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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, seri

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!!!
- TechBro8615 4y ago
  Yeah, it's kinda funny how we simultaneously expect the ideal AI to have human intelligence, but also not to make human mistakes. Guess what? If you build a perfect replica of a human brain, it will make human errors, because that's what human brains do. And incidentally, it's the consequences of those errors that teach us not to repeat them... which is the same feedback loop we use to train AI in the first place!

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!!!
TechBro8615 4y ago
Yeah, it's kinda funny how we simultaneously expect the ideal AI to have human intelligence, but also not to make human mistakes. Guess what? If you build a perfect replica of a human brain, it will make human errors, because that's what human brains do. And incidentally, it's the consequences of those errors that teach us not to repeat them... which is the same feedback loop we use to train AI in the first place!