Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

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> I'm sure it can be influenced easily.

Maybe. Right now this reads like a glorified shopping list. It's coherent, but actually sounding human also requires a theory of mind.

E.g. I explain here why it's possible for written statements to be objectively insightful, informative, interesting, or funny, but objectively in a way that's relational to other information or beliefs. The implication being that statements are only going to seem subjectively funny or insightful (or whatever) to others who have that knowledge or those beliefs, which means that you can't reliably create those subjective experiences in a reader without having some sort of theory of mind for them.

I guess you can create content that's funny or insightful relative to that content itself, but that's not especially useful. It's entertaining at the time, but the experience is more like seeing a movie that you laugh a lot during but then leave and are kind of like what was the point? It's an empty experience because it wasn't transformative.

I definitely don't think it's impossible, but I also don't think it's a matter of just adding a couple more if-else statements.

https://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2010/06/how-writin...

> Maybe. Right now this reads like a glorified shopping list. It's coherent, but actually sounding human also requires a theory of mind.

I'm going to call this goalpost shifting. This article is better writing than some % of humans, theory of mind or otherwise. The AI has comfortably surpassed Timecube-level writing and is entering the pool of passes-for-a-human.

'Sounds human' is a spectrum that starts with the mentally ill and goes up to the best writers in human history.

> I'm going to call this goalpost shifting.

That's completely fair. On the other hand, without a theory of mind it can't really educate or inspire people, the only thing it can do is maybe trick them about the authorship of something. But once people learn the techniques for identifying this kind of writing, it can't even do that anymore. To me this is like the front end of something, but it still needs a back end.

Don't get me wrong, it's super cool research and seems like a huge step forward, and I'm excited to see where it goes. But I also don't see this AI running a successful presidential campaign or whatever, at least within the next couple years.

On the other hand, without a theory of mind it can't really educate or inspire people

I wouldn't agree with that, either. How often have we heard of someone gaining useful insights by considering ideas that were misapplied or just plain wrong? Entire branches of physics have evolved that way. As far as successful presidential campaigns are concerned... well, let's not even go there.

If there's such a thing as a 'theory of mind', it applies to the reader, not the writer.

I think I disagree.

For example, I delayed in writing this comment because the cat was on my lap, and I couldn't fit the laptop and the cat both. You get that. I know you do, even if you don't own a cat, and even if you're reading this on a phone or a desktop.

GPT-3 does not understand about the cat. To GPT-3, they're just words and phrases that occur in the vicinity of each other with certain probability distributions. As a result, it can't write something and know that there's something there in your mind for it to connect to.

Cyc would handle the bit about the cat differently. It would ask "Did you mean cat-the-mammal, cat-the-Caterpillar-stock-symbol, or cat-the-ethernet-cable-classification?" It has categories, and some notion of which words fit in each category, but it still doesn't understand what's going on.

But you the human understand, because you have a lap, and you've at least seen a cat on a lap.

> But you the human understand, because you have a lap, and you've at least seen a cat on a lap.

You really think GPT-3 never came across a comment about a cat in lap? 50% of all the pictures on the internet are cats sitting on people. GPT-3 doesn't need to understand it to echo this common knowledge.

Airplanes don't look like birds at all but they do fly.

I don't see how any number of comments about cats in laps can allow it to synthesize the following logical chain: cat-on-lap -> pauli exclusion principle -> laptop NOT on lap -> laptop awkward to reach -> delayed comment

It made me consider: - The existence of this model I hadn't heard of - Bitcoin (sigh) - Testing it out on a forum, trying to become a well known poster - picking a forum with many different types of posters - some of which you dislike

And that got me thinking about what I could do with this thing, whether I should, what I wanted to try out...

So the BS random ideas were still inspiring a bit.

I think the issue is that text doesn't exist in a vacuum, but the corpus that the model is learning from does. A piece of human writing exists for a particular reason - to persuade, to inform, to ask a question, etc - and its value is judged on its ability to perform that task. But that's not a quality that is evident from the text itself, only from looking at the world outside the text. This suggests to me some limits on this kind of passive self-supervised approach. Perhaps it could be improved by augmenting the text with other forms of data? For instance predicting video from text and vice versa. But I think that to learn a true "theory of mind", it needs to use text like an agent - to influence its environment, not merely predict it.

It could also be a result of training data. If every page is weighted equally, you'd expect SEO spam and even autogenerated content to far surpass high quality content in volume.

I would like to see a GPT model where training data is weighted by credibility / authority (e.g. using Pagerank).

My understanding is that GPT-2 was actually trained on a dataset that was designed to avoid those pitfalls. They followed all the links posted to Reddit that had more than a couple karma, under the theory that the content was at least slightly interesting to some actual humans, as opposed to a giant blob of search keywords or what have you.

>Right now this reads like a glorified shopping list. It's coherent, but actually sounding human also requires a theory of mind.

What if the ultimate theory of mind turns out to be that consciousness is an illusion and nothing separates us from a sufficiently sophisticated markov process.

>What if the ultimate theory of mind turns out to be that consciousness is an illusion and nothing separates us from a sufficiently sophisticated markov process.

Conscious experience would still exist (see cogito ergo sum, Chalmers, etc). If we were to be shown we're just Markov processes, that wouldn't disprove the existence of conscious experience. Just like confabulation, a misleading experience is still an experience.

What it would disprove is any sense of agency.

"objectively ...funny" strikes me as a contradiction in terms; concepts like humor, insight, and interest are fundamentally subjective, dependent by definition on a subject's consciousness and expectations

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