ChatGPT outperforms crowd workers for text-annotation tasks

Sascha

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2305016120

To me, the problem is that ultimately accuracy still needed to be evaluated by "professional annotators".

I don't know yet what to make of it.

However, I am trying to keep track of AI as a most likely assistant in a literal sense. I am very suspicious:

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Manfred Spitzer compares the effect of an ox and a tractor on work performance and health.[62/63][#spitzer2012]

If you harness an ox to the plough, you still have to work hard. You have to walk, steer the plough and so on.

If you hitch a tractor to the plough, you don't have to work at all, you just sit and don't exert yourself physically.

So we can distinguish two ways in which we increase our performance:

1. we increase the effectiveness of our efforts.
2. we replace our efforts with the efforts of others.

Amontillado

Manfred Spitzer compares the effect of an ox and a tractor on work performance and health.[62/63][#spitzer2012]

If you hitch a tractor to the plough, you don't have to work at all, you just sit and don't exert yourself physically.

So we can distinguish two ways in which we increase our performance:

1. we increase the effectiveness of our efforts.
2. we replace our efforts with the efforts of others.

May I offer a third option? We can work while standing on the shoulders of giants. We don't have to retire our efforts to benefit from others.

AI will properly be like the tractor. Truly like the tractor. As a country boy who has plowed fields with a tractor (in one case, an ancient hand cranked Avery) I can tell you the process is not without exertion.

Nor will intellectual work in the age of AI be without mental effort.

Or, I'm whistling past the graveyard. Fortunately, AI has no way of preventing me from writing. I can still pursue written art.

So far, written art is definitely a pursuit. It's somewhere far ahead, barely visible in the distance. No matter. I limp along as best I can with a smile on my face.

ZettelDistraction

@Amontillado said:
AI will properly be like the tractor. Truly like the tractor. As a country boy who has plowed fields with a tractor (in one case, an ancient hand cranked Avery) I can tell you the process is not without exertion.

You also have to avoid disturbing wasps nests on the ground and in tree stumps. I was in a tractor that barely missed ripping a wasp nest apart.

Sascha

I am not so optimistic. The decline is already happening, and we are declining for a long time. It seems that the IQ is falling since decades.