5 ms·

It’s completely unreliable because it sounds confident and plausible even when it’s wrong. Essentially it fails in ways that are very hard to detect. If you as

It’s completely unreliable because it sounds confident and plausible even when it’s wrong. Essentially it fails in ways that are very hard to detect. If you ask it question you have no way to know whether it’s right or not unless you already know the answer. I’ve asked it many questions about my area of expertise, distributed systems, and it was often flat out wrong, but to a non expert it sounded perfectly plausible. I asked my my wife, a physician, to try it out and she reported the exact same problem. Some of the answers it gave had even veered off from just annoying to actually dangerous. That doesn’t mean it can’t be useful, but using it to answer important questions or using it to teach yourself something you don’t already know is dangerous.

beefield 4y ago
> It’s completely unreliable because it sounds confident and plausible even when it’s wrong This describes pretty accurately a non-trivial amount of people I have worked with.
- sarchertech 4y ago
  And hopefully after someone shows you that they can be described that way, you stop trusting what they say (at least about the thing they are known to be unreliable about).
  - vidarh 4y ago
    A whole lot of people can be trusted within a reasonable identified set of constraint, and we do, while discounting them in others where they're known to spew bullshit. It's very rarely all or nothing.
    - sarchertech 4y ago
      Obviously. Chatgpt will randomly spew bullshit about nearly any topic though. So you can really only trust it for things you are already an expert in or things that are very easy to verify.
      - williamcotton 4y ago
        It's not random. It's probabilistic. There is a very big difference. The types of errors are predictable which means they can be improved, and empirically so if you follow the academic literature.
        sarchertech 4y ago
        I have read enough of the academic literature to say with some confidence that the majority of the errors I’m talking about are not probabilistic in any meaningful sense. At least not in a way that can be predicted from the amount of readily available training data.
        zmgsabst 4y ago
        Ironically, this reply is about as useful as if chatGPT wrote it: - there’s no cited facts - it boldly proclaims its conclusion - which you’d only be able to verify as an expert …so I’m having trouble understanding what you’re complaining about with chatGPT, when that seems to be the standard for discourse.
        sarchertech 4y ago
        I don’t trust a random hacker news comment by someone I don’t know or can verify any further than I can throw it, so in that sense they are probably similar. The comment I was replying to was “the errors you’re talking about are probabilistic if you read the literature” my response is “no they aren’t I have read the literature.” Note that I’m talking about a specific class of error and proving a negative is difficult enough that I’m not diving through papers to find citations for something n levels deep in a hacker news thread.
        williamcotton 4y ago
        Here you go, here's a bunch of papers that you have not read. If you had read them then you would know that the errors are predictable and therefore there are many measurable ways to make improvements. Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04761 https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04761 PAL: Program-aided Language Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.10435 https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.10435 TALM: Tool Augmented Language Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.12255 https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.12255 Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903 https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903 Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.03629 https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.03629
  - nl 4y ago
    chatGPT (as in the current release of the OpenAI tool that was released 30/Nov/22, so ~3 months ago) has this problem. This does not mean it is a problem that is impossible to fix.
- peoplearepeople 4y ago
  You shouldn't listen to them either then
- discreteevent 4y ago
  It may describe a number of people you have worked with but it does not describe the average medical textbook which will usually describe the best knowledge we have of a condition. If chatgpt produces something that looks like it came from a medical textbook then it is hard to blame many people for believing it. More generally, people started to trust computers more than people as soon as calculators demonstrated their reliability.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    I don't know, I get this feeling ChatGPT has also read all the quack books where the condition depends on the alignment of stars when you were born, or how chicken entrails land when the shaman "studies" it. Those books are also written confidently without giving any sign of being completely fabricated. In the end, why do people believe what they believe? The answer is it connects with what they already believe. That's it. If you had a diet of what we call science, you'll have a foothold in a whole bunch of arenas where you can feel yourself forward, going from one little truth to another. If you are a blank slate with a bit of quackery seeded onto it, you end up believing the stars predict your life and that you can communicate with dead people with a Ouija board. CGPT doesn't have an "already believe". It just has a "humans on the panel give me reward" mechanism, and all it's doing is reflecting what it got rewarded for. Sometimes that's the scientific truth, sometimes it's crap. All the time it's confident, because that's what's rewarded.
  - petra 4y ago
    This is not a new phenomena. Have most people invested time in making sure their web search results are accurate? It is dangerous for sure, but that's what you got.
Vvector 4y ago
> It’s completely unreliable because it sounds confident and plausible even when it’s wrong. That applies to my boss, college professors, Wikipedia, or my neighbor after a couple of beers. It's not designed to give the correct medical steps to diagnosis a brain injury.
- rnk 4y ago
  The problem is most people do believe these confident facts spoken by a leader, they aren't evaluating them. An easy example is the fairly widespread belief that somehow the us pres election was stolen. People said it, but there mountains of evidence don't exist. But millions of people believe it.
williamcotton 4y ago
You're not thinking about this probabilistically. This isn't about "correct" and "incorrect". There is an entire universe between those two poles with regards to most kinds of knowledge. Facts are a specific kind of knowledge, and frankly, not that important. It's more important to know why the Civil War was fought than to know the exact dates and locations of each battle. I've heard people say they wouldn't use ChatGPT even if there was "only a 1 in a billion chance that it made their bank account details public"... May I introduce you to some very real probabilities: https://oddsofdying.com https://oddsofdying.com If you are living in America there is a 1 in 615 chance that your cause of death will be the result of an automobile accident. So yes, it is unlikely that we will ever create a tool that can answer with 100% confidence. It is also unlikely that a manufacturing process will result in a widget that conforms to allowed tolerances 100% of the time. However, in manufacturing this is understood. A defect of 3.4 per million widgets is considered an incredibly high process capability. These tools are being made more reliable everyday. Please have a realistic goal in mind. Edit: Well I've learned this much. Many of you are not Beyesians!
- sarchertech 4y ago
  I asked it 3 questions about distributed systems, 2 of the answers were so fundamentally wrong that they would lead to a complete misunderstanding of the subjects, and if you tried to implement systems based on that understanding they would be broken in hard to detect ways. The problem is that an LLM can only be as reliable as its training material. For example I wrote a blog post on the 2 generals problem. In the comments there is more text from inexperienced people asserting that a solution exists than there is text from my original article. An LLM trained on that article and comments will always be wrong. LLMs can be trained on smaller vetted training sets sure, but they also currently require massive amounts of data and there’s no guarantee that just waiting a few months or years will improve reliability enough to fix these issues.
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    That's a very small sample size. Also, the scope of that question is rather broad. There are a number of techniques you could try to improve your results. But I get the distinct feeling that you are not interested in improving your results as you have a motivation to "prove" something about LLMs.
Loquebantur 4y ago
Weirdly enough, people seem to view this only from one side: "ChatGPT is an expert at lying!". Actually, it was explicitly instructed to sound confident, serious and expertly. The important thing here is: to most people, it is enough to sound like that in order to make them believe. This heuristic is trivial to hack, gets exploited not just by ChatBots and is downright dangerous on a societal level. Acquiring and vetting information is a task of crucial importance situated in between journalism and science. Just trawling the internet and autocompleting the acquired driftwood is a weird approach to begin with. Doing so without transparency in private companies is simply folly.
- panarky 4y ago
  I know flesh and blood humans who are confident in their knowledge but still manage to make shit up and get facts wrong. I make up my own mind about what's true and what's useful by considering an ensemble of sources. In my experience with ChatGPT, it gets less wrong and more right than most humans, and it's able to find relationships among facts and concepts that are impossible with Wikipedia and Google. It's extremely useful and powerful in its current form, in spite of its many limitations. With other tools, we don't demand perfection to find them useful. Just because a hammer sometimes misses the nail and puts a hole in the wall, just because Wikipedia sometimes gets vandalized with lies, doesn't mean hammers and Wikipedia aren't essential tools.
  - Loquebantur 4y ago
    A good hammer is designed with an optimal weight distribution that makes it easy to hit the nail. ChatGPT may be better than using your own head at times, people will still sue sooner rather than later over lost digits. However, it provides an excellent opportunity for us mere humans to reflect upon the way we organize our society in regard to vital information processing. We are awfully bad at it. So bad actually, we can't even tell how it should be in the first place and are disturbed already by some piece of software telling nonsense.
  - shrimp_emoji 4y ago
    >I know flesh and blood humans who are confident in their knowledge but still manage to make shit up and get facts wrong. I make up my own mind about what's true and what's useful by considering an ensemble of sources. They're turning the freakin' frogs gay!!!
slackdog 4y ago
What if instead of asking ChatGPT for facts, we instead asked it for plausible methods of determining those facts? So instead of answering "The statue of Liberty is 151 feet tall" it could instead respond with "Look it up yourself on wikipedia."
- link_108 4y ago
  ChatGPT has made up sources when I've asked for them, so I wouldn't 100% trust it to provide great sources. Also, if ChatGPT just redirects you to search, doesn't that remove most of the value?
  - slackdog 4y ago
    > Also, if ChatGPT just redirects you to search, doesn't that remove most of the value? That's pretty much the conclusion I've already come to. I have to verify everything ChatGPT tells me, so using it is pointless if I already know where/how to look something up.
rnk 4y ago
It's basically like political candidate Kari Lake in Arizona. She is an extremely confident speaker, talking about the conspiracies against her, how she really won the election for Az Gov, all of them have no evidence or support. She is such an excellent speaker, she's just chilling to me because people will often just believe someone who is so well spoken. Chatgpt is that. Imagine connecting what chatgtp says with with a "super confident fascist human avatar" that is kind of Kari Lake. It will happen because it's obvious. We are just going to have ever more persuasive unreliable sources of information.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

beefield 4y ago

> It’s completely unreliable because it sounds confident and plausible even when it’s wrong This describes pretty accurately a non-trivial amount of people I have worked with.

sarchertech 4y ago
And hopefully after someone shows you that they can be described that way, you stop trusting what they say (at least about the thing they are known to be unreliable about).
- vidarh 4y ago
  A whole lot of people can be trusted within a reasonable identified set of constraint, and we do, while discounting them in others where they're known to spew bullshit. It's very rarely all or nothing.
  - sarchertech 4y ago
    Obviously. Chatgpt will randomly spew bullshit about nearly any topic though. So you can really only trust it for things you are already an expert in or things that are very easy to verify.
    - williamcotton 4y ago
      It's not random. It's probabilistic. There is a very big difference. The types of errors are predictable which means they can be improved, and empirically so if you follow the academic literature.
      - sarchertech 4y ago
        I have read enough of the academic literature to say with some confidence that the majority of the errors I’m talking about are not probabilistic in any meaningful sense. At least not in a way that can be predicted from the amount of readily available training data.
        zmgsabst 4y ago
        Ironically, this reply is about as useful as if chatGPT wrote it: - there’s no cited facts - it boldly proclaims its conclusion - which you’d only be able to verify as an expert …so I’m having trouble understanding what you’re complaining about with chatGPT, when that seems to be the standard for discourse.
        sarchertech 4y ago
        I don’t trust a random hacker news comment by someone I don’t know or can verify any further than I can throw it, so in that sense they are probably similar. The comment I was replying to was “the errors you’re talking about are probabilistic if you read the literature” my response is “no they aren’t I have read the literature.” Note that I’m talking about a specific class of error and proving a negative is difficult enough that I’m not diving through papers to find citations for something n levels deep in a hacker news thread.
        williamcotton 4y ago
        Here you go, here's a bunch of papers that you have not read. If you had read them then you would know that the errors are predictable and therefore there are many measurable ways to make improvements. Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04761 https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04761 PAL: Program-aided Language Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.10435 https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.10435 TALM: Tool Augmented Language Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.12255 https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.12255 Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903 https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903 Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.03629 https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.03629
- nl 4y ago
  chatGPT (as in the current release of the OpenAI tool that was released 30/Nov/22, so ~3 months ago) has this problem. This does not mean it is a problem that is impossible to fix.
peoplearepeople 4y ago
You shouldn't listen to them either then
discreteevent 4y ago
It may describe a number of people you have worked with but it does not describe the average medical textbook which will usually describe the best knowledge we have of a condition. If chatgpt produces something that looks like it came from a medical textbook then it is hard to blame many people for believing it. More generally, people started to trust computers more than people as soon as calculators demonstrated their reliability.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  I don't know, I get this feeling ChatGPT has also read all the quack books where the condition depends on the alignment of stars when you were born, or how chicken entrails land when the shaman "studies" it. Those books are also written confidently without giving any sign of being completely fabricated. In the end, why do people believe what they believe? The answer is it connects with what they already believe. That's it. If you had a diet of what we call science, you'll have a foothold in a whole bunch of arenas where you can feel yourself forward, going from one little truth to another. If you are a blank slate with a bit of quackery seeded onto it, you end up believing the stars predict your life and that you can communicate with dead people with a Ouija board. CGPT doesn't have an "already believe". It just has a "humans on the panel give me reward" mechanism, and all it's doing is reflecting what it got rewarded for. Sometimes that's the scientific truth, sometimes it's crap. All the time it's confident, because that's what's rewarded.
- petra 4y ago
  This is not a new phenomena. Have most people invested time in making sure their web search results are accurate? It is dangerous for sure, but that's what you got.

Vvector 4y ago

> It’s completely unreliable because it sounds confident and plausible even when it’s wrong. That applies to my boss, college professors, Wikipedia, or my neighbor after a couple of beers. It's not designed to give the correct medical steps to diagnosis a brain injury.

rnk 4y ago
The problem is most people do believe these confident facts spoken by a leader, they aren't evaluating them. An easy example is the fairly widespread belief that somehow the us pres election was stolen. People said it, but there mountains of evidence don't exist. But millions of people believe it.

williamcotton 4y ago

You're not thinking about this probabilistically. This isn't about "correct" and "incorrect". There is an entire universe between those two poles with regards to most kinds of knowledge. Facts are a specific kind of knowledge, and frankly, not that important. It's more important to know why the Civil War was fought than to know the exact dates and locations of each battle. I've heard people say they wouldn't use ChatGPT even if there was "only a 1 in a billion chance that it made their bank account details public"... May I introduce you to some very real probabilities: https://oddsofdying.com https://oddsofdying.com If you are living in America there is a 1 in 615 chance that your cause of death will be the result of an automobile accident. So yes, it is unlikely that we will ever create a tool that can answer with 100% confidence. It is also unlikely that a manufacturing process will result in a widget that conforms to allowed tolerances 100% of the time. However, in manufacturing this is understood. A defect of 3.4 per million widgets is considered an incredibly high process capability. These tools are being made more reliable everyday. Please have a realistic goal in mind. Edit: Well I've learned this much. Many of you are not Beyesians!

sarchertech 4y ago
I asked it 3 questions about distributed systems, 2 of the answers were so fundamentally wrong that they would lead to a complete misunderstanding of the subjects, and if you tried to implement systems based on that understanding they would be broken in hard to detect ways. The problem is that an LLM can only be as reliable as its training material. For example I wrote a blog post on the 2 generals problem. In the comments there is more text from inexperienced people asserting that a solution exists than there is text from my original article. An LLM trained on that article and comments will always be wrong. LLMs can be trained on smaller vetted training sets sure, but they also currently require massive amounts of data and there’s no guarantee that just waiting a few months or years will improve reliability enough to fix these issues.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  That's a very small sample size. Also, the scope of that question is rather broad. There are a number of techniques you could try to improve your results. But I get the distinct feeling that you are not interested in improving your results as you have a motivation to "prove" something about LLMs.

Loquebantur 4y ago

Weirdly enough, people seem to view this only from one side: "ChatGPT is an expert at lying!". Actually, it was explicitly instructed to sound confident, serious and expertly. The important thing here is: to most people, it is enough to sound like that in order to make them believe. This heuristic is trivial to hack, gets exploited not just by ChatBots and is downright dangerous on a societal level. Acquiring and vetting information is a task of crucial importance situated in between journalism and science. Just trawling the internet and autocompleting the acquired driftwood is a weird approach to begin with. Doing so without transparency in private companies is simply folly.

panarky 4y ago
I know flesh and blood humans who are confident in their knowledge but still manage to make shit up and get facts wrong. I make up my own mind about what's true and what's useful by considering an ensemble of sources. In my experience with ChatGPT, it gets less wrong and more right than most humans, and it's able to find relationships among facts and concepts that are impossible with Wikipedia and Google. It's extremely useful and powerful in its current form, in spite of its many limitations. With other tools, we don't demand perfection to find them useful. Just because a hammer sometimes misses the nail and puts a hole in the wall, just because Wikipedia sometimes gets vandalized with lies, doesn't mean hammers and Wikipedia aren't essential tools.
- Loquebantur 4y ago
  A good hammer is designed with an optimal weight distribution that makes it easy to hit the nail. ChatGPT may be better than using your own head at times, people will still sue sooner rather than later over lost digits. However, it provides an excellent opportunity for us mere humans to reflect upon the way we organize our society in regard to vital information processing. We are awfully bad at it. So bad actually, we can't even tell how it should be in the first place and are disturbed already by some piece of software telling nonsense.
- shrimp_emoji 4y ago
  >I know flesh and blood humans who are confident in their knowledge but still manage to make shit up and get facts wrong. I make up my own mind about what's true and what's useful by considering an ensemble of sources. They're turning the freakin' frogs gay!!!

slackdog 4y ago

What if instead of asking ChatGPT for facts, we instead asked it for plausible methods of determining those facts? So instead of answering "The statue of Liberty is 151 feet tall" it could instead respond with "Look it up yourself on wikipedia."

link_108 4y ago
ChatGPT has made up sources when I've asked for them, so I wouldn't 100% trust it to provide great sources. Also, if ChatGPT just redirects you to search, doesn't that remove most of the value?
- slackdog 4y ago
  > Also, if ChatGPT just redirects you to search, doesn't that remove most of the value? That's pretty much the conclusion I've already come to. I have to verify everything ChatGPT tells me, so using it is pointless if I already know where/how to look something up.

rnk 4y ago

It's basically like political candidate Kari Lake in Arizona. She is an extremely confident speaker, talking about the conspiracies against her, how she really won the election for Az Gov, all of them have no evidence or support. She is such an excellent speaker, she's just chilling to me because people will often just believe someone who is so well spoken. Chatgpt is that. Imagine connecting what chatgtp says with with a "super confident fascist human avatar" that is kind of Kari Lake. It will happen because it's obvious. We are just going to have ever more persuasive unreliable sources of information.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]