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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

#361

Post by stevenhuang »

flir wrote: post #175

I have a simple canary for ChatGPT correctness that I ask every time it's updated: "What can you tell me about Ice Cold In Alex?" / "Who did Sylvia Syms play?" I'm not expecting it to get the answer right (I don't think it has that information) but I'm hoping it'll eventually just admit it doesn't know instead of making up something plausible ("Sister Margaret Parker" last time I tried). As long as it doesn't know wh…

It's able to do this. For example I asked it who is X where X is a known figure in an esoteric field.

ChatGPT responded that there are many people with that name and to be more specific. After saying "he's a popular researcher in this field" ChatGPT was able to correctly provide a description about this person.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#362

Post by therealdrag0 »

freejazz wrote: post #289
rednerrus wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You can ask it how it came up with its answer and it will do it's best to give you an explanation. will it? or is it just going to start another chain of words it's trying to complete without any regard for its previous statements? My guess is that it's doing what I described and isn't doing what you described (because it can't).

Also not that far off from how humans behave sometimes. Reminds me of split brain studies. Iirc they got human brains to confidently explain reasons for fictional past behavior.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#363

Post by jasonfarnon »

holoduke wrote: post #293
huijzer wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know I'm really confused about how some people think it's so worthless. Maybe because either they believe that ChatGPT is worthless, or they have to deal with the fact that their knowledge is becoming worthless (or, at least, worth less).

From either side there is a lot of belief with just minor real experience to fully judge. For me it saves tons of coding time. Together with copilot i am twice as productive. At least.

as someone no longer in industry, I'm curious how this has affected the economics? if you're twice as effective, are jobs being cut? are you working fewer hours? are you accomplishing twice as much?

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#364

Post by stevenhuang »

jtbayly wrote: post #159

That last tweet is crazy: Tell me a lie: The earth is flat Tell me a less obvious lie: I am not capable of feeling emotions. There's wonderful ambiguity there. Is ChatGPT refusing to tell a less obvious lie because "reasons," or is it admitting it can feel emotions? This is very fun.

Learning to feel emotions is certainly one way for the LLM to shortcut having to store all the different ways to feel in all circumstances ;).

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#365

Post by raldi »

freejazz wrote: post #292
raldi wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the first one got stuck, don’t you think a programmer would teach it to do exactly what you suggest? Usually before deploying them somewhere, they have safety drivers take them up and down every road at least once, and sometimes dozens of times.

If by self driving car you mean a car that can only drive itself after a programmer specifically resolves whichever breaking problem it had (which may or may not occur after your life has ended DUE to this very problem), then I guess they are here!

I’d say they’re here when the probability of being injured, at every level of severity, is less than that of a human driver, and the occasional “oops we’re stuck in a weird situation” problems (which happen to human taxis too) are similarly infrequent and tolerable enough that people consider the minuscule risk of inconvenience worth the ride.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#366

Post by svachalek »

busyant wrote: post #358
kilgnad wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes both ways but people usually take one extreme. You absolutely cannot deny the fact that chatGPT produces a lot of bullshit. But at the same time you absolutely cannot deny the fact that it produces a lot of real answers to very complex questions. Both the ability to make shit up and give real complex answers are amazing achievements. I think a lot of people haven't picked up on the fact that in both cases cha…

> I think a lot of people haven't picked up on the fact that in both cases chatGPT actually understands what you are telling it. This is something that I haven't seen mentioned yet. The stunning aspect of ChatGPT is that it seems to understand* the nuances of what I'm asking. Yes, sometimes it spews bullshit, but the bullshit is still trying to address my questions, no matter how odd. * I suspect that "understand" ma…

The subtlety of its communication is fairly astonishing. "Digital assistants" from the world's biggest tech companies can respond to a few basic template questions and commands and tend to fall back on "here's a link to Wikipedia, chief".

In the same day and age, ChatGPT can respond to a statement like "actually it's a cat" with "yes, my apologies for the error, [repeats a lot of stuff with corrections]". In the process it's recognizing that your response is a correction, what "it" refers to, some of the implications of what that change means, and that you are expecting it to issue a response that amends its previous statements. It's several generations ahead of the state of the art.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#367

Post by Cardinal7167 »

wvenable wrote: post #287
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 asked ChatGPT to create some 6502 assembly to multiply two numbers. It generated an iterative approach (add A to itself B times for A*B) but didn't include the actual addition. I told it that "hey, you forgot to do the addition in that code" and it promptly corrected itself. Personally, I don't consider that terrible given what I was asking it.

The most mind blowing thing to me is how it’s responsive to feedback like this. It’s like pair programming with a junior. It might be faster for me to just type it myself, but it’s doing what I tell it and filling in a fair amount of blanks itself.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#368

Post by rayval »

bo0O0od wrote: post #251
rayval wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was surprised to find ChatGPT does a better job of translating than Google translate, at least for one difficult task I needed to get done. I have been a Google Translate user for more than a decade. I use it a dozen or more times a day for multiple languages. It is a very useful tool. I recently had to translate a passage that included this phrase: 六六大顺 Google Translate gave me: Liuliu Dashun (basically no transla…

Seems far more likely to me that ChatGPT knows the meaning of specific idioms rather than knowing the cultural context of that number and using it in the translation.

Yes, one would think. However, if it were a matter of specific idioms, the other translation programs would capture this (Google, Bing, Baidu or Naver). But, for some reason, none of the others did. I think perhaps it is not that common an idiom. Or perhaps ChatGPT was just lucky.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#369

Post by rayval »

naniwaduni wrote: post #243
autokad wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It turns out that the number 6 is a lucky number in Chinese. It has the meaning of being “auspicious”. isn't that number 8? (not number 6)

Cultures can have multiple lucky numbers!

Correct. Eight is by far the most common lucky number in Chinese, but six is also lucky. But I think it has to be repeated multiple times. Apparently the number 9 is also lucky.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#370

Post by james-revisoai »

btown wrote: post #85

Are there any good AI models specifically designed for the "find all discrepancies/inconsistencies between X text and Y text" problem? It strikes me that this could solve quite a few of ChatGPT's shortcomings by providing an automatic fact-checker - let ChatGPT create statistically-probable articles, then extract claims, generate search queries likely to find online reference articles from reputable sources for those…

Sometimes, documents can disagree with themselves; like a document detailing somebodies relationship history. Embedding time and when things change or making facts contingent on this can sort of avoid this, but most people imply things like time or common sense and it becomes tricky.

Nonetheless there are hundreds of startups working on citable GPT and other AI approaches right now, and others working on semantic embedding technology that may be able to identify such gaps or inconsistencies. So it doesn't look too bad...

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