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I see people using ChatGPT, Bard, etc. to answer questions on mailing list threads. It'll be a long thread of thoughtful human written responses, and then some

I see people using ChatGPT, Bard, etc. to answer questions on mailing list threads. It'll be a long thread of thoughtful human written responses, and then someone will come along and say "I asked Bard what it thought about this issue, here's the response". And then out comes five paragraphs of text that I might as well not even bother reading, as it often contains falsehoods that I have to waste time looking up and double-checking. It bothers me so much that these LLMs don't have any inherent understanding of truth or facts, so the only thing they're really good at is writing fiction (e.g. I hear they're pretty good as a DM's assistant to flesh out flavor/scenario descriptions and such). The Midjourney generated images fall into the same fiction category and are generally pretty good too. But for actual non-fiction usage, you have to spend so much time triple-checking everything they say to ensure that it isn't simply complete nonsense. What's the point?

KingLancelot 3y ago
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deeviant 3y ago
> And then out comes five paragraphs of text that I might as well not even bother reading, as it often contains falsehoods that I have to waste time looking up and double-checking. I'm curious on if you feel human generated content does not contain falsehoods.
barbariangrunge 3y ago
As a fiction author, I don’t feel gpt writes good fiction at all. It’s a non-fiction tool, just one that lies to you constantly. Half of what it says is a lie…
- nimbleal 3y ago
  Yes, it’s terrible at writing fiction. Cliché laden, dull, repetitive prose and somehow, in terms of actual content, it never generates anything of interest. Its desire to always wrap things up into a happy ending within a couple of paragraphs also means it’s almost incapable of generating conflict. At best it can generate teenage fan fiction — and bad teenage fan fiction, at that.
darklycan51 3y ago
Why do people use bard, like genuinely, it just gives way worse responses than bing esp on creative mode, the only good thing bard has going for it is that the frontend programmers knew what they were doing and it doesn't auto scroll up when it types.
copperx 3y ago
I consider code to be non-fiction, and ChatGPT will generate stuff that compiles and works most of the time. There's no need to triple-check the code output.
- brk 3y ago
  But this is not really an accurate comparison. "Code" is really a much much much smaller and much much much more structured output than "English words". Presumably, the system was trained with a very small amount of "untrue code" in the sense of stuff that just absolutely could never work. And also presumably, it was trained with a lot of free-form text that was definitely wrong or false, and highly likely to have been originally created to be purposefully misleading, or at a minimum, fiction. That the system outputs reliable code tells us nothing about its current ability to output highly reliable free form text.
  - gAI 3y ago
    But it understands English words and translates the meaning behind them into code very well, particularly with a bit of iteration. Simply taking the interface from writing code to speaking in plain language is a huge practical accomplishment.
- gAI 3y ago
  With the Code Interpreter beta active, it will compile and run that code in the same chat window.
tempestn 3y ago
The point is you need to collaborate with the LLM, not just expect it to provide fully-formed answers. I've saved countless hours of work over the past few months using GPT-4 to help me solve problems. One general framework can be to use it to help you google a solution instead of a problem. Googling a problem gives you all kinds of results, which you then need to dig through and understand in order to evaluate whether there's something that can be adapted to your use case. On the other hand, you can ask GPT-4 for solutions to the problem, and then google those, which cuts the process down significantly. Of course that's only one example. The pattern though is that you need to play to its strengths. It's not particularly smart, but it's very knowledgeable. Just like a human though, you can't expect it to perfectly regurgitate all the details. You use it for direction, and then refine from there, through conversation with the LLM as well as external research.
- mrkramer 3y ago
  >Googling a problem gives you all kinds of results, which you then need to dig through and understand in order to evaluate whether there's something that can be adapted to your use case. Exactly; search engines give you those blue links and short descriptions of the search results which are not enough for you to grasp what is the website about. I think what search engines need to do is tackle the complexity of going through the results of a search engine. Google page rank seemed like a silver bullet back in the day but the websites which are the most popular are not necessarily of the best quality. What we need is to lower the complexity for casual users when they deal with search results. On the other hand ChatGPT is like an answer machine that can give you satisfactory answer on your fist try but if not, you need to talk with it, push it and explore what answers it gives you, just like you said. I think ChatGPT type search engine will be more suitable for people who are "lazy" or for the people who don't have time to "Google" and go through search results and look around the web for the helpful and useful information.
  - bagasme 3y ago
    Yikes! I mean ChatGPT-style search engine is more fit for noobs and the faint-of-heart people (the ones with nothing in the world for them IMO).
JohnFen 3y ago
> then someone will come along and say "I asked Bard what it thought about this issue, here's the response" At least they tell you where the text came from, so you know to skip it. It's worse when they just post an LLM response as their own.
- gAI 3y ago
  I love this, honestly. If I don't notice, that's a win for AI. If I do, then I just treat it as the new Rick Roll.
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  This would annoy me significantly. Can I ask what field you're in?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I'm a software developer. Working, in part, on AI systems, ironically enough.
_jal 3y ago
I'm getting people filing tickets for... let's call them complex, medium-large projects that they want implemented. Helpfully, they're including ChatGPT "instructions" for how to do it. I got my first "but ChatGPT said..." argument about why I'm wrong about something just yesterday. Somewhat more general, but I've pretty much already decided that if I find people using it to talk to me without telling me, I won't be talking to them. Goes for businesses as well as personal things - don't gaslight me, or you will lose the option to do so.

KingLancelot 3y ago

[dead]

deeviant 3y ago

> And then out comes five paragraphs of text that I might as well not even bother reading, as it often contains falsehoods that I have to waste time looking up and double-checking. I'm curious on if you feel human generated content does not contain falsehoods.

barbariangrunge 3y ago

As a fiction author, I don’t feel gpt writes good fiction at all. It’s a non-fiction tool, just one that lies to you constantly. Half of what it says is a lie…

nimbleal 3y ago
Yes, it’s terrible at writing fiction. Cliché laden, dull, repetitive prose and somehow, in terms of actual content, it never generates anything of interest. Its desire to always wrap things up into a happy ending within a couple of paragraphs also means it’s almost incapable of generating conflict. At best it can generate teenage fan fiction — and bad teenage fan fiction, at that.

darklycan51 3y ago

Why do people use bard, like genuinely, it just gives way worse responses than bing esp on creative mode, the only good thing bard has going for it is that the frontend programmers knew what they were doing and it doesn't auto scroll up when it types.

copperx 3y ago

I consider code to be non-fiction, and ChatGPT will generate stuff that compiles and works most of the time. There's no need to triple-check the code output.

brk 3y ago
But this is not really an accurate comparison. "Code" is really a much much much smaller and much much much more structured output than "English words". Presumably, the system was trained with a very small amount of "untrue code" in the sense of stuff that just absolutely could never work. And also presumably, it was trained with a lot of free-form text that was definitely wrong or false, and highly likely to have been originally created to be purposefully misleading, or at a minimum, fiction. That the system outputs reliable code tells us nothing about its current ability to output highly reliable free form text.
- gAI 3y ago
  But it understands English words and translates the meaning behind them into code very well, particularly with a bit of iteration. Simply taking the interface from writing code to speaking in plain language is a huge practical accomplishment.
gAI 3y ago
With the Code Interpreter beta active, it will compile and run that code in the same chat window.

tempestn 3y ago

The point is you need to collaborate with the LLM, not just expect it to provide fully-formed answers. I've saved countless hours of work over the past few months using GPT-4 to help me solve problems. One general framework can be to use it to help you google a solution instead of a problem. Googling a problem gives you all kinds of results, which you then need to dig through and understand in order to evaluate whether there's something that can be adapted to your use case. On the other hand, you can ask GPT-4 for solutions to the problem, and then google those, which cuts the process down significantly. Of course that's only one example. The pattern though is that you need to play to its strengths. It's not particularly smart, but it's very knowledgeable. Just like a human though, you can't expect it to perfectly regurgitate all the details. You use it for direction, and then refine from there, through conversation with the LLM as well as external research.

mrkramer 3y ago
>Googling a problem gives you all kinds of results, which you then need to dig through and understand in order to evaluate whether there's something that can be adapted to your use case. Exactly; search engines give you those blue links and short descriptions of the search results which are not enough for you to grasp what is the website about. I think what search engines need to do is tackle the complexity of going through the results of a search engine. Google page rank seemed like a silver bullet back in the day but the websites which are the most popular are not necessarily of the best quality. What we need is to lower the complexity for casual users when they deal with search results. On the other hand ChatGPT is like an answer machine that can give you satisfactory answer on your fist try but if not, you need to talk with it, push it and explore what answers it gives you, just like you said. I think ChatGPT type search engine will be more suitable for people who are "lazy" or for the people who don't have time to "Google" and go through search results and look around the web for the helpful and useful information.
- bagasme 3y ago
  Yikes! I mean ChatGPT-style search engine is more fit for noobs and the faint-of-heart people (the ones with nothing in the world for them IMO).

JohnFen 3y ago

> then someone will come along and say "I asked Bard what it thought about this issue, here's the response" At least they tell you where the text came from, so you know to skip it. It's worse when they just post an LLM response as their own.

gAI 3y ago
I love this, honestly. If I don't notice, that's a win for AI. If I do, then I just treat it as the new Rick Roll.
7thaccount 3y ago
This would annoy me significantly. Can I ask what field you're in?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I'm a software developer. Working, in part, on AI systems, ironically enough.

_jal 3y ago

I'm getting people filing tickets for... let's call them complex, medium-large projects that they want implemented. Helpfully, they're including ChatGPT "instructions" for how to do it. I got my first "but ChatGPT said..." argument about why I'm wrong about something just yesterday. Somewhat more general, but I've pretty much already decided that if I find people using it to talk to me without telling me, I won't be talking to them. Goes for businesses as well as personal things - don't gaslight me, or you will lose the option to do so.