ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

Post by weinzierl » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 9:53 PM UTC

godelski wrote: post #171

weinzierl wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "It is basically like having an incredibly smart engineer/scientists/philosopher/etc that can explain things quite well, but for pretty much every field. Does this "person" make mistakes? " Does this person stubbornly insist on being right, even if they are wrong? Likely, that's just how humans usually behave - and ChatGPT does the same. At least that was my thinking when people complain about ChatGPT being a know-…

> Does this person stubbornly insist on being right, even if they are wrong? Actually ChatGPT will almost always change tune if you tell it that it is wrong. That's because it is a stochastic parrot and that's an "unlikely" event if you actually got the answer right. But we'll see if this gets updated/broken too.

Post by freejazz » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 9:55 PM UTC

iinnPP wrote: post #279

freejazz wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Post by freejazz » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 9:57 PM UTC

ETH_start wrote: post #98

whartung wrote: post #69

After having played it ChatGPT for a bit, mostly asking computer questions, I've had mixed results. Some are amazing, others are gibberish. But what struck me the other day is a couple of quotes from, of all things, Galaxy Quest which seem particularly apt. "May I remind you that this man is wearing a costume, not a uniform." and "You know, with all that makeup and stuff, I actually thought you were SMART for a secon…

It's quite limited, in frequently making even basic mistakes, but when it works well, it displays real intelligence. It synthesizes new knowledge, as opposed to just retrieving it. When it works well, It's not just a magic trick.

Post by wvenable » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 9:58 PM UTC

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…

Post by freejazz » Fri, Feb 03, 2023, 9:59 PM UTC

rednerrus wrote: post #206

ronjobber wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the difference is that when we communicate those ideas, in scientific/academic literature at least, we reference the source of those original ideas, which permits verification and also plays an important social role.

You can ask it how it came up with its answer and it will do it's best to give you an explanation. It may not cite its sources directly but it will try to explain.