(2022-12-14) Hoel The Banality Of Chatgpt

Erik Hoel: The banality of ChatGPT. Despite being the culmination of a century-long dream, no better word describes the much-discussed output of OpenAI’s ChatGPT than the colloquial “mid.” (middle mind)

Related tweet: The semantic apocalypse is here and most people don't even know it yet. AI inflates away meaning by saturating human creativity with an infinite counterfeit supply. I Commented multi.

ChatGPT is by far the most impressive AI the public has had access to. It can basically pass the Turing test—conversationally, it acts much like a human.

While technically ChatGPT doesn’t pass the official Turing test, it turns out that’s only because the original Turing test is about subterfuge—the AI must pretend to be a human, and the question is whether a good human judge could ever tell the difference via just talking to it.

As a practical matter, Turing’s test turns out to be a bad benchmark for AI

Here’s Turing: make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent, chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.

Why 70%? Because that’s the ballpark estimate Turing gives for one human passing for another in the imitation game. Specifically, in his own example, a man pretending to be a woman

The issue with Turing’s test is not that it’s wrong, but that the standards are far too high: after all, the judge is supposed to be an expert, and trying to ferret out the answer as quickly as possible—they are in the mode of an inquisitor. With an expert and suspicious judge, it is incredibly hard to pass the imitation game

ChatGPT fails Turing’s test, but only because it admits it’s an AI! That is, only because its answers are either too good, too fast, or too truthful

So let us carve out, from within Turing’s original idea of an imitation game, what we actually care about. These are the cases where the judge doesn’t know that they’re a judge. This is the most common situation we find ourselves in

would a person have a greater than 70% chance of guessing that the Twitter account / Reddit account / customer that they’re interacting with over a couple dozen back-and-forths, (e.g., about five minutes of conversation) is really ChatGPT in disguise? My guess is no.

ChatGPT is impressive because it passes what we care about when it comes to the Turing test

Yet my reaction is one of disappointment. Just as Hannah Arendt reckoned with “the banality of evil” so we must reckon with “the banality of AI.” For when talking to ChatGPT I was undeniably, completely, unchangeably, bored.

First, ChatGPT loves to add disclaimers to what it writes—things are always “impactful” and the effects are always “wide-ranging” and it always jumps to note that “not everyone agrees,” and so on, until you’re yawning yourself to death. ChatGPT also loves cliches, almost as much as it loves contentless sentences that add nothing but padding to its reply

Of course, there’s plenty of fun stuff you can do with a celestial bureaucrat at your side. Like asking it for recipes, most of which seem pretty good

maybe some future celestial bureaucrat can teach children subjects one-on-one, acting like the aristocratic tutors of old. But even so, to give more correct answers, to give replies that are academically standardized and checkable, it must necessarily become even more constrained and typified.

I don’t want to live in a world where most text is written by AI.

The dawning disinterestedness I found within that chat window came on like divine providence for the human race—it was the sight of rescue orange deep in the trough of a wave, lost to sight, and then resurfacing gloriously, and, against all expectation, just within reach.