Uhhhhh

[telophase]

So apparently there are people who treat ChatGPT as a search engine.

CharGPT is not a search engine. It is a method for generating things that sound like human-generated results. It is not concerned with the accuracy of the results.

See someone asking r/AskHistorians about references from ChatGPT: https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11u21ie/the_consensus_from_a_brief_search_of_previous/

Comments

[yhlee]

HAHAHAHAHA

I realize there are many ways in which this is terrible and bad, but I personally can't singlehandedly FIX the terrible and bad, so I'm left at cynical black humor laughter.

[telophase]

I’ve heard of scientists being contacted and asked for papers that don’t exist because ChatGPT came up with them, but this is the first time I’ve encountered one in the wild, as it were.

[torachan]

Yeah, I guess it's a huge thing? Like people really think that since it's "AI" they can just ask it questions and they will get real actual factual answers! So that's a fun thing.

[helen_keeble]

There’s a software company that’s had to put a big disclaimer on their website that their API does not, in fact, do what ChatGPT claims it does.

(IIRC they have some kind of location API for IP lookup; ChatGPT will confidently state it lets you look up someone’s current location from their mobile phone number, and even produce completely bogus code samples showing how to do it)

[helen_keeble]

To be fair, Bing actually put ChatGPT into their search engine*, so the confusion is understandable!

* without in any way making it an actual search engine; it still doesn’t search the internet, just gives responses based on its training data

[trobadora]

Yeah, I've seen that basically since ChatGPT first turned up. It's really worrying me.

[jreynoldsward]

The escalating cascade of writers who seem to think ChatGPT is a good thing just confounds me. Do that many people really struggle with generating ideas, developing plot, and--I don't know--changing POV amongst other things, to the degree that they wholeheartedly embrace the use of a novel technology to do these tasks?

So far, the highest and best use I can imagine for the device is all about the tech writing side of things. In my former work as a special education caseworker and teacher, I could see where ChatGPT would be useful for standardizing the creation of necessary documents like Individual Education Plans, for example. Not only would it save the time needed to craft a decent one, but it would also eliminate the woefully bad IEPs.

[telophase]

Ugggghhghghghgh. I know someone who's got a coworker that's fairly excited about AI code generation (or "generation"), but the person I know has to gently push back and point out the errors all the time. :/

[helen_keeble]

I suspect AI generated code looks good to amateur software engineers in the same way AI art looks good to non-artists.

(Did you see that Twitter thread from a kimono historian ripping apart the geisha images Midjourney is using to show off the “realism” of v5?)

[telophase]

The researchers involved in creating it are, I think, falling victim to the assumption that people understand far more about their work than people generally do, so they think their disclaimers are effective.

Before anyone else posts it, yes, relevant XKCD.

[telophase]

Yeah. And the legal issues haven't yet shaken out--I encountered a self-published author on Reddit who was very excited because he didn't have to pay money-grubbing artists who had the GALL to price-gouge for copyright licensing for HIS* intellectual property, and was convinced that because he created the prompts, the resulting artwork belonged to him. I pointed out that no, it wasn't that cut-and-dried until it had been into a court of law, and that courts had once before decided in favor of a non-human, but he was, er, very stringent at me that that was not the case for HIS work, so I blocked him and moved on.

*Honestly, no idea the gender but I'm making an educated guess here. XD

[telophase]

I've poked at ChatGPT a lot for plot generation, and it's really good at producing utterly average short plot synopses, as you'd expect. I think it would be useful for the sort of writer who wants to do self-pubbed rapid release in targeted genres of romance and thriller and is less concerned about quality than hitting the tropes and going for readers looking for popcorn for their id. And they're not going to hit the HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! levels of id-popcorn that things like Ice Planet Barbarians, Morning Star Milking Farm and The Last Hour of Gann do.

Just last night I was trying to get it to come up with some amusing variants on Warhammer 40K romance, and other than the first 3 entries, they were all pretty boring. WARHAMMER. ROMANCE. BORING. It should be ridiculous and pulpy, but it can't produce that because it can't do anything that isn't derivative by definition.

I bet there's plenty of people generating plots and characters with ChatGPT and farming them out to writers on Fiverr, then dumping the results on Amazon right now.

In case anyone reading this is curious, here's the only three entertaining plots it generated:

Make up examples of back cover copy from romance novels set in the Warhammer 40K universe, please.

Sure, here are some examples of back cover copy from hypothetical romance novels set in the Warhammer 40K universe:

"In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war...and unexpected love. When Inquisitor Kiera and Space Marine Captain Marcus are forced to work together to prevent an Ork invasion, they discover a mutual attraction that threatens to compromise their duty and their very souls. Will they succumb to their forbidden desires or stay true to their calling?"

"As the Imperium fights a losing battle against the forces of Chaos, one woman stands alone to face her destiny. Sister Superior Lucia is a warrior of unparalleled skill and determination, but when she meets the enigmatic Eldar Farseer Yriel, her loyalty to the Emperor is put to the test. Can they find love amidst the chaos of war, or will their different paths lead them to destruction?"

"When planetary governor's daughter Celestine meets Ork warboss Gorgutz, she knows she should hate him for all the destruction his kind has wrought. But there's something about his brutish charm that draws her in, and soon she finds herself torn between duty to her family and the passion that burns within her. Can their love survive in a universe that is constantly tearing them apart?"

Please note that these are entirely fictional examples and are not affiliated with Games Workshop or the Warhammer 40K universe in any way.

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war...and unexpected love.: The best thing it genreated by far. XD

[telophase]

No, I missed that thread!

AI-generated art is flooding stock photo sites right now, and it's annoying because it looks good in the thumbnail, which is the point where I hit it to add it to a list of favorites for later use, but when I look at the larger size, it's AI. And while I will have no problem using AI-generated stuff as elements once all the copyright mess of the training sets is worked through and settled, right now I don't want to accidentally infringe on anyone else's rights.

That's why, even though I don't mind my artwork being used in training datasets, I still mark all my Artstation posts as "No AI"--I'm using assets from other people whose stance I don't know, and I can't ethically give permission for their works to be used that way.

And, ugh, there's a couple of people on Artstation Marketplace flooding the Reference section with AI-generated art, without marking it as AI-Generated the way Artstation rules say you have to. When I get bored I go to Artstation and report them until I can't stand it any longer. (I think they're claiming that their work to clean up the artwork makes it no longer AI-generated but that's bullshit, IMO.)

[dhampyresa]

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war...and unexpected love.

Brings a tear to my eye :') love truely conquers all

[dhampyresa]

Oh noooooooooo

[trobadora]

Yeah, I think you made the right call with the gender there. *g*

[myrialux]

https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/21/ai_assistants_bad_code/

It's a small study, but the big takeaways are AI-assisted devs produced worse code, but _were more confident in it_. Ugh.

[helen_keeble]

Kimono thread:
https://twitter.com/Ninetail_foxQ/status/1636924016492699650?t=I2LiRnvqPRAlyxcBiErPoA&s=09

I was most amused that the AI dressed its geisha as corpses. XD

[helen_keeble]

I’m be been playing around with it because I’ve seen a number of authors enthusing about it for the purposes of creating blurbs and marketing copy. Maybe I’m just not figuring out how to prompt it correctly, but so far the results are deeply uninspiring. It’s very good at producing bland-as-porridge, predictable text.

I’ve also tried giving it chunks of my manuscript and asking it to rewrite/edit/continue, and again, it rapidly devolves to the most bland and insipid text possible.

But this is an AI exclusively trained on internet data; I _am_ somewhat concerned about the long term implications of the UK passes a proposed copyright adjustment that would allow AIs to be trained on copyrighted books without permission. But I do think that an AI is always going to struggle to product the _unexpected_, which to me is vital for good fiction.

[telophase]

Oh good lord. XD And the replies! "Nobody's taking AI as depicting reality!" Uh, I beg to differ, sir or madam....