That is a such a wild claim. People like the output of LLMs so much that ChatGPT is the fastest growing app ever. It and other AI apps like Perplexity are now beginning to challenge Google’s search dominance.
Sure, probably not a lot of people would go out and buy a novel or collection of poetry written by ChatGPT. But that doesn’t mean the output is unpleasant to consume. It pretty undeniably produces clear and readable summaries and explanations.
While people seem to love the output of their own queries they seem to hate the output of other people's queries, so maybe what people actually love is to interact with chatbots.
If people loved LLM outputs in general then Google, OpenAI and Anthropic would be in the business of producing and selling content.
Listening or trying to read other peoples chats with these things is like listening to somebody describe a dream. It’s just not that interesting most of the time. It’s remarkable for the person experiencing it but it is deeply personal.
After all this hype, they still can't do text to speech properly. Pause at the wrong part of the sentence all the time.
Google used to be interested in making sure you clicked either the paid link or the top link in the results, but for a few years now they'd prefer that a user doesn't even click a link after a search (at least to a non-Google site)
If somebody writes a design or a report, you expect that they’ve put in the time and effort to make sure it is correct and well thought out.
If you then find the person actually just had ChatGPT generate it and didn’t put any effort into editing it and checking for correctness, then that is very infuriating.
They are essentially farming out the process of creating the document to AI and farming out the process of reviewing it to their colleagues. So what is their job then, exactly?
These are tools, not a replacement for human thought and work. Maybe someday we can just have ChatGPT serve as an engineer or a lawyer, but certainly not today.
The inundation of verbose, low SNR text and documents. Maybe someone put thought into all of those words. Maybe they vibed it into existence with a single prompt and it’s filled with irrelevant dot points and vague, generic observations.
There is no way to know which you’re dealing with until you read it, or can make assumptions based on who wrote it.
The people using ChatGPT like its output enough when they're the ones reading it.
The people reading ChatGPT output that other people asked for generally don't like it. Especially if it's not disclosed up front.
While technically correct it came to the wrong conclusions about the best path forward and inevitably hamstrung the project.
I only discovered this later when attempting to fix the mess and having my own chat with an LLM and getting mysteriously similar responses.
The problem was that the assumptions made when asking the LLM were incorrect.
LLMs do not think independently and do not have the ability to challenge your assumptions or think laterally. (yet, possibly ever, one that does may be a different thing).
Unfortunately, this still makes them as good as or better than a very large portion of the population.
I get pissed off not because of the new technology or the use of the LLM, but the lack of understanding of the technology and the laziness with which many choose to deliver the results of these services.
I am more often mad at the person for not doing their job than I am at the use of a model, the model merely makes it easier to hide the lack of competence.
Yep.
More seriously, you described a great example of one of the challenges we haven't addressed. LLM output masquerades as thoughtful work products and wastes people's time (or worse tanks a project, hurts people, etc).
Now my job reviewing work is even harder because bad work has fewer warning signs to pick up on. Ugh.
I hope that your workplace developed a policy around LLM use that addressed the incident described. Unfortunately I think most places probably just ignore stuff like this in the faux scramble to "not be left behind".
It IS possible for a LLM to challenge your assumptions, as its training material may include critical thinking on many subjects.
The helpful assistant, being almost by definition a sycophant, cannot.
Particularly on the challenging your assumptions part is where I think LLMs fail currently, though I won't pretend to know enough about how to even resolve that; but right now, I can put whatever nonsense I want into ChatGPT and it will happily go along telling me what a great idea that is. Even on the remote chance it does hint that I'm wrong, you can just prompt it into submission.
None of the for-profit AI companies are going to start letting their models tell users they're wrong out of fear of losing users (people generally don't like to be held accountable) but ironically I think it's critically important that LLMs start doing exactly that. But like you said, the LLM can't think so how can it determine what's incorrect or not, let alone if something is a bad idea or not.
Interesting problem space, for sure, but unleashing these tools to the masses with their current capabilities I think has done, and is going to continue to do more harm than good.
However, whether or not people like it is almost irrelevant. The thing that matters is not whether economics likes it.
At least so far, it looks like economics absolutely loves LLMs: Why hire expensive human customer support when you can just offload 90% of the work to a computer? Why pay expensive journalists when you can just have the AI summarize it? Why hire expensive technical writers to document your code when you can just give it to the AI and check the regulatory box with docs that are good enough?
Some people who hate LLMs are absolutely convinced everyone else hates them. I've talked with a few of them.
I think it's a form of filter bubble.
And that was 18 months ago.
Yes, believe it or not, people eventually wake up and realize slop is slop. But like everything else with LLM development, tech is trying to brute force it on people anyway.
You article isn’t making the point you seem to think it is.
"Here's what chatGPT said about..."
I don't like that, either.
I love the LLM for answering my own questions, though.
I have seen people use "here's what chatGPT" said almost exclusively unironically, as if anyone else wants humans behaving like agents for chatbots in the middle of other people's discussion threads. That is to say, they offer no opinion or critical thought of their own, they just jump into a conversation with a wall of text.
Now that is a wild claim. ChatGPT might be challenging Google's dominance, but Perplexity is nothing.
I never said Perplexity individually is challenging Google, but rather as part of a group of apps including ChatGPT, which you conveniently left out of your quote.
And how much of that is free usage, like the parent said? Even when users are paying, ChatGPT's costs are larger than their revenue.
And this kind of meaningless factoid was immediately usurped by the Threads app release, which IMO is kind of a pointless app. Maybe let's find a more meaningful metric before saying someone else's claim is wild.
And while Threads growth and usage stalled, ChatGPT is very much still growing and has *far* more monthly visits than threads.
There's really nothing meaningless about ChatGPT being the 5th most visited site on the planet, not even 3 years after release. Threads doesn't make the top 50.
https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/emerson-ai-and-the-for...
> That is a such a wild claim.
I think when he said "consume" he meant in terms of content consumption. You know, media - the thing that makes Western society go round. Movies, TV, music, books.
Would I watch an AI generated movie? No. What about a TV show? Uh... no. What about AI music? I mean, Spotify is trying to be tricky with that one, but no. I'd rather listen to Remi Wolf's 2024 Album "Big Ideas", which I thought was, ironically, less inspired than "Juno" but easily one of the best albums of the year.
ChatGPT is a useful interface, sure, but it's not entertaining. It's not high-quality. It doesn't provoke thought or offer us some solace in times of sadness. It doesn't spark joy or make me want to get up and dance.
