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1. Embed this notice
   Matt Campbell (matt@toot.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:10:52 JST Matt Campbell

   I'm getting tired of simplistic, indignant characterizations of generative AI like this one: https://social.ericwbailey.website/@eric/111584809768617532 "a spicy autocomplete powered by theft that melts the environment to amplify racism and periodically, arbitrarily lie"

   It's a tool like any other; it can be used for good as well as bad. Yes, the copyright issue is real, but we can presumably overcome it by using models whose developers are more scrupulous about their sources of training data, not throwing out the whole thing.

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:10:38 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison
     • Glyph
     • Maria Bustillos
     • Luis Villa
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @glyph @luis_in_brief @simon @matt @danilo @maria That claim sounds sus. I could see it being the case with poor sampling (which is often what you're stuck with for this kind of study), but there is a large enough literate/educated population for some appreciable % to recognize these things.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:10:39 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison
     • Rich Felker
     • Maria Bustillos
     • Luis Villa
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @luis_in_brief @dalias @simon @matt @danilo @maria I personally know a couple of researchers who have studied digital literacy and disinformation and based on what they have told me about their work, at a population scale, approximately 0% of users have any sense of what the meta-context of a web page and browser chrome are telling them about the provenance of information.

     Watching google’s “what is a web browser” vox pop videos is eye-opening.

   • Embed this notice
     Luis Villa (luis_in_brief@social.coop)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:10:40 JST Luis Villa

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison
     • Rich Felker
     • Maria Bustillos
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @dalias @simon @matt @danilo @maria “which the user has a mental model for potentially being a party they do or don't trust” lol/sob, they absolutely don’t have that mental model, that’s why so much disinfo was quite effective pre-llm.

     There’s a fair critique that the use of first person pronouns and conversational style make it even harder for people to do that analysis. But it was pretty hard for most people already.

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:10:41 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison
     • Maria Bustillos
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @simon @matt @danilo @maria I disagree mostly with the comparison to search. Each search result is already attributed to a source which the user has a mental model for potentially being a party they do or don't trust. That is, except the featured snippets, which are an evil precursor to LLMs and are presented as Truth on the query with source missing (before) or buried and misattributed (now) to claim a legitimate source is saying something wrong (due to truncation/misformatting) in the snippet.

   • Embed this notice
     Simon Willison (simon@fedi.simonwillison.net)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:10:43 JST Simon Willison

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • Maria Bustillos
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @dalias @matt @danilo @maria maybe there are people out there who can't learn from LLMs because they don't have the ability to responsible consume unreliable information, but I would hope that everyone can learn information skills that overcome that - otherwise they're already in trouble from exposure to Google search

   • Embed this notice
     Simon Willison (simon@fedi.simonwillison.net)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:10:44 JST Simon Willison

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • Maria Bustillos
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @dalias @matt @danilo @maria I genuinely think that the idea that "LLMs get things confidently wrong, so they're useless for learning" is misguided

     I can learn a TON from an unreliable teacher, because it encourages me to engage more critically with the information and habitually consult additional sources

     It's rare to find any single source of information that's truly infallible

   • Embed this notice
     Simon Willison (simon@fedi.simonwillison.net)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:10:45 JST Simon Willison

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • Maria Bustillos
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @dalias @matt @danilo @maria same way I do with random information I find on Google, or stuff that a confident but occasionally confidently wrong teacher might tell me

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:10:46 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @simon @matt @danilo How do you distinguish the 90% from the 10%?

   • Embed this notice
     Simon Willison (simon@fedi.simonwillison.net)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:10:47 JST Simon Willison

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @dalias @matt @danilo that's not true. 90% of the output I get from LLMs is genuinely useful to me. Comparing it to a magic 8-ball doesn't work for me, at all.

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:10:48 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @simon @matt @danilo The core problem here, and I don't know how to solve it, is extreme ignorance about information provenance in these people going by their "lived experience" with AI. What AI produces is no less nonsense than the output of a magic 8 ball. The process by which it's produced has nothing to do with the truth of the statement.

   • Embed this notice
     Simon Willison (simon@fedi.simonwillison.net)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:10:50 JST Simon Willison

     in reply to

     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @matt @danilo "And so the problem with saying “AI is useless,” “AI produces nonsense,” or any of the related lazy critique is that destroys all credibility with everyone whose lived experience of using the tools disproves the critique, harming the credibility of critiquing AI overall." 💯

   • Embed this notice
     Matt Campbell (matt@toot.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:10:51 JST Matt Campbell

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     I'll mention again a more balanced take from @danilo that I posted the other day: https://redeem-tomorrow.com/the-average-ai-criticism-has-gotten-lazy-and-thats-dangerous

     I also like @simon's writing on generative AI.

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:13:38 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison
     • Maria Bustillos
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @simon @matt @danilo @maria Sadly I think a lot of ppl still insist on seeing this as a bug that's on the verge of being overcome rather than the fundamental nature of the tool...

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Simon Willison (simon@fedi.simonwillison.net)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:13:39 JST Simon Willison

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • Maria Bustillos
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @dalias @matt @danilo @maria I encourage people who are getting started with it to try and find a situation where it confidently gives them a clearly incorrect result

     My hope is that the earlier you see it get something obviously wrong, the quicker you can form a mental model that it's not "intelligent" in the human sense of the word

   • Embed this notice
     Simon Willison (simon@fedi.simonwillison.net)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:13:40 JST Simon Willison

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • Maria Bustillos
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @dalias @matt @danilo @maria one of the biggest challenges of this technology is that it looks easy to use, but that's actually very deceptive - it's extremely hard to use well

     Using it to get great results in a responsible way requires a ton of practice and knowledge about how the tech works, which is difficult to teach people because so much of it depends on developing intuition about what works reliably and what doesn't

   • Embed this notice
     Simon Willison (simon@fedi.simonwillison.net)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:13:42 JST Simon Willison

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • Maria Bustillos
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @dalias @matt @danilo @maria this is why I think it's so important to dispel the idea that these things are superintelligences

     They're spicy autocomplete... but it turns out spicy autocomplete can be incredibly useful if you take the time to learn how to use it effectively, which isn't nearly as easy as it looks at first

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:13:43 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison
     • Maria Bustillos
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @simon @matt @danilo @maria Do you understand that a lot of people are not doing that, but taking the output as the result of thought by a superintelligence?

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:16:19 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison
     • Maria Bustillos
     • Luis Villa
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @simon @matt @luis_in_brief @danilo @maria I love how it's declared itself to be "informative and objective" 🤣 🤡

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Simon Willison (simon@fedi.simonwillison.net)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:16:21 JST Simon Willison

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • Maria Bustillos
     • Luis Villa
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @matt @luis_in_brief @dalias @danilo @maria I just built one as an experiment: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-bno1OSvBy-objective-advisor

   • Embed this notice
     Matt Campbell (matt@toot.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:16:22 JST Matt Campbell

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison
     • Rich Felker
     • Maria Bustillos
     • Luis Villa
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @luis_in_brief @dalias @simon @danilo @maria It would be interesting to see an LLM tuned for instruction-following, particularly iterative instruction following taking prior context into account, that is specifically trained not to emulate a person, e.g. no first-person pronouns.

   • Embed this notice
     Luis Villa (luis_in_brief@social.coop)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:17:20 JST Luis Villa

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison
     • Rich Felker
     • Maria Bustillos
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @simon @dalias @matt @danilo @maria

     me: AI regulation is a fiendish problem; we'll be lucky if we get out of our immediate local minima in my lifetime; we need to be patient and thoughtful
     also me: implement this proposal tomorrow https://crookedtimber.org/2023/05/22/ban-llms-using-first-person-pronouns/

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Simon Willison (simon@fedi.simonwillison.net)'s status on Saturday, 16-Dec-2023 06:17:21 JST Simon Willison

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • Maria Bustillos
     • Luis Villa
     • Danilo Campos 🇵🇷

     @luis_in_brief @dalias @matt @danilo @maria the first person pronoun thing is such a huge problem, I really wish that hadn't become the standard for how these tools work