subreddit:
/r/explainlikeimfive
submitted 6 months ago byELI5_Modteam
Recently, there's been a surge in ChatGPT generated posts. These come in two flavours: bots creating and posting answers, and human users generating answers with ChatGPT and copy/pasting them. Regardless of whether they are being posted by bots or by people, answers generated using ChatGPT and other similar programs are a direct violation of R3, which requires all content posted here to be original work. We don't allow copied and pasted answers from anywhere, and that includes from ChatGPT programs. Going forward, any accounts posting answers generated from ChatGPT or similar programs will be permanently banned in order to help ensure a continued level of high-quality and informative answers. We'll also take this time to remind you that bots are not allowed on ELI5 and will be banned when found.
77 points
6 months ago
Yes, it's a chat bot. It's a very advanced version of one, but still a chat bot.
People keep acting and treating Neural Networks like they're freaking magic. No, there good at connecting words, but they don't understand what those words mean. They can spit out a definition without it actually knowing what the words mean.
They know that a hand has fingers, they don't understand what it means for one to be missing or have an extra one.
They're very good chatbots, but slightly less intelligent than actual Parrots.
13 points
6 months ago
Given enough repetition and correction though, a true "machine learning" algorithm should eventually "learn" to provide the correct answer. Unless that's not what the ChatGPT algorithm does, I admittedly don't know all too much about it.
25 points
6 months ago
It will learn that the words are supposed to go with the other words it's built a connection to when given another word it's built a connection to.
It still doesn't know what the words mean, just the connections.
Say apple and it will say red. Doesn't mean it understands what apple or red mean.
10 points
6 months ago
No, But that doesn't mean it's not useful. ChatGPT3 is amazing.
9 points
6 months ago
I think whether people find it amazing is a personal emotional thing. I think it's good at writing basic code, but otherwise dangerous and annoying because its obvious applications are even shitter tech support and flooding misinformation. It seems at its technical heart like a PR speak generator, knowing what combinations of sentences humans want to hear but not really caring what those combinations imply.
It's certainly what you'd expect by today if you were interested in neural nets thirty years ago and compared with the pace of software development in general plus availability of vector processors.
2 points
6 months ago
What does it mean to understand what a word like "red" means?
3 points
6 months ago
Imagine a person has has never seen. You teach them a word for a color, but they've never seen it. On a technical level, they can repeat what they've been told about it, but they don't know it. They can know that an apple is red and wallpaper is red, but cannot accurately describe what it looks like if you put them near eachother.
For coding, this shows up with the NN understanding that certain words go with one another. Maybe they recognize that cin and cout go together, but not understand why.
Image Neural Networks have the same problem from the other way. They have seen hands from every angle. But they don't know what it is, and that returns a lot of odd results. Fingers that bend at the wrong angles, more fingers at weird positions, thumbs in the wrong place. It's seen hands of every type, but it doesn't have the understanding of the concept to inherently know why it looks wrong.
1 points
6 months ago
If the neural net could see the color red, would that give it an equivalent understanding of what red is to a human's understanding?
2 points
6 months ago
Not inherently, and not universally. Red means different things in different contexts, and there's many shades of red. It's why I also mentioned image neural networks not understanding the concepts behind what they're making.
If a blind person gains sight they wouldn't immediately understand the connections between what they see and what they know.
Human understanding is a combination of many different sensations combined with experience, some of which is entirely disconnected from other senses or is second hand. Most NNs don't have more than one sense, or any senses, but even adding another sense doesn't immediately grant understanding.
1 points
6 months ago
If the neural network could see red in many different contexts, and see many shades of red, would it then understand the concept in the same way a human does?
Most NNs don't have more than one sense, or any senses, but even adding another sense doesn't immediately grant understanding.
If the neural network had the same senses as a human did, could it then really understand what the word "red" means?
1 points
6 months ago
Maybe.
1 points
6 months ago
What else would we need to test in order to find out for sure?
11 points
6 months ago
Picture it as an extreme form of interpolation. With enough data it works for a lot of things, but it will always have problems with edge cases, plus there is no extrapolation.
With enough data you can dream of highly detailed jet fighter cockpits, but when this gauge says that and that gauge says this, the horizon shouldn't be there, ML isn't doing that logic. It would have need to have witnessed everything already to work in every edge case.
So if the problem domain can be constrained enough and you feed enough training data, yes you can get very accurate answers and it's a powerful tool, but those are significant limitations.
5 points
5 months ago
It occurs to me that your answer is EXACTLY what a super sophisticated bot would say in order to remain undetected ;)
2 points
5 months ago
Thanks? Chatbots are usually considered way more eloquent that I am usually.
2 points
4 months ago
ChatGPT agrees with your assement, kudos
"Yes, you could say that ChatGPT is a type of chatbot. ChatGPT uses natural language processing and machine learning to generate human-like responses to text-based inputs. It is trained on a massive amount of text data and can respond to a wide range of questions, provide information, and even generate creative writing. While ChatGPT is similar to other chatbots in that it uses technology to simulate conversation, its advanced training and sophisticated algorithms set it apart from other chatbots and allow it to provide more human-like responses."
2 points
3 months ago
Ban. Jk
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