4 ms·

> For books or sites or most things these signals exist too; I can look up what others have said about it. That's no different from ChatGPT. The control on boo

> For books or sites or most things these signals exist too; I can look up what others have said about it. That's no different from ChatGPT. The control on books at least is a publisher, but that is not really the case for a website. That's why fake news is a real issue. And your uncle may talk to you in private. Or maybe it's your parents around the family dinner table. There are many sources of dangerous misinformation, not just ChatGPT. Education and critical thinking is the real solution.

arp242 3y ago
Let's not lose track of what this discussion is about: it's not about whether your uncle might be feeding you bullshit, it's about whether ChatGPT is a good source to learn about new topics you're not knowledgable on. Your crackpot uncle is not the baseline here – a well-reviewed book (or documentary series, or podcast, or whatever) is. That there are crackpot books out there is besides the point; I can trivially find out which the good books and crackpot books are. With ChatGPT you need to verify every single reply it gives you. And there is nuance here. Take Horrible Histories. I like Horrible Histories – it's fun, and generally the history is accurate. But it's not perfect and has mistakes, and there's a ton of lists enumerating these mistakes, so you can safely watch the show and then read these lists to ensure you're not believing a mistake. There is no "historical inaccuracies in ChatGPT" list. It would be impossible to construct such a list. You need to verify every single reply it gives you, and every detail of that not just the general gist. General critical thinking helps you surprisingly little because many of the signals of reliability that you usually rely on are lacking. Thinking you can trust ChatGPT on topics you're not already fairly knowledgable on and can't be easily empirically tested (e.g. math, programming to some degree) is a good way to get fooled.
- darkerside 3y ago
  I think you overestimate the reliability of the random crap you hear from other human beings on a daily basis
  - arp242 3y ago
    I'm not primarily talking about random crap from random people; I'm talking about making a conscious effort to learn more about a specific topic. I really don't know how to explain this better than I already did. You keep trying to turn this in to a "people on random sites saying stupid stuff" vs. ChatGPT thing, but that's not what this is about. But even there, of course you shouldn't believe random stuff on the internet, but at the same time it does have some mechanisms for correction that ChatGPT lacks.

arp242 3y ago

Let's not lose track of what this discussion is about: it's not about whether your uncle might be feeding you bullshit, it's about whether ChatGPT is a good source to learn about new topics you're not knowledgable on. Your crackpot uncle is not the baseline here – a well-reviewed book (or documentary series, or podcast, or whatever) is. That there are crackpot books out there is besides the point; I can trivially find out which the good books and crackpot books are. With ChatGPT you need to verify every single reply it gives you. And there is nuance here. Take Horrible Histories. I like Horrible Histories – it's fun, and generally the history is accurate. But it's not perfect and has mistakes, and there's a ton of lists enumerating these mistakes, so you can safely watch the show and then read these lists to ensure you're not believing a mistake. There is no "historical inaccuracies in ChatGPT" list. It would be impossible to construct such a list. You need to verify every single reply it gives you, and every detail of that not just the general gist. General critical thinking helps you surprisingly little because many of the signals of reliability that you usually rely on are lacking. Thinking you can trust ChatGPT on topics you're not already fairly knowledgable on and can't be easily empirically tested (e.g. math, programming to some degree) is a good way to get fooled.

darkerside 3y ago
I think you overestimate the reliability of the random crap you hear from other human beings on a daily basis
- arp242 3y ago
  I'm not primarily talking about random crap from random people; I'm talking about making a conscious effort to learn more about a specific topic. I really don't know how to explain this better than I already did. You keep trying to turn this in to a "people on random sites saying stupid stuff" vs. ChatGPT thing, but that's not what this is about. But even there, of course you shouldn't believe random stuff on the internet, but at the same time it does have some mechanisms for correction that ChatGPT lacks.