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ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

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Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#111

Post by rqtwteye »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #17

I had a detailed conversion with chatGPT about how to gracefully handle terminating conditions of a rust program. It summarized cogently to register at_exit()’s for each thread, panic handlers, and register signal handlers. It advised and explain in detail on my query about the thread handling for each of these variants, gave really helpful advice on collecting join handles in a closure on the main thread and waiting…

Same for me. I fed it a few requirements and test objectives and its comments were pretty reasonable. With a little specialized training it will probably do better than most systems engineers or testers I know.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#112

Post by hospadar »

I wonder if the biggest shortcoming of GPT right now is not that it sometimes gets things wrong, or can't cite its sources, or whatever - maybe it needs to learn when to say "I don't know the answer to that question".

That's a pretty hard thing for most humans (and myself) to learn to say, and I suspect GPT's training data (tha internet) doesn't include a lot of "I'm not sure" language and probably does include a lot of "I'm definitely sure and definitely totally correct" language (maybe, I guess, no evidence to back up that suggestion, I'm not sure).

Many of my favorite coworkers, friends, doctors, pundits are trustworthy exactly because they work hard to not profess knowledge they are unsure about. The reason (IMO) that Scott Alexander is a jewel of the internet is because of the way he quantifies uncertainty when working through a topic.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#113

Post by williamcotton »

petra wrote: post #87
williamcotton wrote: post #6

I'm finding the analytic-synthetic distinction to be somewhat useful, even if it veers in important ways from how these terms were defined and used by Kant/Frege/Quine, etc. Roughly, if the prompt is "analytic", that is contains all the necessary facts for the expected output, then the tool is much more reliable. If the prompt is "synthetic", that is it contingent on outside facts, then the tool is much less reliable…

What does "having all the necessary facts" mean?

Oh, for example:

Me: "Hey, can you help me turn a baseball box score into an entertaining outline of the game?"

GPT: Sure, I'd be happy to help you turn a baseball box score into a summary of the game! Can you provide the box score for me to use as reference?

Me: Saturday, October 26, 1991 Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Atlanta 0 0 0 0 2 0 1 0 0 0 0 – 3 9 1 Minnesota 2 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 – 4 9 0

[edited for size, but it has the whole box score]

GPT: In a close match-up between the Atlanta Braves and the Minnesota Twins on October 26, 1991, the Twins managed to eke out a win with a 4-3 score. The Twins got off to a quick start with two runs in the first inning, but the Braves soon answered back with a two-run homer in the fifth inning by Terry Pendleton. Despite putting up a strong defense, the Twins couldn't secure the win until the 11th inning, when Kirby Puckett hit a game-winning home run. The Twins' defense was strong throughout the game, only allowing three runs and keeping the Braves' runners to seven left on base. Meanwhile, the Twins' offense was equally impressive, with Puckett leading the way with three RBIs and three hits, including his game-winning home run.

---

All of the necessary facts about the game are contained in the box score. The entertaining outline of the game references knowledge about the game contained in the box score.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#114

Post by logifail »

broast wrote: post #103
webstrand wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience from asking it questions about things that I know well, the deeper you get into the weeds with it, the more likely it is to invent some kind of extremely plausible-sounding but incorrect answer. How confident are you that what it told you is actually correct?

That's what I like to use it for. To come up with plausible answers for questions that people don't have correct answers for yet, and then probe the reasons behind it. It can be very creative and insightful in such uses.

> It can be very creative and insightful in such uses

I once worked with a very smart woman who at that time worked in marketing for the airside retail stores at a large international airport.

If anyone from outside her immediate sphere asked her what she did, she would typically say "I tell lies for a living".

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#115

Post by happymellon »

webstrand wrote: post #27
VBprogrammer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I recently learned about how the Toyota Synergy Drive system works in detail. Despite being the type of person who'd be interested in that kind of thing I thought it was not generally well understood, I've only come across one website which described it in detail. I asked ChatGPT about it and it game me a fairly surface level answer. I then asked it for more details and it went into detail far beyond what th…

In my experience from asking it questions about things that I know well, the deeper you get into the weeds with it, the more likely it is to invent some kind of extremely plausible-sounding but incorrect answer. How confident are you that what it told you is actually correct?

So it's a junior dev that reads lots of blogs?

This sounds like a lot of interviews I've conducted over the years.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#116

Post by yellow_postit »

sampo wrote: post #23
_huayra_ wrote: post #4

I can't tell what is worse now: the sycophantic ChatGPT hype guys/gals who write articles "it's coming for all of our jerbs!", or articles like this one that deliberately misuse ChatGPT and then say "it's overhyped". They're both missing the point. Yes, ChatGPT can be tricked, confidently give wrong answers, but it is still ludicrously useful. It is basically like having an incredibly smart engineer/scientists/philos…

> Can't cite their sources? Has there been research on neural nets who could cite their sources? In common cases, thousands or millions of items in the training set have contributed to the weights in the pathways that activate for a certain input. But maybe for some inputs, only a small number of items in the training set contributed strongly to the weights on the pathways the are decisive to the output? Could you de…

I’d have thought the short lived Galatica from Meta would have demonstrated more capability on this need given it was explicitly positioned as being to help Researchers.

I wonder if this is a special case for Explainable Models [1] — once you select an answer, another model helps describe and source the output.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explainable_artificial_intel...

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#118

Post by MagicMoonlight »

It’s a very good demonstration of how powerful artifical intelligence will be. When we truly get that it will be the new dominant species.

But it’s just not intelligent. There’s no thoughts there. They’ve just brute forced a really big markov chain. You need a completely different approach to get true intelligence.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#119

Post by photochemsyn »

_huayra_ wrote: post #4

I can't tell what is worse now: the sycophantic ChatGPT hype guys/gals who write articles "it's coming for all of our jerbs!", or articles like this one that deliberately misuse ChatGPT and then say "it's overhyped". They're both missing the point. Yes, ChatGPT can be tricked, confidently give wrong answers, but it is still ludicrously useful. It is basically like having an incredibly smart engineer/scientists/philos…

It is very useful but there's definitely a constant issue with quality-of-results, but I've found a pretty good workflow, involving jumping back and forth between search engine results and ChatGPT results.

Fundamentally, it's:

1) Ask ChatGPT a series of questions, going from the general down to the more specific. For example, 'Give me a list of options for setting up a headless Raspberry Pi as a Nginx server from scratch using only command line tools'. ChatGPT will produce a decent list of options.

2) Run that list of options in truncated form, just the keywords, through Google or other search engine that allows for a 'verbatim' search. Set to 50 or more results per page to get a decent spread of results at a glance. Get the more specific information for various options.

3) Run that more narrowed information back through ChatGPT to see what it produces. At this point you might be pretty close to the correct specific information you need, but generally I run it through search again just to be sure.

For example, this way I was able to quickly discover my headless RPi setup with the latest Raspberry Pi OS wasn't allowing me to ssh into it over wireless because the RPi engineers did away with default user/password settings for security reasons, so I had to manually include the 'userconf.txt' file in the boot directory on the SD card. Also it was very helpful with what needed to go into the wpa_supplicant.conf file.

Trying to find stuff like that out by search alone, in the past, would have probably taken at least 10X as long.

I wouldn't ever blindly trust what it suggests, however.

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