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I use LLMs quite a lot to help me in my work, but they are wrong so often that it’s ridiculous. This isn’t a major issue when you’re an expert using the tools t
by devjab 3y ago
I use LLMs quite a lot to help me in my work, but they are wrong so often that it’s ridiculous. This isn’t a major issue when you’re an expert using the tools to be more efficient, because you’ll spot and laugh at the errors it makes. Sometimes it’ll be things that anyone would notice, like how a LLM will simply “invent” a library function that has never existed. Even if you’re not an expert, you’re not going to get that PNP-whatever function to work in Powershell if it never existed in the module to begin with.
Where it becomes more dangerous, at least in my opinion, is when the LLM only gets it sort of wrong. Maybe the answer it gives you is old, maybe it’s inefficient, maybe it’s insecure or a range of other things, and if you’re new to programming, you’re probably not going to notice. Hell, I’ve reviewed code from senior programmers that pulled in deprecated things with massive security vulnerabilities and never noticed because they were too focused on fast delivery and “it worked”. I can’t imagine how that would work out for people trying to actually learn things.
I’m not sure what we can really do about it though. I work a side gig as an external examiner for CS students. A lot of the curriculum being taught (at least here in Denmark) are things I’ve seen the industry move “beyond” in the previous 20 years. Some of it is so dated that it really makes no sense at all. Which isn’t exactly a great alternative to the LLMs, and it’s only natural that a lot of people simply turn to these powerful tools.
I tend to tell people to ask their favorite LLM to help them solve a crossword. When you ask it to give you words ending on “ing” it’ll give you words that don’t end on “ing” because of how the tokens used work. This tends to be an eye opener for people in regards to how much they trust their LLM. At least until they get refined enough that they can also do these things.
Anyway, it’s a good answer.
- bongodongobob 3y agoI'm sorry, but it sounds like you're using ChatGPT3.5. I get very very few invented libraries unless it's a very specific version of an old or rare language. I tried your "ING" example and GPT4 got 100/100. Idk, ymmv, but GPT4 beats the pants off of 3.5.
- samatman 3y agoI use GPT4 and it confabulates constantly. Try it on a language in the 10th-20th range of popularity (let alone lower) and I expect you'll see it as well. I don't see that as often with Python, the only top-5 language I currently work with.
- bongodongobob 3y agoRight, that's my experience as well. Python, C, C++, bash, PowerShell, etc, are all pretty much spot on 95/% of the time. It will start to fumble if I specify PS 4.0, or Python 2, C89, etc. Or use X language but don't use popular library Y.
- devjab 3y agoIn my experience it depends a lot more on what you prompt it with rather than the language itself. As soon as you task it with something where your prompt doesn’t hit the right marks, I’ll go into its “inventive” mode and simply make stuff up. Copilot for enterprise is a little better in terms of not making things up, but the flip side of this is that it often simply provides a very, very, useless result. My experience with it for Powershell hasn’t been as impressive as yours. It simply invented functions for the PnP module. Which I suppose isn’t in too much use these days, especially not against on-prem SharePoint. I’m not an expert on Powershell, however, and I really don’t think the documentation on things like PnP search queries is very good. So this was an area where I got to experience what it’s like to use these tools when you’re not the expert. In the end it was trial and error along with various shitty internet articles that helped me. That being said. You can easily have GPT4 solve your CS exam questions, and likely whatever technical interview you’re given if you’re applying at jobs which do these things. And as such, I guess you could also argue that a lot of what we teach in CS is now even more dated than before. Because even if some of it is sort of useful for basic understanding, I’d bet money on students “cheating” their way through where they can. Because why wouldn’t they use the “calculator”?
- smartmic 3y agoI can confirm as well. I tried something with GNU APL ... and the answers were purely ridiculous. It fabulated some totally wrong stuff based on Dyalog APL with invented libraries and more. Okay, I didn't expect usable results here but everyone should be aware... when even non-mainstream technologies are being discriminated, what about the human spectrum?
- sumtechguy 3y agoYesterday I asked it the date. Then asked it if it was possible to give me the date. It gave a very different answer that contradicted what it just did. It is kind of hard to trust when it can not even make itself consistent between 2 prompts. For creative prompts this thing is very cool. For logical prompts it is frustrating to no end how much detail it gets wrong.