7 ms·
How can you tell if ChatGPT is lying to you and what you're learning is total hogwash?
by vore 3y ago
How can you tell if ChatGPT is lying to you and what you're learning is total hogwash?
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoI imagine the stakes of rewriting the Star Wars films are sufficiently low that this risk is acceptable...
- vore 3y agoI’ll just pick a topic and then ask for a summary and then ask clarifying questions. Probably don't want to start quoting hallucinated facts!
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoGood thing podcasts never have false/misleading information on them...
- vore 3y agoThis is an absurd argument that you are just making for the sake of argument and you know it. There's a difference between someone getting things wrong and a LLM shamelessly making something up out of the whole cloth.
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoNo; I'm much more confident in ChatGPT's accuracy than I am in a random podcast's accuracy. Podcasts tend to be relatively terrible, accuracy wise. If the alternative is learning from ChatGPT, your odds of getting correct information is substantially higher. Podcasts are entertaining! But not where I would go to learn anything.
- apwell23 3y agowhy are you forced to listen to "random" podcasts vs podcasts by people you trust? This argument is so dishonest its infuriating.
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoTrust is not a rational behavior, nor is it indicative of reliability of fact.
- apwell23 3y agoSure but that doesn't make it "random" . I don't get why top comment was listening to podcasts knowing full well that you will be given possibly inaccurate facts. I have hard time accepting that podcasts are audible wikipedia, such a strange take is top voted comment.
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoI listen to podcasts; they’re fun! But I am comfortable operating with incomplete information, and thus know how to treat a low quality source. I also chat with LLMs to better understand topics, and am better off than the folks here who can’t do that as a result. The main thing I’m getting from this discussion is that a lot more very smart people seem to have deluded themselves into thinking knowledge is objective or “locked in” than I had initially realized. The desire for certainty is an extremely human thing, but it’s a dead end, intellectually.
- apwell23 3y agoyea exactly "chatgpt replaced my podcasts" is kind of silly. People don't listen to joe rogan experience to learn facts about how particular jiu jitsu choke works. I don't know what kind of podcasts op replaced with chatgpt but i call BS .
- Martinussen 3y ago
- akho 3y agoIs there a similar difference between an LLM getting things wrong and someone shamelessly making something up out of the whole cloth? That's closer to what actually happens.
- JW_00000 3y agoI'm pretty sure that in the podcasts I listen to, no one is shamelessly making something up completely.
- colechristensen 3y agoThe kinds of mistakes an LLM makes aren’t nearly as bad as the kind of nonsense you can find humans saying, particularly in podcasts.
- Fatnino 3y agoPodcasts make stuff up from thin air all the time. Sometimes even maliciously.
- denlekke 3y agothey definitely do but i think in podcasts i generally have a better ability to evaluate how much trust i should place in what i'm hearing. i know if i'm listening to a professional chef podcast, i can probably trust they will generally be right talking about how they like to bake a turkey. if i'm listening to the hot wings guy interview zac efron i know to be less blindly trusting of their info on astrophysics. with chatgpt i don't know it's "experience" or "education" on a topic and it has no social accountability motivating it to make sure it gets things right so i can't estimate how much i should trust it in the same way.
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoI guarantee ChatGPT won't lie to you about how to bake a turkey. The paranoia around hallucination is wildly overblown, especially given the low stakes of this context.
- denlekke 3y agoi appreciate your confidence and would love to know how far you would go with the guarantee ! it makes me realize that there is at least one avenue for some level of trust about gpt accuracy and that's my general awareness of how much written content on the topic it probably had access to during training. i think maybe your earlier comment was about the average trustworthiness of all podcasts vs the same for all gpt responses. i would probably side with gpt4 in that context. however, there are plenty of situations where the comparison is between a podcast from the best human in the world at something and gpt which might have less training data or maybe the risks for the topic aren't eating an uncooked turkey but learning cpr wrong or having an airbag not deploy
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoThere are zero podcasts from “the best person in the world”, the very concept is absurd. No one person is particularly worth listening to individually, and as a podcast??? Good lord no. LLMs beat podcasts when it comes to, “random exploration of an unfamiliar topic”, every single time. The real issue here is that you trust podcasts so completely, by the way, not that ChatGPT is some oracle of knowledge. More generally, a skill all people need to develop is the ability to explore an idea without accepting whatever you first find. If you’re spending an afternoon talking with ChatGPT about a topic, you should be able to A) use your existing knowledge to give a rough first-pass validation of the information you’re getting, which will catch most hallucinations out of the gate, as they’re rarely subtle, and B) take what you learn with a hefty grain of salt, as if you’re hearing it from a stranger in a bar. This is an important skill, and absolutely applies to both podcasts and LLMs. Honestly why such profound deference to podcasts in particular?
- superultra 3y agoOne thing that could happen, sooner rather than later, is that agents are deployed that have access to a facial database of information relevant to the topic. So, there could be a GPT of that day’s NYT Daily with a high ranked database of info on, say, Israel and Hamas, and the text synthesis generates an overview but the user can “ask” for clarifying details to drill down, and responses.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- superultra 3y agoI consider the information I’m receiving at a “water cooler” level of factual accuracy. That said there are a few topics I’ve asked where I know enough to know (I had a grad degree in US history) and I’ve found it’s about on par with what you’d dig up through Google. I’ve also found recently that it’ll state when it can’t equivocally say something. Or, in some cases, when I have misunderstood something and repeat it back incorrectly to try and clarify, it’ll correct me. 6 months ago, over text interface, it never would have corrected me: it almost always assumed the user was right and went along with it. But again - it’s not like I’m fact checking Frank at the water cooler (or, often anyway). It’s shooting the shit and it’s great for that.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoIt can't be worse than TED talks, about half of which suffer from the reproducibility crisis (and therefore likely false).
- superultra 3y agoMy 15-year old loves the Percy Jackson series, and he said that the audio conversation he had with ChatGPT was the first time he felt like like “someone” “got” Percy Jackson, in “real life.” Lots of airquotes there because there isn’t a someone, and ChatGPT doesn’t get it, and what is real even? But the conversation was so good that my 15-year is now totally creeped out by ChatGPT and refused to use it after that that 30 min conversation. You take about low stakes but fiction is a massive industry. In making what is essentially Star Wars fanfic with ChatGPT, I’ve realized why AI was such a contentious point for the recent writers strikes.
- cosmojg 3y agoAs long as we're entertained, who cares?
- vore 3y agoIf you're replacing a factual podcast with it, maybe you should care a little...
- osti 3y agoHow can you be sure the podcast is factual, are you fact checking everything they say on the podcast?
- GaryNumanVevo 3y agoEvery source of information has a bias, but with ChatGPT that's changing every time you hit "enter"
- bigfudge 3y ago1. The primary source of bias will still be the person writing the prompt. The 'most probable completion' for the podcast will depend a lot on the setup. 2. I'm not sure it's going to vary more than a human day to day is it?
- GaryNumanVevo 3y ago1. Absolutely not, ChatGPT has a mountain of biases that are simply _uncovered_ by prompting. To call this bias via prompting is intellectually dishonest. 2. No, ChatGPT is borderline schizophrenic. I trust a human and team of writers and producers to be more consistent in their bias and truthiness outright than a do a program that's trained on Reddit / Twitter and has almost no grounding.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ddxv 3y agoI've been developing understanding from using it for coding. I guess a lot of us are developing this understanding. It is very trustable about high level things many people know. As the knowledge is more specific or esoteric the less trustworthy it is. If my mom asks it questions about my work industry, they are vague and high level enough that chatgpt is very accurate in it's answers. If I ask it probing questions I care about my industry it hallucinates or fails to grasp key terminology. So, if I was OP, likely asking it broad questions about things I know very little about is quite safe. Going too far down a rabbit hole to something super specific I would want to verify on Wikipedia.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- willvarfar 3y agoRight now, chatgpt is trained on a broad spectrum of slightly dated information, so hopefully the biases even out. And we know it hallucinates etc. In the future I see two big risks with the tech, approach and ownership: 1) short term, SEO is going to move into trying to influence the LLMs to push products unwittingly. Companies will be getting great offers from shady SEO outfits promising to make their products the default answers for broad questions? 2) mid term, now that all sense and pretence of safety and greater good are gone from openai, openai will be working out how to insert and see ads in the results? There will probably even be product placement in the results coming from the paid-for in-ms-office version.
- da39a3ee 3y agoIf you've used it a lot this year for coding like many people, you'll have found that you develop the ability to know when it doesn't know what it talks about. Perhaps you're one of the people who think they're above it, and hence haven't developed that ability?
- creativenolo 3y agoAnd you know not to push it further down the path of ‘not knowing’. And even before your next prompt, you can feel it’s got a foot down the wrong path. Nudge it to fix it, and/or move on.
- resonious 3y agoMight be able to ask the same question to someone listening to real podcasts.
- icelancer 3y agoPeople never consider the base rate. They compare AI things to gods rather than what it is replacing, which is usually a low-value wiki or podcast.
- raydev 3y agoIt's more commenters here revealing how low their standards are when they say "well people and/or podcasts spread false info too". No actually, you can pay people to lie less and prove that they do so. We pay $20/month for ChatGPT to straight up lie to us and we know we need to sort it out.
- colechristensen 3y ago“These people have no idea what they’re talking about” is a frequent reaction to podcasts I hear. To the point that there are very few I want to keep listening to. ChatGPT lies to me but only in a specific way.