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_By default_ GPT gives the average advice. You can prompt it to take perspectives that will lead it to give very different advice.

asp_hornet 3y ago
Isnt that an extension of the same problem though? You probe it to take the statistically most accepted alternative perspectives that exists in its data. Its not intelligent in the sense that it comprehends what you or it are saying, it just follows the weights.
- ianbicking 3y ago
  It definitely doesn't just "follow the weights". It can follow instructions that go down paths where there would be no similar training data and no simple completion that could result in that response. What it does probably isn't "comprehension", but we also have no idea what comprehension is so it's not a very good target.
jazzyjackson 3y ago
I find it follows wherever you lead it, but if I know what kind of advice I need, what information is the bot adding?
- chrisin2d 3y ago
  At the end of the day, the advice seeker is responsible for the evaluation of given advice for their situation. That's a key difference between advice and instruction. The advice giver cannot know the seeker's situation completely, nor can the advice seeker know the giver's. An AI cannot be trusted to give The Answer. But you can use AI to explore other perspectives and critique your thoughts—not that its critiques will be correct either. Nonetheless it can help get you on different thinking paths that your normal thought patterns wouldn't guide you on.
- PoignardAzur 3y ago
  For me it's a form of rubber-duck debugging. I've never managed to make it work with an actual rubber duck. Talking to an inanimate object doesn't make me think any differently, but there's something in trying to formulate things to get the LLM to "understand" my problem that triggers the same brain mechanisms I get when explaining it to a real person.
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  Not necessarily, sometimes you need it to give you writing advice from the perspective of Hemingway or interpret someone's motives from the perspective of Jane Austen.
- ben_w 3y ago
  When I was a kid and needed to know how to spell a word, my teachers told me to look it up in a dictionary. This had the problem you're describing — if I could do that, I wouldn't need to. But AI? I can ask LLMs questions like: "A couple is buying a house in Germany. What questions do they typically forget to ask, which they regret not asking, and often wish later that someone had told them to ask?" And it can fill in the gaps better than when I ask a human the same kind of question. I don't expect it to be perfect, this could well be a half-arsed boilerplate, but the actual humans who I asked this of, mostly responded "Huh? I don't understand?" https://chat.openai.com/share/f17b013e-6b24-4b49-9986-78a5e46b7844 https://chat.openai.com/share/f17b013e-6b24-4b49-9986-78a5e4... (Note this chat had been given custom instructions, that's why it's responding with this unusual pattern).

asp_hornet 3y ago

Isnt that an extension of the same problem though? You probe it to take the statistically most accepted alternative perspectives that exists in its data. Its not intelligent in the sense that it comprehends what you or it are saying, it just follows the weights.

ianbicking 3y ago
It definitely doesn't just "follow the weights". It can follow instructions that go down paths where there would be no similar training data and no simple completion that could result in that response. What it does probably isn't "comprehension", but we also have no idea what comprehension is so it's not a very good target.

jazzyjackson 3y ago

I find it follows wherever you lead it, but if I know what kind of advice I need, what information is the bot adding?

chrisin2d 3y ago
At the end of the day, the advice seeker is responsible for the evaluation of given advice for their situation. That's a key difference between advice and instruction. The advice giver cannot know the seeker's situation completely, nor can the advice seeker know the giver's. An AI cannot be trusted to give The Answer. But you can use AI to explore other perspectives and critique your thoughts—not that its critiques will be correct either. Nonetheless it can help get you on different thinking paths that your normal thought patterns wouldn't guide you on.
PoignardAzur 3y ago
For me it's a form of rubber-duck debugging. I've never managed to make it work with an actual rubber duck. Talking to an inanimate object doesn't make me think any differently, but there's something in trying to formulate things to get the LLM to "understand" my problem that triggers the same brain mechanisms I get when explaining it to a real person.
CuriouslyC 3y ago
Not necessarily, sometimes you need it to give you writing advice from the perspective of Hemingway or interpret someone's motives from the perspective of Jane Austen.
ben_w 3y ago
When I was a kid and needed to know how to spell a word, my teachers told me to look it up in a dictionary. This had the problem you're describing — if I could do that, I wouldn't need to. But AI? I can ask LLMs questions like: "A couple is buying a house in Germany. What questions do they typically forget to ask, which they regret not asking, and often wish later that someone had told them to ask?" And it can fill in the gaps better than when I ask a human the same kind of question. I don't expect it to be perfect, this could well be a half-arsed boilerplate, but the actual humans who I asked this of, mostly responded "Huh? I don't understand?" https://chat.openai.com/share/f17b013e-6b24-4b49-9986-78a5e46b7844 https://chat.openai.com/share/f17b013e-6b24-4b49-9986-78a5e4... (Note this chat had been given custom instructions, that's why it's responding with this unusual pattern).