brain and are increasingly the model of choice for NLP problems, replacing RNN models such as long short-term memory (LSTM). The additional training parallelization allows training on larger datasets. This led to the development of pretrained systems such as BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), which were trained with large language datasets, such as the Wikipedia Corpus and Common Crawl, and can be fine-tuned for specific tasks.

Google also gave the public TensorFlow [3] and DeepDream [4] that really started the intense excitement of AI/ML. I was super interested when the AI art / computer vision side started to come up. The GANs for style transfer and stable diffusion are intriguing and euphoric almost in output.

In terms of GPT/chat, Bard or some iteration of it, will most likely win long term, though I wish it was just called Google Brain. Bard is a horrible name.

ChatGPT basically used Google Brain created AI tech, transformers. These were used to build ClosedGPT. For that reason it is NopeGPT. ChatGPT is really just datasets, which no one knows, these could swap at any time run some misinformation then swap the next day. This is data blackboxing and gaslighting at the up most level. Not only that it is largely funded by private sources and it could be some authoritarian money. Again, blackboxes create distrust.

Microsoft is trusting OpenAI and that is a risk. Maybe their goal is embrace, extend, extinguish here but it seems with Google and Apple that Microsoft may be a bit behind on this. Github Co-pilot is great though. Microsoft usually comes along later and make an accessible version. The AI/ML offerings on Azure are already solid. AI/ML is suited for large datasets so cloud companies will benefit the most, it also is very, very costly and this unfortunately keeps it in BigCo or wealthy only arenas for a while.

Google Brain and other tech is way more open already than "Open"AI.

ChatGPT/OpenAI just front ran the commercial side, but long term they aren't really innovating like Google is on this. They look like a leader from the marketing/pump but they are a follower.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Brain

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(machine_learning_...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TensorFlow

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepDream

My most productive is a therapy session with ChatGPT as therapist. I told it my values, my short term goals, and some areas in my life where I'd like to have more focus and areas where I would like to spend less time.

Some days we are retrospective and some days we are planning. My therapist gets me back on track, never judges, and has lots of motivational ideas for me. All aligned with my values and goals.

Last weekend, I went on a hike because ChatGPT told me to. My life is better if I just do what it says.

- the insight into your mind that a private for profit company gets is immense and potentially very damaging when weaponized (either through a “whoops we got hacked” moment or intentionally for the next level of adtech)

- chatgpt and other LLMs are known to hallucinate. What if it’s advice is wrong or makes you worse in the long term because it’s just regurgitating whatever at you?

Therapy isn't magic always-correct advice either. It's about shifting your focus, attitudes, thought patterns through social influence, not giving you the right advice on each and every step.

Even if it's just whatever, being heard out in a nonjudgmental manner, acknowledged, prompted to reflect, does a lot of good.

> chatgpt and other LLMs are known to hallucinate. What if it’s advice is wrong or makes you worse in the long term because it’s just regurgitating whatever at you?

As someone on a long-term therapy journey, I would be far less concerned about this. Therapy is rarely about doing exactly what one is told, it's about exploring your own thought processes. When a session does involve some piece of advice, or "do xyx for <benefit>", that is rarely enough to make it happen. Knowing something is good and actually doing it are two very different things, and it is exploring this delta that makes therapy valuable (in my personal experience).

At some point, as that delta shrinks and one starts actually taking beneficial actions instead of just talking, the advice becomes more of a reminder / an entry point to the ground one has already covered, not something that could be considered prescriptive like "take this pill for 7 days".

The point I'm trying to make is that if ChatGPT is the therapist, it doesn't make the person participating into a monkey who will just execute every command. Asking the bot to provide suggestions is more about jogging one's own thought processes than it is about carrying out specific tasks exactly as instructed.

I do wonder how someone who hasn't worked with a therapist would navigate this. I could see the value of a bot like this as someone who already understands how the process works, but I could absolutely see a bot being actively harmful if it's the only support someone ever seeks.

My first therapist was actively unhelpful due to lack of trauma-awareness, and I had to find someone else. So I could absolutely see a bot being unhelpful if used as the only therapeutic resource. On the flip side, ChatGPT might actually be more trauma-"aware" than some therapists, so who knows.

> Last weekend, I went on a hike because ChatGPT told me to. My life is better if I just do what it says.

I'm not sure how literally to take that sentence, but it's worrisome.

My stance here is based on an optimistic outlook that a person seeking therapeutic advice is by doing so demonstrating enough awareness that they’re probably capable of recognizing a good idea from a bad one.

I realize this can get into other territory and there are very problematic failure modes in the worst cases.

Regarding “My life is better if I just do what it says.”, I think concern is a fair reaction and I don’t think the author fully thought that through. But at the same time, it’s entirely possible that it’s true (for now).

If someone continues to follow advice that is clearly either bad or not working, then it becomes concerning.

But that was the other point of my anecdote. It became pretty clear to me what wasn’t working, even at a time that I wasn’t really sure how the whole thing worked.

Do you think you are somehow special? Just create a burner account and ask it what you want, everything it gets told, it's seen thousands of times over, does chatGPT or some data scientist somewhere really care that there is someone somewhere that is struggling with body issues, struggling in a relationship or struggling to find meaning in there lives? There are literally millions of people in the world with the same issue.

The only time it might be a little embarrassing is if this info got leaked to friends and family with my name attached to it, else I don't get the problem, it seems to me people have an over inflated sense of self importance, nobody cares.

If i worked at openAI and had full access to everyones chats, I would get bored within five minutes and not even want to read anymore.

Not the tool nor data scientists, but advertisers are salivating at the chance to even further improve their microtargetted campaigns. If they can deliver ads to you for a specific product _at the moment you need it_, their revenues will explode.

Consider this hypothetical conversation:

> Oh, Tina, I'm feeling hopeless today. Please cheer me up.

> Certainly, Michael! Here's a joke: ...

> Also, if you're feeling really sad, maybe you should try taking HappyPills(tm). They're a natural mood enhancer that can help when times get tough. Here's a link where you can buy some: ...

If you don't think such integrated ads will become a reality, take a look at popular web search result pages today. Search engines started by returning relevant results from their web index. Now they return ad-infested pages of promoted content. The same thing has happened on all social media sites. AI tools are the new frontier that will revolutionize how ads are served. To hell with all that.

Yes, obviously.

But that's not what I'm worried about personally. I'm worried about the weaponization of this data in the future, either from OpenAI's greed to create the next advertising money-printing machine or from the data leaking through a breach. And because the interface with ChatGPT is so "natural" and "human like", it's easy to trust it and talk to it like a friend divulging very personal information about yourself.

Imagine OpenAI (or whatever other AI) used the confidences you made to it or the specifics of your "therapy" sessions with it to get you to act in a certain way or buy certain things. Would you be comfortable with that? Well, that's irrelevant because they have the data already and can use it. Kinda like Cambdridge Analytica but on steroids because tailoring it to anyone's particular biases and way of thinking becomes trivial with ChatGPT and friends.

Seeing how cavalier OpenAI has been with last week's breach and how fast they've flipped from being apparently benevolent to what they are now. And it's only been a few months of ChatGPT being available to the public.

Not that much different from the current fingerprint techniques, it's just that on steroids but I don't understand the issue.

We don't know the potential for this nascent technology either. I'm personally very concerned about the potential for manipulating people on a very personal basis since the cost of doing so is cents with LLMs vs orders of magnitude more when using a troll farm (the "state of the art" until ChatGPT3+ came around)

Some of us just don't appreciate being manipulated and influenced to further someone else's agenda that is detrimental to ourselves I suppose.

It's scary how these services are being so casually adopted, even by tech-minded people. Sure, they're convenient _now_, but there's no guarantee how your data will be used in the future. If anything, we need to be much more privacy conscious today, given how much personal information we're likely to share.

Using it as a therapist is absolutely terrifying.

The best deception is one where the victim is self-motivated to believe it.

No one is going to actually read them, but try "ChatGPT-5, please compile a list of the ChatGPT-4 users most likely to [commit terrorism/subscribe to Hulu/etc]"

I'd be interested in how GPT answers that question.

Although i've been running a ChatGPT 4 space via hugging face that doesn't need a AI key or an account, so there is nothing linking it to me.

https://huggingface.co/spaces/yuntian-deng/ChatGPT4

There are a few you can find by searching ChatGPT4 if it gets busy, also this allows you to run GPT 4 for free which is only for plus members right now.

What if you talk to a human, and their advice is wrong or makes you worse off in the long term, because they're just repeating something they heard somewhere?

Here's my advice: Don't accept my advice blindly, humans make mistakes too.

In this discussion, a human has studied psychology and has diplomas or certifications to prove it, an ethics framework it must follow, and responsibility for its mistakes. ChatGPT has none of that, it just regurgitates something it got from the Internet's wisdom or something it invented altogether.

I'm not saying humans are never wrong, but at least their reasoning isn't a black box unlike ChatGPT and other LLMs.

Additionally there's something called the replication crisis in the social sciences (psychology included) which is basically to the effect of a major discovery that most of these "black box" studies can not be reproduced. When someone runs the same experiment the results are all different.

It goes to show that either many of the studies were fraudulent or statistical methodologies are flawed or both.

Given that chatGPT therapeutic data is ALSO derived from the same training data I would say it's ok to trust chatGPT as much as you would trust psychologists. Both have a lot of bullshit with nuggets of truth.

How exactly?

You currently cannot get a therapist to parachute into your life at a moment's notice to talk with for 5-10 minutes. (Presumably only the ultra-wealthy might have concierge therapists, but this is out of reach for 99% of people.) For the vast majority of people, therapy is a 1 hour session every few weeks. Those sessions also tend to cost a lot of money (or require jumping through insurance reimbursement hoops).

To keep the experience within healthy psychosocial bounds, I just keep in mind that I'm not talking with any kind of "real person", but rather the collective intelligence of my species.

I also keep in mind that it's a form of therapy that requires mostly my own pushing of it along, rather than the "therapist" knowing what questions to ask me in return. Sure, some of the feedback I get is more generic, and deep down I know it's just an LLM producing it, but the experience still feels like I'm checking in with some kind of real-ish entity who I'm able to converse with. Contrast this to the "flat" experience of using Google to arrive at an ad-ridden and ineffective "Top 10 Ways to Beat Procrastination" post. It's just not the same.

At the end of some of these "micro-sessions", I even ask GPT to put the insights/advice into a little poem or haiku, which it does in a matter of seconds. It's a superhuman ability that no therapist can compete with.

Imagine how much more we can remember therapeutic insights/advice if they are put into rhyme or song form. This is also helpful for children struggling with various issues.

ChatGPT therapy is a total game-changer for those reasons and more. The mental health field will need to re-examine treatment approaches, given this new modality of micro-therapy. Maybe 5-10 minute micro-sessions a few times per day is far superior than medication for many people. Maybe there's a power law where 80% of psych issues could be solved by much more frequent micro-therapeutic interactions. The world is about to find out.

*Edit: I am aware of the privacy concerns here, and look forward to using a locally-hosted LLM one day without those concern (to say nothing of the fact that a local LLM can blend in my own journal entries, conversations, etc for full personalization). In the meantime, I keep my micro-sessions relatively broad, only sharing the information needed for the "therapy genie" to gather enough context. I adjust my expectations about its output accordingly.

How do you start these micro sessions? What prompts do you use?

It just spouts out the same generic nonsense you get from googling something like that, things that are not actually helpful, anyone can come up with and is just written by a content farm.

have you found a different way to make it useful?

I think the idea is addressed by others with regard to LLMs, it seems to be a better sidekick if you sorta already know the answer, but you want help clarifying the direction while removing the fatigue of getting there alone.

I agree though, despite this, it does go on rants. I just hit stop generating and modify the prompt.

"Give me something I can do for X minutes a day and I'll check back with you every Y days and you can give me the next steps"

"Give me the next concrete step I can take"

But I am curious about this, is it the case that ChatGPT's training is too generic or is it just a case that most problems are fairly simple and we already know the answers? Not talking about technical things here obviously, more to do with our mental health / self improvement.

This sounds straight out of a dystopian science-fiction story.

It’s a matter of time until these systems use your trust against you to get to buy <brand>. And consumerism is the best case scenario; straight manipulation and radicalisation aren’t a big jump from there. The lowest you are in life, the more susceptible you’ll be to blindly follow it’s biased output which you have no ideia where it came from.

Well of course, if people use LLMs instead of google for advice, google has to make money somehow. We used to blindly click on the #1 result which was often an ad and now we shall blindly follow what a LLM suggests for us to do.

I asked it to give me advice on some issues I was having and just went from there.

If you have time I'd love to hear how you approach this and maintain context so you can have successful conversations over a long period of time. Long even meaning a week or so... Let alone a month or longer

It still seems to give good advice. Today it built an itinerary for indoor activities (raining here) that aligned with some short-term goals of mine. No issues.

Huh, that's curious because everytime I ask it about some personal issue it tells me that I should try going to therapy.

I say "My values are [ ], and I want to make sure when I do things they are aligned."

And then later, I will say "I did this today, how does that align with the values I mentioned earlier?" [and we talk]

I am most definitely not qualified for one of those prompt engineering jobs. Lol. I am typing English into a chat box. No A/B testing, etc. If I don't like what it does I give it a rule to not do that anymore by saying "Please don't [ ] when you reply to me."

There is almost definitely a better way, but I'm just chatting with it. Asking it to roleplay or play a game seems to work. It loves to follow rules inside the context of "just playing a game".

This is probably too abstract to be meaningful though.

> And then later, I will say "I did this today, how does that align with the values I mentioned earlier?" [and we talk]

That's a prompt; and one I don't think I would have tried, even from your first post.

Prompting overall is still quite experimental. There are patterns that generally work, but you often have to just try several different approaches. If you find a prompt works well, it's worth sharing.

Also, I expect a lot of the value here to come from just putting your thoughts and feelings into words. It would be like journaling on steroids.

I'd pick a human over an AI every time for therapy but I'd also pick an AI over nothing.