Metadata
- Author: Ted Chiang
- Full Title:: ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web
- Finished date:: 2023-02-12
Highlights
If the photocopier simply produced blurry printouts, everyone would know that they weren’t accurate reproductions of the originals. What led to problems was the fact that the photocopier was producing numbers that were readable but incorrect; it made the copies seem accurate when they weren’t (View Highlight)
human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression. (View Highlight)
Generally speaking, though, I’d say that anything that’s good for content mills is not good for people searching for information (View Highlight)
starting with a blurry copy of unoriginal work isn’t a good way to create original work. If you’re a writer, you will write a lot of unoriginal work before you write something original. And the time and effort expended on that unoriginal work isn’t wasted; on the contrary, I would suggest that it is precisely what enables you to eventually create something original (View Highlight)