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ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

tedgioia.substack.com

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Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#271

Post by freejazz »

cribbles wrote: post #58

I would greatly appreciate a moratorium on this genre of article until there is compelling accompanying evidence that a meaningful portion of ChatGPT's users are unaware of these shortcomings. I have yet to encounter or even hear of a non-technical person playing around with ChatGPT without stumbling into the type of confidently-stated absurdities and half-truths displayed in this article, and embracing that as a lim…

>I would greatly appreciate a moratorium on this genre of article until there is compelling accompanying evidence that a meaningful portion of ChatGPT's users are unaware of these shortcomings. I have yet to encounter or even hear of a non-technical person playing around with ChatGPT without stumbling into the type of confidently-stated absurdities and half-truths displayed in this article, and embracing that as a limitation of the tool.

There was the chatGPT program for reviewing legal documents that the creator posted here weeks ago. Several people pointed out the dangerous shortcomings in the application, to which the creator completely ignored (it got the entire directionality of the ycombinator SAFE wrong, among other things) and numerous posters exclaimed things like "going to use this on my lease!". so, I think you are being a bit disingenuous with this whole "it's just wikipedia" thing and pretending like no one would use it ignorantly. It's just obviously not true and that's perusing comments here.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#272

Post by kibwen »

tester457 wrote: post #229
kibwen wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, everyone should assume that it's lying at all times. Nobody should be using a product that both lies to you and then lies to you about the fact that it's lying to you.

It's not lying about the fact that it lies, they have a disclaimer. It's the user's responsibility to verify truth. This was trained on the internet and everyone knows not to believe everything you see on the internet. This isn't any different.

And you don't see how this makes it useless as a paid product? Truth is the product. An AI chatbot that makes no pretensions to the truth might as well be a Markov chain for all the good it does me. Are people really so blinded by the song and dance of this mechanical monkey that they can't see through the ruse?

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#273

Post by ArjenM »

tester457 wrote: post #229
kibwen wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, everyone should assume that it's lying at all times. Nobody should be using a product that both lies to you and then lies to you about the fact that it's lying to you.

It's not lying about the fact that it lies, they have a disclaimer. It's the user's responsibility to verify truth. This was trained on the internet and everyone knows not to believe everything you see on the internet. This isn't any different.

Was looking for the disclaimer comment, they do genuinely mention on their page it's not fit for consumption, although so do many services we often use.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#274

Post by joe_the_user »

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…

Yeah, in my experimenting with ChatGPT, it seems quite good at condensing factual information where there's not much chance that people will making things up online.

The thing is that this doesn't extend to situations where, say, a common summary of a topic isn't true when one looks at things in more detail.

For example, Earnest Hemingway is know for "short, concise sentences" and ChatGPT will give this description when asked about his style. But Hemingway in fact used complicate compound sentences fairly frequently - sentences by that a Strunk and White style definition should be broken up. ChatGPT will not admit this even when prompted (though I think most actual critics say this), and it will recommend the long sample sentence I give it be broken up.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#275

Post by qayxc »

Reptur wrote: post #265
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…

Yeah, yesterday I just told it to write a Dockerfile for me, with exactly what I wanted. instead of changing anything by hand, I told it what to fix, without telling it how to. Took 20-30 follow-up messages, telling it to add things, remove things, fix things, make things compatible with the versions of software it was running etc. It worked. Running the container now, works great.

> Took 20-30 follow-up messages, telling it to add things, remove things, fix things, make things compatible with the versions of software it was running etc.

So in other words you basically spent just as much time and effort as if you did it yourself?

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#276

Post by throw1234651234 »

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…

I tried it this whole week. I was initially amazed and thinking "maybe it really will replace my job." Then I switched to "it's a useful helper" and "I can use it to study things". Maybe after the gained confidence, I gave it some more difficult tasks - write code that will give a user read-only permissions - it obviously failed to note that the public schema is special, so that the user could still DROP tables. Asked it where the total count of users in Auth0 is - it lied. Asked it to solve a basic algo problem, it got it wrong. Told it to write incremental back off and remove a try-catch, it couldn't remove the try-catch. Etc, etc. Kind of over it already.

Does copilot do anything differently other than being available as an IDE extension?

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#277

Post by vehemenz »

rvz wrote: post #80
_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…

Well an AI that can't explain itself transparently makes it untrustworthy for more serious use and applications since ChatGPT it is being celebrated as a great sophist. There is nothing new in this, other than 'train more data on the internet'. The hype in ChatGPT reminds me of the short-lived hype of Clubhouse; the end result is the same: The bigger players will come in to surpass it, just like they did with GPT-3.

I wonder. If the bigger players can make an AI good enough to be indistinguishable from human (but not quite), then wouldn't the AI slowly and incestuously train itself to become dumber, with nothing but AI-generated content left to "feed it?"

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#279

Post by iinnPP »

freejazz wrote: post #271
cribbles wrote: post #58

I would greatly appreciate a moratorium on this genre of article until there is compelling accompanying evidence that a meaningful portion of ChatGPT's users are unaware of these shortcomings. I have yet to encounter or even hear of a non-technical person playing around with ChatGPT without stumbling into the type of confidently-stated absurdities and half-truths displayed in this article, and embracing that as a lim…

>I would greatly appreciate a moratorium on this genre of article until there is compelling accompanying evidence that a meaningful portion of ChatGPT's users are unaware of these shortcomings. I have yet to encounter or even hear of a non-technical person playing around with ChatGPT without stumbling into the type of confidently-stated absurdities and half-truths displayed in this article, and embracing that as a li…

I used ChatGPT to write cover letters and to create job specific resumes(with an additional tool).

Then those documents resulted in employment.

I had to edit some, and I went over all of them.

I have to assume people look at the thing they understand may be inaccurate (because you can't possibly miss THAT fact) and give it at least a quick once over. Lacking that, it's a failure of the person, not the tool.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#280

Post by JohnFen »

The thing that makes me nervous about it isn't ChatGPT or other LLMs, really. It's that people seem to be easily fooled by them into thinking it's something more than it is. The comments from the most ardent fans imply that it's doing reasoning or is a step in the direction of AGI, when it's not that at all.
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