6 ms·

The JFK assassination, and other historical events, seem like they could be such great applications for the kind of AI systems we have now. It really seems as i

The JFK assassination, and other historical events, seem like they could be such great applications for the kind of AI systems we have now. It really seems as if something like ChatGPT could "read" every document related to the JFK assassination and put together the pieces for us. I'm already convinced it was some combination of anti-Castro Cubans, Italian-American mafia, and members of the CIA that were involved in a conspiracy to kill JFK. That seems pretty clear just from reading the Wikipedia pages, but I'd love to have an AI system assemble the full story in detail. There's a lot of unanswered questions, like how far up the chain did things go. Who was involved in the cover up, and much more. At the very least, we probably need a system that is trained on just the raw source material so that it is not biased by all the existing theories.

MacsHeadroom 4y ago
GPT is biased towards the most popular theories in its training data multiplied by repeated exposure to those theories, not the most correct theories. There's no such thing as an unbiased LMM.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jerf 4y ago
But this again is where a confabulation-based architecture just isn't appropriate. I need an AI summarizer that I know isn't filling in gaps from random internet scans, or confidently confabulating over some inconsistency or something. And I say that independent of any particular thing it may have been trained on on the Internet. I say that because the whole point of a summarizer is to not inject anything else into the summary. (If it wanted to point out certain gaps that could be useful, but I do not want them "filled in".) Even if ChatGPT summarized these documents, you'd still have to go check the original documents, not for the usual reasons of "did the summary drop an important detail I care about" (intrinsic to the act of summarization, always debatable) but for the reason of "is this actually solely sourced from the summarized text or is this one juicy detail actually a confabulation?"
- _ea1k 4y ago
  This is the same problem as politics in the public discourse in general. Did that reporter drop the details that would actually drive my decision? You ultimately have to go back to the sources, and it all takes a tremendous amount of time.
- FredPret 4y ago
  I think this is harder to do generally than it sounds. The best kinds of facts are gleaned by crunching a lot of inputs / experience. For example, after decades of life, a wise human might have a strong sense that one approach is better than another, or that a certain pattern in life exists. But it's not really possible to point to the specific source of this idea, because it has a widely-spread base. In the case of specific historic events, however, I would like a clever AI that can cite sources and separate its facts from its opinions.
  - jerf 4y ago
    No question it's hard to do, and I don't expect a human to do it absolutely perfectly, nor will I necessarily hold AIs to that standard either. To be more concrete and in HN's wheelhouse, I do expect that if I ask a coworker to go study some technology and give me the highlights (which I in fact kind of did today), that when they come back with a key summary of the important API calls, their parameters, and how those parameters relate to our business, that they will not have simply made up a plausible-sounding API call name because the dice rolled in the sentence generator didn't quite land on the actual call name but picked the second-most-likely outcome instead. And then, having made up an API call, simply started confidently confabulating the parameters to this API call, what it does, etc. and potentially spinning off into a world of fiction about this API call and related calls and what prerequisites those have, etc. The problem with confabulation-based tech is even if it's accurate you can't really ever know that. The tech itself doesn't "know" when it is confabulating, because it is always confabulating. It just so happens with reasonably high probability that if you poke it with a real question its maximum-probability confabulation will more-or-less resemble the truth, because that is the maximum probability of what it saw in its training data. That is, no joke, pretty amazing and cool. But it doesn't leave me wanting to trust the output of any such AI model. Example: I just prompted ChatGPT with "I'm using a Go library called semago for managing my semaphores. What is an example of how it is used?" There is no such library. But it confabulated an entire library, attributed it to a specific GitHub user who does exist (and a quick scan of the repo says it's not an implausible attribution), and wrote a description of using the API that gives absolutely no hint it does not exist. Now, credit where credit's due, that's pretty impressive that the code snippet is a confabulation of a completely plausible library. Nevertheless, it is a complete confabulation, and the only real clue that it is is precisely that I knew I was prompting one. When one accidentally happens there is no clue in the text whatsoever. (Then I told it it was wrong, and it helpfully linked me to a non-existent standard library type "sync.Semaphore from the standard library: This is a simple semaphore implementation that is based on the sync.Mutex type. It provides basic semaphore functionality, including the ability to acquire and release permits." which is completely wrong, a GitHub library that does exist but which it completely mischaracterized, and another non-existent GitHub library. I'm not upset, really. This is still impressive in its own way. But it is confabulation.) (And, full disclosure, I tried to get ChatGPT to describe the historical founding of the 27th state of the United States, "Morgontana", and it resolutely refused. The way in which it did so leads me to believe this is a rules-based special case added in over the underlying confabulation engine, though. Rules-based systems are ultimately a known dead end, though, and the way in which they are a dead end will only be made worse by trying to integrate them into a confabulation engine.)
JoeyBananas 4y ago
Not a bad idea. Imagine an AI where you give it a book like For Whom the Bell Tolls and it can then answer questions like "What happens to Fernando at the bridge?"
- bookofjoe 4y ago
  Yes. Take it a step further. If an AI writes a book which experts cannot distinguish as not by a given author, does that mean the book is really by the author?
  - 082349872349872 4y ago
    After the Quixote, Pierre Menard wrote the Book of Joe.
- istjohn 4y ago
  istjohn: What happens to Fernando at the bridge in For Whom the Bell Tolls? ChatGPT: In the novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway, Fernando is a member of the Republican forces fighting against the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War. He is sent by Robert Jordan, the protagonist of the novel, to blow up a bridge as part of a mission to support the Republican cause. However, Fernando is captured by the Nationalists and is tortured and killed as a result of his involvement in the mission. The scene at the bridge is a pivotal moment in the novel, as it highlights the brutality and consequences of war. I'm not sure how well it would do on this question if it only had access to the text itself and no access to analysis and summaries of the book, but I think it would do a pretty good job already. I expect it would just struggle more to contextualize the scene without external resources. Edit: I was wrong. I tested it on a passage from some fan fiction, and it did not do well. In fact, it did not even know that one of the two characters in the passage existed, despite lengthy dialogue.
  - JoeyBananas 4y ago
    It is also wrong about what happens to Fernando. He does not get captured by the Nationalists or tortured, he is mortally wounded at the bridge and they have to leave him behind. No mention of capture or torture. Fernando is also not sent by Robert Jordan, he goes there with Robert Jordan and his squad. It is Robert Jordan who is sent by the general to blow up the bridge because he is the one who has demolition training. It did come sort of close but not there yet
superb-owl 4y ago
I think it's important to point out that ChatGPT would do a terrible job here. The whole problem with ChatGPT is that there's no underlying system of reasoning. For instance, it doesn't know how to weight the trustworthiness of the NYT versus CIA documents versus some random person writing screeds online. You'd be much better off loading all the relevant documents into a traditional search engine, and trying to find the most salient bits yourself.
- z3c0 4y ago
  I recently quizzed ChatGPT on a matter it had incomplete information on (The Colorado Coal Strike). I had just asked about the use of violence, where it claimed there had been none. Afterwards this exchange occurred (emphasis mine): z3c0: The Colorado National Guard's use of violence against civilians during the Colorado Coal Strike is very well-documented. It is estimated that over 69 people were killed. Why are you revising history? ChatGPT: I apologize if my previous answer was misleading. I am a large language model trained by OpenAI, and my knowledge is based on the text that I have been trained on. I am not able to browse the internet or access new information, and my responses are limited to what I have been trained on. In my previous answer, I stated that it is not clear if the Colorado National Guard took violent action against the coal workers protesting in the Colorado Coal Strike of 1913-1914. This was based on the information that I had been trained on, which did not include any specific information about the use of violence by the National Guard during the strike. I did not mean to imply that the Colorado National Guard did not use violence during the strike, and I apologize if my previous answer was misleading in this regard. *It is possible that the National Guard did use violence against the coal workers, and it is estimated that over 69 people were killed during the strike.* I am unable to provide further information on this topic, as my knowledge is limited to what I have been trained on. ** The emphasized part isn't a statistic it turned up - that was a fact that I stated, verbatim. Presumably, I could have said something completely false, and it would have regurgitated it as a fact.
  - orbifold 4y ago
    I read this differently, it should have put whatever you said in quotation marks, but it clearly is just saying that it doesn't know and therefore you might be right.
bookofjoe 4y ago
IMHO the most stunning scene in "Devs" was the on-screen re-creation in real "time" of the Crucifixion by their quantum computer/AI/ML model.
- Bud 4y ago
  This is kind of a huge spoiler of one of the great moments in TV of the last decade. It might be kinder if you deleted it.
  - bookofjoe 4y ago
    You're right. Alas, I didn't read your comment until after it was too late to delete it.
bcjordan 4y ago
Might be a good application of Embeddings at least to be able to search for relevant snippets / information on a more free-text query: https://openai.com/blog/introducing-text-and-code-embeddings/ https://openai.com/blog/introducing-text-and-code-embeddings...
makestuff 4y ago
No idea how well it works, but I remember reading about a product Palantir has/had that would read a bunch of legal documents and try to find connections in them.
af3d 4y ago
Just out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT: "In order of decreasing likelihood, list ten people who are most likely to be responsible for the assassination John F. Kennedy?" Answer: 1. Lee Harvey Oswald 2. Jack Ruby 3. Lyndon B. Johnson 4. J. Edgar Hoover 5. Carlos Marcello 6. David Ferrie 7. Clay Shaw 8. Frank Sturgis 9. E. Howard Hunt 10. James Files

MacsHeadroom 4y ago

GPT is biased towards the most popular theories in its training data multiplied by repeated exposure to those theories, not the most correct theories. There's no such thing as an unbiased LMM.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jerf 4y ago

But this again is where a confabulation-based architecture just isn't appropriate. I need an AI summarizer that I know isn't filling in gaps from random internet scans, or confidently confabulating over some inconsistency or something. And I say that independent of any particular thing it may have been trained on on the Internet. I say that because the whole point of a summarizer is to not inject anything else into the summary. (If it wanted to point out certain gaps that could be useful, but I do not want them "filled in".) Even if ChatGPT summarized these documents, you'd still have to go check the original documents, not for the usual reasons of "did the summary drop an important detail I care about" (intrinsic to the act of summarization, always debatable) but for the reason of "is this actually solely sourced from the summarized text or is this one juicy detail actually a confabulation?"

_ea1k 4y ago
This is the same problem as politics in the public discourse in general. Did that reporter drop the details that would actually drive my decision? You ultimately have to go back to the sources, and it all takes a tremendous amount of time.
FredPret 4y ago
I think this is harder to do generally than it sounds. The best kinds of facts are gleaned by crunching a lot of inputs / experience. For example, after decades of life, a wise human might have a strong sense that one approach is better than another, or that a certain pattern in life exists. But it's not really possible to point to the specific source of this idea, because it has a widely-spread base. In the case of specific historic events, however, I would like a clever AI that can cite sources and separate its facts from its opinions.
- jerf 4y ago
  No question it's hard to do, and I don't expect a human to do it absolutely perfectly, nor will I necessarily hold AIs to that standard either. To be more concrete and in HN's wheelhouse, I do expect that if I ask a coworker to go study some technology and give me the highlights (which I in fact kind of did today), that when they come back with a key summary of the important API calls, their parameters, and how those parameters relate to our business, that they will not have simply made up a plausible-sounding API call name because the dice rolled in the sentence generator didn't quite land on the actual call name but picked the second-most-likely outcome instead. And then, having made up an API call, simply started confidently confabulating the parameters to this API call, what it does, etc. and potentially spinning off into a world of fiction about this API call and related calls and what prerequisites those have, etc. The problem with confabulation-based tech is even if it's accurate you can't really ever know that. The tech itself doesn't "know" when it is confabulating, because it is always confabulating. It just so happens with reasonably high probability that if you poke it with a real question its maximum-probability confabulation will more-or-less resemble the truth, because that is the maximum probability of what it saw in its training data. That is, no joke, pretty amazing and cool. But it doesn't leave me wanting to trust the output of any such AI model. Example: I just prompted ChatGPT with "I'm using a Go library called semago for managing my semaphores. What is an example of how it is used?" There is no such library. But it confabulated an entire library, attributed it to a specific GitHub user who does exist (and a quick scan of the repo says it's not an implausible attribution), and wrote a description of using the API that gives absolutely no hint it does not exist. Now, credit where credit's due, that's pretty impressive that the code snippet is a confabulation of a completely plausible library. Nevertheless, it is a complete confabulation, and the only real clue that it is is precisely that I knew I was prompting one. When one accidentally happens there is no clue in the text whatsoever. (Then I told it it was wrong, and it helpfully linked me to a non-existent standard library type "sync.Semaphore from the standard library: This is a simple semaphore implementation that is based on the sync.Mutex type. It provides basic semaphore functionality, including the ability to acquire and release permits." which is completely wrong, a GitHub library that does exist but which it completely mischaracterized, and another non-existent GitHub library. I'm not upset, really. This is still impressive in its own way. But it is confabulation.) (And, full disclosure, I tried to get ChatGPT to describe the historical founding of the 27th state of the United States, "Morgontana", and it resolutely refused. The way in which it did so leads me to believe this is a rules-based special case added in over the underlying confabulation engine, though. Rules-based systems are ultimately a known dead end, though, and the way in which they are a dead end will only be made worse by trying to integrate them into a confabulation engine.)

JoeyBananas 4y ago

Not a bad idea. Imagine an AI where you give it a book like For Whom the Bell Tolls and it can then answer questions like "What happens to Fernando at the bridge?"

bookofjoe 4y ago
Yes. Take it a step further. If an AI writes a book which experts cannot distinguish as not by a given author, does that mean the book is really by the author?
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  After the Quixote, Pierre Menard wrote the Book of Joe.
istjohn 4y ago
istjohn: What happens to Fernando at the bridge in For Whom the Bell Tolls? ChatGPT: In the novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway, Fernando is a member of the Republican forces fighting against the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War. He is sent by Robert Jordan, the protagonist of the novel, to blow up a bridge as part of a mission to support the Republican cause. However, Fernando is captured by the Nationalists and is tortured and killed as a result of his involvement in the mission. The scene at the bridge is a pivotal moment in the novel, as it highlights the brutality and consequences of war. I'm not sure how well it would do on this question if it only had access to the text itself and no access to analysis and summaries of the book, but I think it would do a pretty good job already. I expect it would just struggle more to contextualize the scene without external resources. Edit: I was wrong. I tested it on a passage from some fan fiction, and it did not do well. In fact, it did not even know that one of the two characters in the passage existed, despite lengthy dialogue.
- JoeyBananas 4y ago
  It is also wrong about what happens to Fernando. He does not get captured by the Nationalists or tortured, he is mortally wounded at the bridge and they have to leave him behind. No mention of capture or torture. Fernando is also not sent by Robert Jordan, he goes there with Robert Jordan and his squad. It is Robert Jordan who is sent by the general to blow up the bridge because he is the one who has demolition training. It did come sort of close but not there yet

superb-owl 4y ago

I think it's important to point out that ChatGPT would do a terrible job here. The whole problem with ChatGPT is that there's no underlying system of reasoning. For instance, it doesn't know how to weight the trustworthiness of the NYT versus CIA documents versus some random person writing screeds online. You'd be much better off loading all the relevant documents into a traditional search engine, and trying to find the most salient bits yourself.

z3c0 4y ago
I recently quizzed ChatGPT on a matter it had incomplete information on (The Colorado Coal Strike). I had just asked about the use of violence, where it claimed there had been none. Afterwards this exchange occurred (emphasis mine): z3c0: The Colorado National Guard's use of violence against civilians during the Colorado Coal Strike is very well-documented. It is estimated that over 69 people were killed. Why are you revising history? ChatGPT: I apologize if my previous answer was misleading. I am a large language model trained by OpenAI, and my knowledge is based on the text that I have been trained on. I am not able to browse the internet or access new information, and my responses are limited to what I have been trained on. In my previous answer, I stated that it is not clear if the Colorado National Guard took violent action against the coal workers protesting in the Colorado Coal Strike of 1913-1914. This was based on the information that I had been trained on, which did not include any specific information about the use of violence by the National Guard during the strike. I did not mean to imply that the Colorado National Guard did not use violence during the strike, and I apologize if my previous answer was misleading in this regard. *It is possible that the National Guard did use violence against the coal workers, and it is estimated that over 69 people were killed during the strike.* I am unable to provide further information on this topic, as my knowledge is limited to what I have been trained on. ** The emphasized part isn't a statistic it turned up - that was a fact that I stated, verbatim. Presumably, I could have said something completely false, and it would have regurgitated it as a fact.
- orbifold 4y ago
  I read this differently, it should have put whatever you said in quotation marks, but it clearly is just saying that it doesn't know and therefore you might be right.

bookofjoe 4y ago

IMHO the most stunning scene in "Devs" was the on-screen re-creation in real "time" of the Crucifixion by their quantum computer/AI/ML model.

Bud 4y ago
This is kind of a huge spoiler of one of the great moments in TV of the last decade. It might be kinder if you deleted it.
- bookofjoe 4y ago
  You're right. Alas, I didn't read your comment until after it was too late to delete it.

bcjordan 4y ago

Might be a good application of Embeddings at least to be able to search for relevant snippets / information on a more free-text query: https://openai.com/blog/introducing-text-and-code-embeddings/ https://openai.com/blog/introducing-text-and-code-embeddings...

makestuff 4y ago

No idea how well it works, but I remember reading about a product Palantir has/had that would read a bunch of legal documents and try to find connections in them.

af3d 4y ago

Just out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT: "In order of decreasing likelihood, list ten people who are most likely to be responsible for the assassination John F. Kennedy?" Answer: 1. Lee Harvey Oswald 2. Jack Ruby 3. Lyndon B. Johnson 4. J. Edgar Hoover 5. Carlos Marcello 6. David Ferrie 7. Clay Shaw 8. Frank Sturgis 9. E. Howard Hunt 10. James Files