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The problem with ChatGPT's "knowledge" is that it isn't trustworthy. It will happily output very confident sounding nonsense, or blatantly incorrect statements.
by adamsmith143 4y ago
The problem with ChatGPT's "knowledge" is that it isn't trustworthy. It will happily output very confident sounding nonsense, or blatantly incorrect statements. We need a way to verify how accurate it's outputs are
- nathias 4y agoso, much like other knowledge sources?
- roywiggins 4y agoMost knowledge sources don't make up totally fictional citations to nonexistent sources. Or, if they do, nobody uses them for anything serious. Even Wikipedia citations will get removed if they point to URLs that never existed.
- nathias 4y agoif we focus on the best sources, even in studies a lot of research can't be replicated, and if we focus on te most common ones like newspapers and tv, I'd say most of it is made up or might as well be
- adamsmith143 4y agoThat's just a bad take and it doesn't excuse the problems with GPT.
- roywiggins 4y agoSure, nothing is perfect. But I'm not talking about it just being wrong, I'm talking about it citing webpages and books that don't exist and never did[0]. If Wikipedia regularly had that sort of quality issue people just wouldn't use it. There's a threshold below which something stops being useful. [0] Bloggs, Joe. "ChatGPT just makes stuff up". Nature, vol 123, 2022, pp 123-321. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1111/111/111 https://doi.org/10.1111/111/111
- adamsmith143 4y agoOk but if I read a paper from a well known Author published in NeurIps or Nature I have a good sense of how trustworthy that paper might be. Even if we ask GPT to cite it's sources, which it will do, it will then also happily generate false sources. It's untrustworthy turtles all the way down.
- belter 4y agoChatGPT made this nice COBOL program to create an S3 Bucket,a technical impossibility... IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. PROGRAM-ID. CREATE-S3-BUCKET. ENVIRONMENT DIVISION. CONFIGURATION SECTION. INPUT-OUTPUT SECTION. DATA DIVISION. FILE SECTION. WORKING-STORAGE SECTION. 01 AWS-ACCESS-KEY PIC X(20). 01 AWS-SECRET-KEY PIC X(40). 01 BUCKET-NAME PIC X(255). PROCEDURE DIVISION. CREATE-BUCKET. MOVE AWS-ACCESS-KEY TO AWS-ACCESS-KEY-VAR MOVE AWS-SECRET-KEY TO AWS-SECRET-KEY-VAR MOVE BUCKET-NAME TO BUCKET-NAME-VAR INVOKE AWS-S3 "CREATE-BUCKET" USING AWS-ACCESS-KEY-VAR AWS-SECRET-KEY-VAR BUCKET-NAME-VAR
- lmm 4y agoHow is that impossible? Plenty of libraries are available for COBOL, especially if you use COBOL.NET
- jtxt 4y agoOne way I tried to do this is by having it write an answer, and a footnote reference at each fact. [1] then list search terms that be used to verify each claim, then I would respond with the url and quotes from found pages for each one, then have it rewrite the answer based on that information and cite the sources. I think something this direction can be automated. I saw someone do this with math and other tasks, that would talk to a connected program before answering.
- visarga 4y agoYes, it's been done both in papers and in various GPT-3 projects. As long as you can find relevant references the LM will become reliable.
- politician 4y agoSounds like an interesting way to reboot Wikipedia.
- adamsmith143 4y agoI did this as well and it looks great initially but there are already examples of GPT generating totally bogus references and sources. So we're back to square 1.
- moffkalast 4y agoChatGPT to be employed in marketing positions immediately.
- eternalban 4y agoThink bigger. PresidentGPT. On tweeter!
- rdedev 4y agoI just had a run in with this yesterday. I asked it to explain box embeddings. It's a pretty niche topic so I didn't expect it to give the right answer. But the answer it gave sounded so confident but it was so wrong. It took a not al vector embeddings approach but replaced that with box. I tried correcting it but it refused to budge and still sounded confident.
- kyle_grove 4y agoSounds like many humans I know.
- matthewdgreen 4y agoI asked it to explain part of my thesis work on Oblivious Transfer, and it gave me a lovely prose description of the Green-Hohenberger Oblivious Transfer protocol. It was clear and confident, and the thing it described was even an actual protocol. It just wasn’t in any way our protocol: GPT just took some classical protocol it found elsewhere and relabeled it.
- aeternum 4y agoWhose knowledge is trustworthy? We've somehow come to associate certain institutions or scientific authorities with truth when that is about the furthest from real science: "Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, Is it reasonable?" -Richard P. Feynman "One of the great commandments of science is, "Mistrust arguments from authority." -Carl Sagan "In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." -Galileo Galilei
- hippich 4y agoThere is some kind of recursion in here with authors names and "have no respect..." part:)
- aeternum 4y agoFair point
- AnthonyMouse 4y agoActually, it isn't. Their arguments are of the form "this statement could be false." If you evaluate it as a true statement, you have no problems. It could be false; you have to evaluate it for yourself instead of trusting some authority. It's only if you assert that it's certainly false that you have a problem. Because then it's clearly true -- since otherwise these authorities would be telling you something false, which proves their assertion true. Put another way, it can get you from the undesirable position of blindly trusting authorities to the desirable position of questioning them, but not the other way around. Which is the intended result.
- burnished 4y agoI think part of the issue is that it’s easier to test the limits of or a humans knowledge, and ironically with your quotes I think you’ve supplied evidence that trust is crucial, in that the truest expression of those quotes would be to just deliver the payload and not attach any sort of authority by association to it. You can’t trust it’s answers (to be fair that’s the existing status quo), but you also can’t easily test it because it will return reasonable sounding garbage. Conversely you can discover ignorance in most humans pretty quickly by exhausting their ability to respond (or your ability to ask).
- visarga 4y agoYou are right, this is the pain point - trust, verification. I think it will become the next focus of research. There are many things we could do to solve this problem. One of them is to use an external reference for verification. Another one is to train the model to verify facts by augmenting the input with lies - adversarial training for lie detection. Problem solving can be improved by generating more data with the current version of LM for the next one, if we can verify the outputs to be correct.
- palata 4y ago> There are many things we could do to solve this problem. Just like what social networks have failed to do in years? Not sure it's that simple :-)
- lossolo 4y agoSure but you can only verify facts like "when was <someone> born?", you can verify this today easily with knowledge database but that's not what is interesting in ChatGPT, what's interesting is what it can generate which you can't easily fact check, like "generate me a poem in style of <someone> and <someone>", how can you verify that the style is correct automatically? or "write me code that connects to not public system and does <here long instruction in words>", how can you verify if this code works properly without access to that system and ability to run it yourself?