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elzbardico 5 hours ago

A somewhat related anecdote:

Two years ago, I asked chatgpt to rewrite my resume. It looked fantastic at a first sight, then, one week later I re-read it, and feel ashamed to have sent it to some prospective employers. It was full of cringe inducing babble.

You see, for an LLM there are no hierarchies other than what it observed in their training, and even then, applying it in a different context may be tricky for them. Because it can describe hierarchies, relationships by mimicry, but it doesn't actually have a model of them.

Just an example: It may be able to generate text that recognizes that a PhD title is a step above from a Master’s degree, but sometimes it won't be able to translate this fact (instead of the description of this fact) into the subtle differences in attention and emphasis we do in our written text to reflect those real world hierarchies of value. It can repeat the fact to you, can even kind of generalize it, but it won't take a decision based on it.

It can, even more now, get a very close simulation of this, because relative importance of stuff would have been semantically capture, and it is very good at capturing those subtle semantical relationships, but, in linguistic terms, it absolutely sucks at pragmatics.

An example: Let's say in one of your experiences, you improved a model that detected malignancy in a certain kind of tumor images, improving its false negative rate to something like 0.001%, then in the same experience you casually mention that you tied the CEOs toddler tennis shoes once. Given your prompt to write a resume according to the usual resume enhancement formulas, there's a big chance it will emphasize the irrelevant tennis lace tying activity in a ridiculously pompous manner, making it hierarchically equivalent to your model kung-fu accomplishments.

So in the end, you end up with some bizarre stuff that looks like:

"Tied our CEO's toddler tennis shoes, enabling her to raise 20M with minimal equity dilution in our Series B round"

squigz 5 hours ago | parent [-]

You had an LLM rewrite your resume, and then sent it to employers... without proofreading it? That was certainly a choice.

inanutshellus 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Tut tut, judgemental one. The point is the sharing - with us - let's not discourage that.

After all, if he didn't feel foolish for it, he wouldn't've held it in his memory, and thus wouldn't've shared it with us.

Who among us hasn't written an angry email, re-(re-)read it, smugly hit send, slept on it, then regretted the sending?

elzbardico 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I read it. It seemed perfect. I am enthusiastic about new tech, so probably on my first read I overlooked things that later started bugging me

squigz 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Ah I see I myself misread that you re-read it. My mistake. That's a lot more understandable in my opinion than simply not reading it at all :P