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> I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things Why do you trust the output? Chatbots are so inaccurate you surely must be going out of your way t

> I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things Why do you trust the output? Chatbots are so inaccurate you surely must be going out of your way to misinform yourself.

alyxya 1y ago
I try to make my best judgment regarding what to trust. It isn’t guaranteed that content written by humans is necessarily correct either. The nice thing about ChatGPT is that I can ask for sources, and sometimes I can rely on that source to fact check.
- latexr 1y ago
  > The nice thing about ChatGPT is that I can ask for sources And it will make them up just like it does everything else. You can’t trust those either. In fact, one of the simplest ways to find out a post is AI slop is by checking the sources posted at the end and seeing they don’t exist. Asking for sources isn’t a magical incantation that suddenly makes things true. > It isn’t guaranteed that content written by humans is necessarily correct either. This is a poor argument. The overwhelming difference with humans is that you learn who you can trust about what. With LLMs, you can never reach that level.
  - the_af 1y ago
    > And it will make them up just like it does everything else. You can’t trust those either. In tech-related matters such as coding, I've come to expect every link ChatGPT provides as reference/documentation is simply wrong or nonexistent. I can count with fingers from a single hand the times I clicked on a link to a doc from ChatGPT that didn't result in a 404. I've had better luck with links to products from Amazon or eBay (or my local equivalent e-shop). But for tech documentation which is freely available online? ChatGPT just makes shit up.
- MangoToupe 1y ago
  Sure, but a chatbot will compound the inaccuracy.
cm2012 1y ago
Chatbots are more reliable than 95% of people you can ask, on a wide variety of researched topics.
- soiltype 1y ago
  Yeah... you're supposed to ask the 5%. If you have a habit of asking random lay persons for technical advice, I can see why an idiot chatbot would seem like an upgrade.
  - strbean 1y ago
    Surely if you have access to a technical expert with the time to answer your question, you aren't asking an AI instead.
    - contagiousflow 1y ago
      Books exist
      - runj__ 1y ago
        chatGPT exists (I'm not saying not to read books, but seriously: there are shortcuts)
        soiltype 1y ago
        ...and is unreliable, hence the origin of this thread.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  If I want to know about the law, I'll ask a lawyer (ok, not any lawyer, but it's a useful first pass filter). If I want to know about plumbing I'll ask a plumber. If I want to ask questions or learn about writing I will ask one or more writers. And so on. Experts in the field are way better at their field than 95% of the population, which you can ask but probably shouldn't. There are many 100's of professions, and most of them take a significant fraction of a lifetime to master, and even then there usually is a daily stream of new insights. You can't just toss all of that information into a bucket and expect that to outperform the < 1% of the people that have studied the subject extensively. When Idiocracy came out I thought it was a hilarious movie. I'm no longer laughing, we're really putting the idiots in charge now and somehow we think that quantity of output trumps quality of output. I wonder how many scientific papers published this year will contain AI generated slop complete with mistakes. I'll bet that number is >> 0.

> I use ChatGPT to learn about a variety of different things Why do you trust the output? Chatbots are so inaccurate you surely must be going out of your way to misinform yourself.

alyxya 1y ago

I try to make my best judgment regarding what to trust. It isn’t guaranteed that content written by humans is necessarily correct either. The nice thing about ChatGPT is that I can ask for sources, and sometimes I can rely on that source to fact check.

latexr 1y ago
> The nice thing about ChatGPT is that I can ask for sources And it will make them up just like it does everything else. You can’t trust those either. In fact, one of the simplest ways to find out a post is AI slop is by checking the sources posted at the end and seeing they don’t exist. Asking for sources isn’t a magical incantation that suddenly makes things true. > It isn’t guaranteed that content written by humans is necessarily correct either. This is a poor argument. The overwhelming difference with humans is that you learn who you can trust about what. With LLMs, you can never reach that level.
- the_af 1y ago
  > And it will make them up just like it does everything else. You can’t trust those either. In tech-related matters such as coding, I've come to expect every link ChatGPT provides as reference/documentation is simply wrong or nonexistent. I can count with fingers from a single hand the times I clicked on a link to a doc from ChatGPT that didn't result in a 404. I've had better luck with links to products from Amazon or eBay (or my local equivalent e-shop). But for tech documentation which is freely available online? ChatGPT just makes shit up.
MangoToupe 1y ago
Sure, but a chatbot will compound the inaccuracy.

cm2012 1y ago

Chatbots are more reliable than 95% of people you can ask, on a wide variety of researched topics.

soiltype 1y ago
Yeah... you're supposed to ask the 5%. If you have a habit of asking random lay persons for technical advice, I can see why an idiot chatbot would seem like an upgrade.
- strbean 1y ago
  Surely if you have access to a technical expert with the time to answer your question, you aren't asking an AI instead.
  - contagiousflow 1y ago
    Books exist
    - runj__ 1y ago
      chatGPT exists (I'm not saying not to read books, but seriously: there are shortcuts)
      - soiltype 1y ago
        ...and is unreliable, hence the origin of this thread.
jacquesm 1y ago
If I want to know about the law, I'll ask a lawyer (ok, not any lawyer, but it's a useful first pass filter). If I want to know about plumbing I'll ask a plumber. If I want to ask questions or learn about writing I will ask one or more writers. And so on. Experts in the field are way better at their field than 95% of the population, which you can ask but probably shouldn't. There are many 100's of professions, and most of them take a significant fraction of a lifetime to master, and even then there usually is a daily stream of new insights. You can't just toss all of that information into a bucket and expect that to outperform the < 1% of the people that have studied the subject extensively. When Idiocracy came out I thought it was a hilarious movie. I'm no longer laughing, we're really putting the idiots in charge now and somehow we think that quantity of output trumps quality of output. I wonder how many scientific papers published this year will contain AI generated slop complete with mistakes. I'll bet that number is >> 0.