Are you talking about LLMs in general, or specifically ChatGPT with a default prompt?
Since dabbling with some open source models (llama, mistral, etc.), I've found that they each have slightly different quirks, and with a bit of prompting can exhibit very different writing styles.
I do share your observation that a lot of content I see online now is easily identifiable as ChatGPT output, but it's hard for me to say how much LLM content I'm _not_ identifying because it didn't have the telltale style of stock ChatGPT.
Thanks for the thought-provoking post. I don't think I share the perspective, but I'm curious to understand it more.
On a personal level, I'm not happy to see a medallion-owning taxi driver lose their livelihood, in the same sense that I'm not happy to see anyone lose their livelihood, e.g., due to economic conditions, due to a company shutting down, or any other reason.
At the same time, there will be winners and losers from any economic or technological shift, and it seems that in our capitalist society we value progress and competition, underpinned by some utilitarian calculus that the short-term thrash is worth it for the long-term prosperity.
Inventing the telephone certainly would have harmed mail couriers, inventing the automobile would have harmed horse breeders, etc., but we don't typically reflect on those inventions as being ethically problematic.
In short, what I'm wondering is whether you think there's something uniquely unethical about the "tech bro" style of disruption, or if your perspective is more broadly a critique of capitalism.
The distinguishing characteristic is scale & speed.
The switch to electricity happened over half a century. The switch to the automobile took a similarly long time. There was crossfade. There was time to adjust. There were places (for socioeconomic values of 'places') for skilled professionals to go.
The switch to Uber (from taxi medallions) seems well underway at just the one-decade mark.
Differences in speed & scale yield differences in qualitative impact, in the same way that a nuclear bomb -- which increases speed & scale of destruction, over and against TNT -- produced a whole new circumstance for world powers.
Comparing what is coming to telephony replacing a courier is like comparing Nagasaki to dynamiteing an old tree stump on a farm.
I played chess against ChatGPT4 a few days ago without any special prompt engineering, and it played at what I would estimate to be a ~1500-1700 level without making any illegal moves in a 49 move game.
Up to 10 or 15 moves, sure, we're well within common openings that could be regurgitated. By the time we're at move 20+, and especially 30+ and 40+, these are completely unique positions that haven't ever been reached before. I'd expect many more illegal moves just based on predicting sequences, though it's also possible I got "lucky" in my one game against ChatGPT and that it typically makes more errors than that.
Of course, all positions have _some_ structural similarity or patterns compared to past positions, otherwise how would an LLM ever learn them? The nature of ChatGPT's understanding has to be different from the nature of a human's understanding, but that's more of a philosophical or semantic distinction. To me, it's still fascinating that by "just" learning from millions of PGNs, ChatGPT builds up a model of chess rules and strategy that's good enough to play at a club level.
After reviewing the chat history I actually have to issue a correction here, because there were two moves where ChatGPT played illegally:
1. ChatGPT tried to play 32. ... Nc5, despite there being a pawn on c5
2. ChatGPT tried to play 42. ... Kxe6, despite my king being on d5
It corrected itself after I questioned whether the previous move was legal.
I was pretty floored that it managed to play a coherent game at all, so evidently I forgot about the few missteps it made. Much like ChatGPT itself, it turns out I'm not an entirely reliable narrator!
Qxd7 early on was puzzling but has been played in a handful of master games and it played a consistent setup after that with b5 Bb7. Which I imagine was also done in those master games. But interesting that it went for a sideline like that.
It played remarkably well although a bit lacking in plan. Then cratered in the endgame.
Bxd5 was strategically absurd.
fxg4 is tactically absurd.
Interestingly they both follow the pattern: Piece goes to square -> takes on that square.
This is of course an extremely common pattern, so again tentatively pointing towards predicting likely sequences of moves.
Ke7 was also a mistake but a somewhat unusual tactic with Re2 and f5 is forced but after en passant the knight is pinned. This tactic does appear in some e4 e5 openings though. But then the rook is on e1 and the king never moved or if it did, usually to e8, not e7. Possibly suggesting that it has blind spots for tactics when they don't appear on the usual squares?
Me too, I couldn't get it to reliably go past move 15 without numerous errors. In my mind it's closer to 150 ELO than 1300, so I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
As someone who was affected by this (non-U.S.), I have to say I was very satisfied with how PokerStars handled everything. When Full Tilt was shut down I essentially treated the funds I had on there as a write-off, and was delighted by the windfall of actually being reimbursed some time later.
What makes you think pirates are priced out of the market? If we're talking about, say, the U.S., your typical pirate doesn't seem to be "priced out of the market" for a variety of other leisure goods, like the electronics that they're using to pirate music and TV shows.
The difference is that they don't have a frictionless way of "pirating" electronics, so they are actually forced to choose between paying for the good and abstaining from it. With media, it's easy to rationalize that you wouldn't be giving the producer money anyway, but I'm skeptical of your ability to honestly evaluate that when you have the option to trivially enjoy the good for free.
However, there is an incredible amount of content out there available via free and legal means. That is to say - technology has made the barrier to entry very, very low and so content creation is a really competitive market. The relevant question is not whether, strictly speaking, the pirate can afford the product - I can afford an Hermes bag if I save up for a while - but whether their willingness to pay exceeds the price. I'm priced out of the market based on my willingness to pay, not my ability to pay.
That's a good clarification, and I agree that willingness to pay is the relevant metric to use when talking about being priced out of the market. The same point applies, though; it's hard to honestly assess your willingness to pay when it takes you 5 clicks and a few minutes of waiting to get exactly what you want for $0.
If we were to take a typical pirate and transport them to a hypothetical world where piracy was physically impossible, I think you'd generally find that they're not actually priced out of the market for many of the goods that they currently pirate. They'd likely cut down their consumption in a major way, but I strongly suspect that they'd still be willing to pay for a significant portion of the goods they currently pirate.
> If we were to take a typical pirate and transport them to a hypothetical world where piracy was physically impossible, I think you'd generally find that they're not actually priced out of the market for many of the goods that they currently pirate. They'd likely cut down their consumption in a major way, but I strongly suspect that they'd still be willing to pay for a significant portion of the goods they currently pirate.
I really doubt that.
First your last sentence. Which one is it? Either you cut down on consumption in a major way, or you still pay for a significant portion of your current consumption.
Then, questions about this hypothetical world. Does free music (net.labels, ektoplazm.com etc) still exist in this world? If not then I'd expect music culture to become a rather elitist hobby, if it even still exists in any meaningful form at all.
If free music still exists then I expect it to flourish much more than it does in the real world. I'd probably mostly listen to that, because that's where the innovation will happen. I'd probably buy a tiny number of some classic genre-definers that happened to end up on the "paid" side of the fence.
The latter situation is where we're moving with piracy as well.
It's really easy to "honestly" assess willingness to pay, actually.
If you paid for it, you were willing to pay at least the asked amount. In a "pay what you want" scheme, your willingness to pay is something between infinity and what you wind up paying. If you don't buy a thing, your willingness to pay is something below the price being asked.
There's no magic. It's an immediately available revealed-preference system - you either pay or you don't. I won't disagree that the availability of a free, well-functioning, DRM-free, easily available alternative reduces people's willingness to pay for locked-in, degraded, or even available-but-overpriced alternatives. That said, we live in a world where the piracy alternative exists, whether people like it or not.
Adjust your business model accordingly. Valve is making a killing selling software via Steam.
Sure, easy piracy is a part of reality and businesses should, as a pragmatic matter, adjust their business models -- that's neither here nor there.
When I talk about being able to honestly assess willingness to pay, I'm talking about the pirate who claims that they wouldn't buy a good anyway so they might as well pirate it. It might be true, but all we can really say from the outside is that they value the good at least $0 worth, so their willingness to pay is somewhere between 0 and infinity. You can't put an upper bound on their willingness to pay just because they didn't buy the good when they got the good for free.
I don't particularly care if people pirate, but I find that pirates tend to do a fair bit of mental gymnastics trying to justify why piracy is ethical; I think the "I wouldn't pay for it anyway" argument falls under that umbrella.
This sounds fine in the abstract, but I'm suspicious of it in practice because it's hard to make an honest evaluation of your willingness to pay for these goods when you have the easy option of getting them for free. I see many people using this argument while at the same time paying for other leisure goods that I suspect they actually value less than, say, music. The difference is that these other leisure goods really do have a pay-or-abstain dynamic imposed by reality. Reality keeps you honest about how much you're willing to pay for those goods, whereas with music you can consume the good without paying for it and never confront the decision of paying or abstaining from it.
That doesn't necessarily apply to you specifically, since it's dependent on your financial situation and how much you consume various media. Imagine yourself in a hypothetical world where it wasn't physically possible to pirate any music, TV shows, movies, software, etc. Would you really completely abstain from enjoying those goods, or would you simply reduce your consumption while actually paying for it? I think for many people, it's the latter.
I agree that it's compatible, and further that taking care of yourself is crucial to being able to effectively help others. The author might agree too, but in that case it's rather peculiar that everything in the article has an egoistic bent to it. Even if it wasn't the author's intention, I think it's worth pointing out that any mention of altruistic behavior is conspicuously absent from the article.
It's effectively the same thing, except that the set of people at the top of the pyramid is larger. It's still most lucrative for the creators, it's just also highly rewarding for the earliest adopters.
I can see how my post left room for misinterpretation; my intention was to express that the creators are in the set {people for whom it's most lucrative}. The earliest adopters are in the set too, obviously.
Put differently, my point is that "ethical" launches are simply good marketing, and are quite compatible with the sentiment expressed upthread that "[altcoins] are schemes to lure money into the creator's wallets". If a given coin becomes popular, the creator is going to profit immensely from it whether or not they engaged in pre-mining. By doing an "ethical" launch, they're making it more likely that the coin gains significant adoption, albeit probably decreasing the expected size of their payout. That seems like a smart play, given diminishing marginal utility of money, etc.
> There’s a clean exception to all of this, and it flips the entire logic.
> If letting go of the argument sounds like pure loss, here’s the reframe that turns it into a gain.
> The ego is lowered. The defenses are down. The advice lands.
Even if there was some human insight that went into it, the output could be reduced in length by 80+% without any loss of substance.