Comment by danans
2 years ago
> This has nothing to do with "looking smarter". It has to do with being reliably proficient at both translating and synthesizing.
I think the author's point is about how people perceive lossy text output differently than they perceive lossy image output. Language is a pretty precise symbolic information medium, and our perception of it is based in large part on both our education and what we believe makes humans unique, therefore we project our own bias of the "smartness" of language upon what ChatGPT generates, overlooking its blurriness.
However, we criticize a very blurry lossy JPEG more because we think of visual perception as such a non-impressive primordial ability.
I don't think "lossy text" is a useful term because it conflates with th*s k*nd *f l*ss* t*xt as well. Lossy compression is designed to be as reversible as it can be to a given threshold. That's not how ChatGPT was either designed or works in practice. There are definitely a lot of mathematical similarities between the two, I won't deny that.
Would "partial knowledge compression" be a better term? Partial knowledge of both English and French is a requirement to reliably translate from English to French. Partial knowledge of both baseball box scores and entertaining paragraph outlines in English is a requirement to reliably translate from a box score into an entertaining outline, right?
To me, "lossy compression" vs "Partial knowledge compression" sounds like six vs a half-dozen. Whatever you call it, I think the author was writing more about how we perceive the results generated from a language-compression model vs an image compression model.
The reason why the author chose the term lossy compression was to make it seem like ChatGPT was nothing but a thing that makes things blurry. Do you see a single mention of ChatGPT being a reliable translator in that article or any sort of distinction made between the different kind of tasks that the model is used for?
So it is nothing like six vs a half dozen, because those mean the same thing, and lossy compression is a bad description of half of what ChatGPT does, which makes it a bad description and not at all equal to another more thoughtful, less emotional, description.
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