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"Computer, please find out how GPS works and explain it to me like I'm five years old." ChatGPT: GPS stands for Global Positioning System. It is a way that we

"Computer, please find out how GPS works and explain it to me like I'm five years old." ChatGPT: GPS stands for Global Positioning System. It is a way that we can figure out where we are in the world using special satellites. Imagine you are standing outside and you see lots of stars in the sky. Well, GPS works kind of like that, but instead of stars, there are satellites orbiting the Earth. These satellites are way up high, so they can see everything on the ground. When you have a GPS device, like a phone or a car, it can talk to these satellites and ask, "Where am I?" The satellites send back a message that says, "You are here!" and gives your device a special code. The GPS device can use this code to figure out exactly where you are on a map. It's kind of like a magic trick! You can use GPS to find out where you are, or to find your way to a new place. It's super helpful when you're lost or want to go on an adventure. Not bad!

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cs702 4y ago
And it's only going to get better over time. As I mentioned elsewhere, conversational AIs in the early 2020's are like PCs in the 1980's -- a new technology that still has lots of early limitations.
jakeinspace 4y ago
The second half of that explanation is completely wrong though, isn’t it? There is no active signal being sent from your GPS antenna, no two-way communication.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Yes, but unlike most times it gets things wrong, this is probably appropriate for explaining things to 5 year olds. (Also, the UK comedy quiz show QI made the exact same mistake).
  - jakeinspace 4y ago
    I’ll admit it was a decent answer. However, even a somewhat bright person (especially someone with radio / networking experience) could probably have realized that was an issue without any prior knowledge of GPS. They know that their phone has a GPS receiver, and that satellite phones accessing geostationary or high altitude satellites are much bulkier. Clearly, your cell phone isn’t transmitting to each satellite. How will future LLMs be able to conduct that level of reasoning?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - aw1621107 4y ago
    > this is probably appropriate for explaining things to 5 year olds. I feel it's appropriate in terms of simplicity, but I think providing a simple wrong explanation is really only worth it when the more accurate explanation is substantially harder to simplify, and I don't think explaining how GPS works falls into that category. Something like this I think is more accurate without being any more complex: > Imagine you are standing outside and you see lots of stars in the sky. Well, GPS works kind of like that, but instead of stars, there are satellites orbiting the Earth. These satellites are way up high, so you can always see some of them. > When you have a GPS device, like a phone or a car, it can look for these satellites, and if it sees enough of them it can use math to figure out where you are.
  - wolfgang42 4y ago
    You can just as easily ELI5 this without spreading misinformation, though. Just change the third paragraph to: > The satellites all broadcast a special code saying where each of them is. When you have a GPS device, like a phone or a car, it can listen to these codes and find out where and how far away different satellites are. (Actually, this would be a fun thing to do with a class. Have a few kids march around the edges of the playground, saying things like “I’m next to the swingset now!”, and then ask one one kid to close their eyes, put them somewhere in the middle and ask them to guess where they’re standing.)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- daveFNbuck 4y ago
  The first half is wrong too. GPS has nothing to do with satellites being able to see lots of things from high up. The whole thing is just nonsense that looks plausibly like an explanation until you try to decipher it.
  - crabmusket 4y ago
    I didn't even notice that bit (maybe GPT is a flat-earther?). Something GPT discourse has been demonstrating to me is that I'm not usually a very careful reader. I apparently skim a lot. Or maybe I skim GPT outputs because I'm biased in my expectations already?
    - jakeinspace 4y ago
      I’ve noticed this too! It’s excellent at mimicking an expert voice, and it puts me off guard.
  - ygggvbbjiuygvf 4y ago
    So just like a typical explanation of things for five year olds?
    - aw1621107 4y ago
      Achieving simplicity by glossing over details is distinct from achieving simplicity by stating something incorrect. Which one is more appropriate and/or typical will probably depend on what questions the five-year-old is asking, but I think it's reasonable to say the former is usually preferable to the latter.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    >GPS has nothing to do with satellites being able to see lots of things from high up. It does in a sense because the radio waves need an approximate line of sight to reach your GPS receiver. Being high up gives them a large coverage.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  GPS doesn't talk to the satellites, but the satellites do send a message that allows the GPS to answer "where am I" for itself. It's not the worst way to explain things at that level, even if it's misleading. About half the (presumably human) "eli5 GPS" answers I found on Reddit made the same mistake, so chatGPT just copied an apparently popular misconception.
  - monsieurbanana 4y ago
    Might not be the worst way to explain how GPS works, but definitely up there. You'd be better off just saying "it uses satellites and stuff".
  - notahacker 4y ago
    > About half the (presumably human) "eli5 GPS" answers I found on Reddit made the same mistake, so chatGPT just copied an apparently popular misconception. I think that's one of the biggest problems with using LLMs for accurate answers. A lot of the text that's very useful for modelling human language and questions is also full of factual errors and questionable opinions. Answers being wrong is a problem with old-fashioned web search too, but I think LLMs necessarily lean more on quantity rather than quality of content...
    - shagie 4y ago
      It is better at doing "translations" from one "language" to another "language". While it does know stuff and can answer questions about what it knows, that isn't its strength. If you can do "here is the structured data, summarize it and make sure to present this information" it can do that quite well. So far I've played with GPT doing a zero shot classification of HN titles and CSV hourly weather data to summary. In each case, it has done quite well. Neither of those are things about what it "knows."
    - ufmace 4y ago
      The benefit of web searches, and trouble with LLMs, is you can see the site that an answer is on and judge the credibility based on that. If I see that the answer is on Reddit ELI5, then I know that there's no assurance about how accurate the answer is. If it takes me to a page for a university engineering or math department, or the blog of a dude who built a receiver, then I can be a lot more confident that the answer is correct, though it might be technically over my head.
- IanCal 4y ago
  Here's it's reply to me: Ian Calvert Computer, please find out how GPS works and explain it to me like I'm five years old Sure thing! GPS stands for Global Positioning System. It's a way to find out where you are on Earth. GPS works by using satellites that are way up in space. There are lots of these satellites orbiting around Earth, and they are always sending out signals. Your GPS receiver is a special device that can pick up these signals from the satellites. The GPS receiver knows how far away it is from each satellite because of the time it takes for the signal to reach it. By figuring out how far away it is from a few different satellites, the GPS receiver can figure out exactly where it is on Earth. So, if you have a GPS receiver in your car, phone, or on a special device like a watch, it can use the signals from the satellites to tell you exactly where you are and how to get to where you want to go. Does that make sense? --- I was also able to ask it to make it simpler and simpler and it did so pretty well.
  - burnished 4y ago
    Interesting, the one you got id basically correct.
    - jfk13 4y ago
      And comparing these two results for the same question serves to illustrate how ChatGPT does not in any meaningful sense _understand_ what it is "talking" about. It basically just strings together relevant-seeming words in a plausible way. The result may be useful, or it may be nonsense. You'd better know enough (and be alert enough) to tell the difference...
      - gl-prod 4y ago
        And because of how it responds to them, people often forget that ChatGPT is just a language model, not an all-knowing AI.
theteapot 4y ago
Did ChatGPT come up with this, or just rip it off from some place(s) without attribution?
- ben_w 4y ago
  I've seen this sort of response a lot lately, both for GPT and all the image generators. Google, and all the other search engines, literally show snippets of the original content to display search results, and have had copyright infringement lawsuits over this. Yet somehow, it's taken these AI, which generally aren't just block-quoting things unless you ask them to (and often getting it wrong if you do), for non-lawyers to start asking that question.
  - theteapot 4y ago
    I think that just indicates it's more blatant. With search engine results I can click through to the original source. That's attribution, at least to the laymen. ChatGPT has no such thing.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      I selected a few sentences from the given response, asked DuckDuckGo to find them, and got zero hits for any of them. GPT definitely has some kind of internal model of things and how they relate to other things, and the capacity to express those relations in different ways. Whether this is functionally the same as the model in my head, or some analog to it, or if such descriptions are merely cute but misleading anthropomorphisation, is far beyond my knowledge of neuroscience, psychology, and indeed machine learning.
      - theteapot 4y ago
        > I selected a few sentences from the given response, asked DuckDuckGo to find them, and got zero hits for any of them. Science.
  - schrodinger 4y ago
x86x87 4y ago
The explanation is misleading. The satellites don't see you and don't care about you. They are beacons sending a radio signal (the beacons says: i'm satellite X and here is a timestamp). The receiver based on the known position of the satelites and the beacon signals received figures out your position on earth using math! So the explanation is either: satellites and their position or give the full explanation. Not this regurgitation.
pwdisswordfisha 4y ago
I'd be more impressed if it explained set-theoretic forcing on that level.
burnished 4y ago
Except for having nothing to do with how GPS works. The satellites essentially broadcast what time it is and your reciever uses the delay between broadcast and reception to calculate where/when it is. Explain like Im five means break it down, not lie about the complicated bits.
aortega 4y ago
>Not bad! Its terrible. This is totally not how GPS works, I.E. the terminal never sends a message to the satellite. This is the danger of early LLMs, a large amount of their output is false and there is no way to tell unless you are already an expert. This makes them basically useless except for a toy.
- tarl0s 4y ago
  Asking it to “explain how GPS works like I’m a seasoned engineer” yields a more detailed explanation and there’s no mention of GPS terminals sending messages back to the satellites. Probably the “false output” you mentioned is due to the fact that the prompt asked to “explain it like I’m five”, which made ChatGPT answer with a “dialogue between terminal and satellite” explanation, which (arguably) may be better understood by a 5 years old.
thedorkknight 4y ago
I asked it to explain it to me like I'm Shrek. Imagine that the GPS satellites orbiting the Earth are like the magic lanterns in the sky, sending signals down to a receiver (like the one in your phone or car). The receiver can use those signals to figure out how far away it is from each of the magic lanterns. By measuring the distance to multiple lanterns, the receiver can triangulate its position and figure out exactly where it is on the surface of the Earth. So even if you're a big, green ogre like Shrek, you can use GPS to find your way around and never get lost!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cs702 4y ago

And it's only going to get better over time. As I mentioned elsewhere, conversational AIs in the early 2020's are like PCs in the 1980's -- a new technology that still has lots of early limitations.

jakeinspace 4y ago

The second half of that explanation is completely wrong though, isn’t it? There is no active signal being sent from your GPS antenna, no two-way communication.

ben_w 4y ago
Yes, but unlike most times it gets things wrong, this is probably appropriate for explaining things to 5 year olds. (Also, the UK comedy quiz show QI made the exact same mistake).
- jakeinspace 4y ago
  I’ll admit it was a decent answer. However, even a somewhat bright person (especially someone with radio / networking experience) could probably have realized that was an issue without any prior knowledge of GPS. They know that their phone has a GPS receiver, and that satellite phones accessing geostationary or high altitude satellites are much bulkier. Clearly, your cell phone isn’t transmitting to each satellite. How will future LLMs be able to conduct that level of reasoning?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- aw1621107 4y ago
  > this is probably appropriate for explaining things to 5 year olds. I feel it's appropriate in terms of simplicity, but I think providing a simple wrong explanation is really only worth it when the more accurate explanation is substantially harder to simplify, and I don't think explaining how GPS works falls into that category. Something like this I think is more accurate without being any more complex: > Imagine you are standing outside and you see lots of stars in the sky. Well, GPS works kind of like that, but instead of stars, there are satellites orbiting the Earth. These satellites are way up high, so you can always see some of them. > When you have a GPS device, like a phone or a car, it can look for these satellites, and if it sees enough of them it can use math to figure out where you are.
- wolfgang42 4y ago
  You can just as easily ELI5 this without spreading misinformation, though. Just change the third paragraph to: > The satellites all broadcast a special code saying where each of them is. When you have a GPS device, like a phone or a car, it can listen to these codes and find out where and how far away different satellites are. (Actually, this would be a fun thing to do with a class. Have a few kids march around the edges of the playground, saying things like “I’m next to the swingset now!”, and then ask one one kid to close their eyes, put them somewhere in the middle and ask them to guess where they’re standing.)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
daveFNbuck 4y ago
The first half is wrong too. GPS has nothing to do with satellites being able to see lots of things from high up. The whole thing is just nonsense that looks plausibly like an explanation until you try to decipher it.
- crabmusket 4y ago
  I didn't even notice that bit (maybe GPT is a flat-earther?). Something GPT discourse has been demonstrating to me is that I'm not usually a very careful reader. I apparently skim a lot. Or maybe I skim GPT outputs because I'm biased in my expectations already?
  - jakeinspace 4y ago
    I’ve noticed this too! It’s excellent at mimicking an expert voice, and it puts me off guard.
- ygggvbbjiuygvf 4y ago
  So just like a typical explanation of things for five year olds?
  - aw1621107 4y ago
    Achieving simplicity by glossing over details is distinct from achieving simplicity by stating something incorrect. Which one is more appropriate and/or typical will probably depend on what questions the five-year-old is asking, but I think it's reasonable to say the former is usually preferable to the latter.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  >GPS has nothing to do with satellites being able to see lots of things from high up. It does in a sense because the radio waves need an approximate line of sight to reach your GPS receiver. Being high up gives them a large coverage.
AlotOfReading 4y ago
GPS doesn't talk to the satellites, but the satellites do send a message that allows the GPS to answer "where am I" for itself. It's not the worst way to explain things at that level, even if it's misleading. About half the (presumably human) "eli5 GPS" answers I found on Reddit made the same mistake, so chatGPT just copied an apparently popular misconception.
- monsieurbanana 4y ago
  Might not be the worst way to explain how GPS works, but definitely up there. You'd be better off just saying "it uses satellites and stuff".
- notahacker 4y ago
  > About half the (presumably human) "eli5 GPS" answers I found on Reddit made the same mistake, so chatGPT just copied an apparently popular misconception. I think that's one of the biggest problems with using LLMs for accurate answers. A lot of the text that's very useful for modelling human language and questions is also full of factual errors and questionable opinions. Answers being wrong is a problem with old-fashioned web search too, but I think LLMs necessarily lean more on quantity rather than quality of content...
  - shagie 4y ago
    It is better at doing "translations" from one "language" to another "language". While it does know stuff and can answer questions about what it knows, that isn't its strength. If you can do "here is the structured data, summarize it and make sure to present this information" it can do that quite well. So far I've played with GPT doing a zero shot classification of HN titles and CSV hourly weather data to summary. In each case, it has done quite well. Neither of those are things about what it "knows."
  - ufmace 4y ago
    The benefit of web searches, and trouble with LLMs, is you can see the site that an answer is on and judge the credibility based on that. If I see that the answer is on Reddit ELI5, then I know that there's no assurance about how accurate the answer is. If it takes me to a page for a university engineering or math department, or the blog of a dude who built a receiver, then I can be a lot more confident that the answer is correct, though it might be technically over my head.
IanCal 4y ago
Here's it's reply to me: Ian Calvert Computer, please find out how GPS works and explain it to me like I'm five years old Sure thing! GPS stands for Global Positioning System. It's a way to find out where you are on Earth. GPS works by using satellites that are way up in space. There are lots of these satellites orbiting around Earth, and they are always sending out signals. Your GPS receiver is a special device that can pick up these signals from the satellites. The GPS receiver knows how far away it is from each satellite because of the time it takes for the signal to reach it. By figuring out how far away it is from a few different satellites, the GPS receiver can figure out exactly where it is on Earth. So, if you have a GPS receiver in your car, phone, or on a special device like a watch, it can use the signals from the satellites to tell you exactly where you are and how to get to where you want to go. Does that make sense? --- I was also able to ask it to make it simpler and simpler and it did so pretty well.
- burnished 4y ago
  Interesting, the one you got id basically correct.
  - jfk13 4y ago
    And comparing these two results for the same question serves to illustrate how ChatGPT does not in any meaningful sense _understand_ what it is "talking" about. It basically just strings together relevant-seeming words in a plausible way. The result may be useful, or it may be nonsense. You'd better know enough (and be alert enough) to tell the difference...
    - gl-prod 4y ago
      And because of how it responds to them, people often forget that ChatGPT is just a language model, not an all-knowing AI.

theteapot 4y ago

Did ChatGPT come up with this, or just rip it off from some place(s) without attribution?

ben_w 4y ago
I've seen this sort of response a lot lately, both for GPT and all the image generators. Google, and all the other search engines, literally show snippets of the original content to display search results, and have had copyright infringement lawsuits over this. Yet somehow, it's taken these AI, which generally aren't just block-quoting things unless you ask them to (and often getting it wrong if you do), for non-lawyers to start asking that question.
- theteapot 4y ago
  I think that just indicates it's more blatant. With search engine results I can click through to the original source. That's attribution, at least to the laymen. ChatGPT has no such thing.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    I selected a few sentences from the given response, asked DuckDuckGo to find them, and got zero hits for any of them. GPT definitely has some kind of internal model of things and how they relate to other things, and the capacity to express those relations in different ways. Whether this is functionally the same as the model in my head, or some analog to it, or if such descriptions are merely cute but misleading anthropomorphisation, is far beyond my knowledge of neuroscience, psychology, and indeed machine learning.
    - theteapot 4y ago
      > I selected a few sentences from the given response, asked DuckDuckGo to find them, and got zero hits for any of them. Science.
- schrodinger 4y ago

x86x87 4y ago

The explanation is misleading. The satellites don't see you and don't care about you. They are beacons sending a radio signal (the beacons says: i'm satellite X and here is a timestamp). The receiver based on the known position of the satelites and the beacon signals received figures out your position on earth using math! So the explanation is either: satellites and their position or give the full explanation. Not this regurgitation.

pwdisswordfisha 4y ago

I'd be more impressed if it explained set-theoretic forcing on that level.

burnished 4y ago

Except for having nothing to do with how GPS works. The satellites essentially broadcast what time it is and your reciever uses the delay between broadcast and reception to calculate where/when it is. Explain like Im five means break it down, not lie about the complicated bits.

aortega 4y ago

>Not bad! Its terrible. This is totally not how GPS works, I.E. the terminal never sends a message to the satellite. This is the danger of early LLMs, a large amount of their output is false and there is no way to tell unless you are already an expert. This makes them basically useless except for a toy.

tarl0s 4y ago
Asking it to “explain how GPS works like I’m a seasoned engineer” yields a more detailed explanation and there’s no mention of GPS terminals sending messages back to the satellites. Probably the “false output” you mentioned is due to the fact that the prompt asked to “explain it like I’m five”, which made ChatGPT answer with a “dialogue between terminal and satellite” explanation, which (arguably) may be better understood by a 5 years old.

thedorkknight 4y ago

I asked it to explain it to me like I'm Shrek. Imagine that the GPS satellites orbiting the Earth are like the magic lanterns in the sky, sending signals down to a receiver (like the one in your phone or car). The receiver can use those signals to figure out how far away it is from each of the magic lanterns. By measuring the distance to multiple lanterns, the receiver can triangulate its position and figure out exactly where it is on the surface of the Earth. So even if you're a big, green ogre like Shrek, you can use GPS to find your way around and never get lost!