2023-05-10 10:29:08
FIGAROVOX/TRIBUNE – GPT 4 does not think or understand the meaning of words. Therefore, to make the most of its potential, the economist Pierre Bentata reminds us of the need to be precise when drafting a promptto provide elements of context and to know how to proceed by iteration.
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Pierre Bentata
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Professor of economics and lecturer, Pierre Bentata has just published All noted!, published by the Observatory.
“And the code became a verb”. On 30 November 2022, the launch of ChatGPT sounded like a revolution in the digital world. The Open AI company’s chatbot left early adopters speechless. Able to understand an infinity of requests and to answer them in a way as detailed as sophisticated, the system of automatic treatment of the natural language marked the advent of a new era of the technique. A promise that has not been denied the release of version GPT 4 on March 13th.
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During these months, dozens of projects, applications and tutorials have invaded the web and begun to draw the major trends of a future inevitably marked by the democratization of content generation systems. A future as exciting as worrying.
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Exciting of course, because the uses are endless. Chatbots can search, synthesize thousands of pages of documents, organize thoughts, turn text into computer code, detect errors. Image generation systems offer everyone the opportunity to materialize their thoughts in graphic form. Combined, they make it possible to multiply the creative and intellectual capacities of their users. According to Bill Gates, in the near future, these systems will allow everyone to create a small personal virtual genius; a conductor who will ensure the link between all the applications we use, will plan and execute the daunting tasks, and will offer those who know how to use it the means to meet each of their needs.
Go from an idea to a prompt requires to verbalize concepts and symbols, to concretize them in the form of words and sentences; in short, to know how to express oneself.
Pierre Bentata
To those who know how to use it. This is where things get worrisome. Because if it is easily observable phenomenon since the four months which followed the opening of ChatGPT to the public, it is that in terms of use, we are not equal. To the same request, GPT 4 can respond in an incredibly relevant and precise way or be totally irrelevant, when it is not simply manufacturing false information. Midjourney, the most popular image generation system, can produce from the same idea, photographs larger than life or absurd and grotesque images. Because between the user’s request and the system’s response, there is the command – the prompt. And the quality of the result depends on its writing.
However, to write a prompt quality, two elements are key. You have to know how its systems work, and in particular understand that they generate content from probability rules that determine which sequence of words or visual elements is most likely to follow one another to answer the question. set of words that make up the command. These so-called artificial intelligence systems do not think, nor do they understand the meaning of words. Hence the need to be precise in writing a prompt, to provide elements of context, to proceed by iteration, little by little and to remain vigilant to the appearance of a “hallucination”, it is i.e. an incoherent or totally false text. Anyone who knows this can make the most of these tools. But those who do not know this will have every chance of sinking into the illusion that the answer to their request is the verbalized product of an autonomous conscience. From then on, he will no longer doubt the solutions she offers him.
As Michel Serres said, we have formed uneducated educated people and ignorant cultivated people. This attitude has led to an impoverishment of the mastery of the language, all ages and all social origins combined.
Pierre Bentata
Worse still, even if all users understood the mechanics of these systems, another inequality would remain: that of the ability to write. Go from an idea to a prompt requires to verbalize concepts and symbols, to concretize them in the form of words and sentences; in short, to know how to express oneself. A prompt well written, a rich vocabulary, a great mastery of the syntax are all factors that determine the correct execution by the system. Multiple users by Midjourney discovered that to obtain the rendering they wanted, they had to order the adjectives in such a way as to respect the codes of Anglo-Saxon grammar: shapes before colors before materials, otherwise the system would be derailed. And you only have to ask GPT4 how to write a good query to understand that it applies similar rules.
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The latest code developments put words back at the center of the game. Why bother? For an obvious reason. For at least thirty years, the education system has pushed students to turn to mathematics and the hard sciences, suggesting that the literary disciplines were a sideway. With two consequences: almost no one masters simultaneously the language and the number, the culture and the technique. As Michel Serres said, we have formed uneducated educated people and ignorant cultivated people. This attitude led loss of language proficiency, all ages and all social backgrounds. However, without this mastery, the good virtual genius promised by Bill Gates might well become a little demon; because forced to use machines which he cannot make himself obey, the individual runs the risk of becoming their automaton.
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