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And they want it to perform proofreading. And to generate copy for articles and blog posts and job listings and email responses. And to respond to tech support
by LeifCarrotson 3y ago
And they want it to perform proofreading. And to generate copy for articles and blog posts and job listings and email responses. And to respond to tech support tickets. And to operate a phone tree. And, heaven help us, to write software, and - oh God no - to drive cars.
The problem is that people are actually finding it useful for all of those things!
I, too, would never have drawn up a functional specification for a product release which said the product might hallucinate and might be parrot incorrect facts about eggs melting if you phrase the question wrong[edit: if you insert an incorrect premise in the question], or might drive into a bus if it had a mural printed on the side. I'd have required correct performance to a lot more 9s before releasing the thing to the public than the products which have been released to the public demonstrate, or at least required a confidence metric that would allow the product to respond with an error message and escalate to a human if it thought it might fail (for tech support, not for self-driving cars, obviously).
And yet here we are. Turns out people and corporations do find utility in hallucination-prone, often-wrong, easily misled, easily confused LLM chatbots. And they'll strap a weight to the wheel of their Tesla so they can stare at their phone while it drives them on Autopilot.
- elicksaur 3y agoWhy does everyone frame the problem as “if you phrase the question wrong”? This example is a simple question. Any human who understands English understands the meaning of the question here. The fact that it gets it wrong with this phrasing indicates the model doesn’t understand the world. We shouldn’t blame users for asking questions “wrong”.
- pipeline_peak 3y agoHe’s not saying it’s the users fault for how they phrase the question. He’s saying the bot is limited in how it interprets questions.
- wredue 3y agoI’ve had people respond to my posts with “yeah well ChatGPT says …”. For starters, I don’t give a shit what ChatGPT has to say about various programming topics. Second, it makes sense that ChatGPT would get the facts of immutability utterly, childishly incorrect because fad oriented development has decided that claims absent evidence is the way to write software.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago> I’ve had people respond to my posts with “yeah well ChatGPT says …”. One generation earlier, the argument was “yeah well Google/Wikipedia says …”. So this is nothing new.
- wredue 3y agoIt is new though. These AIs are known for being somewhere between outright wrong to subtly wrong, while not presenting a separate layer. When I searched something, I was given lots of results and could individually make judgements. With ChatGPT, people are treating these answers as authority at a much more dangerous level than you would have from engaging with a search engine or sourced material. I will grant that yes, googling and Wikipedia can also get things outright to subtly wrong, but the presentation can make those inaccuracies more apparent.