Annalee Newitz 🍜Ever since playing with ChatGPT, I've become sensitized to the way false rationality sounds ... there's a particular vibe to what is basically coherent nonsense. And now I've started to notice when people do it too. I get this crawly ChatGPT feeling when somebody is obviously making up an "authoritative" answer to a question they know nothing about. #AI #chatgpt #psychology
Alexis Madrigal@annaleen oh man, in college we used to call this “talking a line” — and I feel like now that you’ve said it, I will never be able to think about chatbots doing anything else
@alexismadrigal we called it "answer syndrome"!
Jesse@annaleen @alexismadrigal Had a conversation the other night about jobs that push false confidence as a virtue, and it got me wondering if chatbots will raise the social value of whatever is the opposite of this. People being very clear with themselves and the world about what they know and what they don't. Seemed almost too wishful to let myself think it, but I guess it can't hurt to dream.
Jeremy Kahn@misc @annaleen @alexismadrigal "jobs that push false confidence as a virtue" are exactly the "real work" under threat from these LLMs
But the decision-makers of "who to layoff/fire/fund" are holders of at least two classes of these jobs -- venture capital and many c-level executives
Kent Brewster@alexismadrigal @annaleen yes. See also "blowing smoke," which is the polite form of "blowing smoke up your ass," which has a whole fascinating origin story all its own.