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ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

ramrajv.com

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Re: ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

#41

Post by dr_dshiv »

whatshisface wrote: post #30

This is really awful, the text is completely content-free but it's got everyone who's not a domain expert hooked. I didn't know whether ChatGPT's ability to babble convincingly was going to cause trouble or be a funny quirk that we all knew about and worked around, but this thread is really making it look like the pessimists were right about it. The problem is that it gets past many people's filters because its phras…

> the text is completely content-free

Since the same could be said about your comment, perhaps you could amend your critique?

Re: ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

#42

Post by danbmil99 »

This is actually a much better version of the techno-babble we see all the time in movies and TV. I assume they get it wrong because the story is more important, and tech ppl don't want to be associated with the bs that comes out of the actor's mouths.

A great gig for GPT -- Hollywood bullshitter!

Re: ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

#43

Post by [deleted] »

whatshisface wrote: post #30

This is really awful, the text is completely content-free but it's got everyone who's not a domain expert hooked. I didn't know whether ChatGPT's ability to babble convincingly was going to cause trouble or be a funny quirk that we all knew about and worked around, but this thread is really making it look like the pessimists were right about it. The problem is that it gets past many people's filters because its phras…

[deleted]

Re: ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

#44

Post by ramraj07 »

whatshisface wrote: post #30

This is really awful, the text is completely content-free but it's got everyone who's not a domain expert hooked. I didn't know whether ChatGPT's ability to babble convincingly was going to cause trouble or be a funny quirk that we all knew about and worked around, but this thread is really making it look like the pessimists were right about it. The problem is that it gets past many people's filters because its phras…

I (OP) am not a physicist but still a scientist. I’m not gonna say the theories it said are solid. It’s quite clear to me that they’re not. But they are better theories than what I (who knows the fundamentals of physics for the most part) can come up with. So it’s not a subject matter expert but better than the average joe. For what it is, (and given I asked it to imagine theories), its output looks impressive to me. And I can attest to its abilities to do this in biology as well, and I’ll say it does a better job than most biology professors in fact. I just didn’t publish those chats here.

Maybe it did a better job in biology because I was able to correct it at an expert level (which I was not able to here). Given the demonstrably (like right here in these comments) myopic unimaginative nature of physics as a science today, it’s possible not a single physicist would try to entertain this system as a hypothesis generation machine. I mean we have discovered everything already right?

Re: ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

#45

Post by simplotek »

whatshisface wrote: post #30

This is really awful, the text is completely content-free but it's got everyone who's not a domain expert hooked. I didn't know whether ChatGPT's ability to babble convincingly was going to cause trouble or be a funny quirk that we all knew about and worked around, but this thread is really making it look like the pessimists were right about it. The problem is that it gets past many people's filters because its phras…

> The problem is that it gets past many people's filters because its phrasing sends a lot of intelligent/rational/professional signals, as it was engineered to do. Nobody is used to picking smart-sounding text apart word by word to make sure they agree with it, except maybe academics, and that's the vulnerability it reaches us through.

I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill. To me ChatGPT is basically a clever way to interpolate and extrapolate coherent text based on user input and its training set. If the training set is lacking in some areas, it underfits the output.

I've tested ChatGPT in a couple of engineering fields I'm familiar and I expected the service to respond poorly, but even though it returned nonsense in some areas I thought were low-hanging topics, such as the release year of an international standard, overall its output was very impressive and very entertaining.

Perhaps it's the engineer in me talking, but it's pointless to waste time waxing lirically about human nature. Tools like ChatGPT might one day be superb expert systems and teaching tools, but like any expert system and learning tool you need to corroborate the results by yourself. Human nature has zero to do with this.

Re: ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

#46

Post by zoover2020 »

nomercy400 wrote: post #34

I know some physics, but not enough in this area to judge if the results here are accurate. With the inaccuracy of AI chatbots, this makes this tool not useful for me for learning new concepts, as they might be blatantly wrong.

Not only not useful, I'd go as far as extremely dangerous as most people _not_ in niche fields can't distinguish facts from fiction

Re: ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

#47

Post by tokamak-teapot »

nico wrote: post #5

Love it. A few days ago I did a similar exercise playing with alternative definitions of gravity. It was even able to provide (GlowScript 3.1!) code to run a simulation using the concepts we developed (and it worked). It’s amazing the feeling of going back and forth, iterating quickly on the ideas and then being able to generate code to test them.

Any chance of a peek at the demo code and/or transcript please? Sounds fun!

Re: ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

#48

Post by i_cannot_hack »

whatshisface wrote: post #30

This is really awful, the text is completely content-free but it's got everyone who's not a domain expert hooked. I didn't know whether ChatGPT's ability to babble convincingly was going to cause trouble or be a funny quirk that we all knew about and worked around, but this thread is really making it look like the pessimists were right about it. The problem is that it gets past many people's filters because its phras…

I'm not a domain expert either, but to me the results seem to be entirety what you would expect from a model trained to pattern match very well on existing content.

That is, the ideas, strengths and limitations of the current well-known theories are very well explained and mostly correct. However, the "novel theory" is mostly filler words around some very thin concepts to make it sound like an actual theory with some depth to it, but in reality saying nothing more than that spacetime is granular and there could maybe be some matrices.

Re: ChatGPT spitballing fundamental physics theories

#50

Post by whatshisface »

ramraj07 wrote: post #44
whatshisface wrote: post #30

This is really awful, the text is completely content-free but it's got everyone who's not a domain expert hooked. I didn't know whether ChatGPT's ability to babble convincingly was going to cause trouble or be a funny quirk that we all knew about and worked around, but this thread is really making it look like the pessimists were right about it. The problem is that it gets past many people's filters because its phras…

I (OP) am not a physicist but still a scientist. I’m not gonna say the theories it said are solid. It’s quite clear to me that they’re not. But they are better theories than what I (who knows the fundamentals of physics for the most part) can come up with. So it’s not a subject matter expert but better than the average joe. For what it is, (and given I asked it to imagine theories), its output looks impressive to me.…

I think you asked it some of the right questions, but even then it was able to slip past your skepticism by being really good at sounding like an intelligent human being that was saving you the trouble of the details. There's no hypothesis in there.

You would have to be an insanely skeptical person, one who would drive anybody nuts to talk to, to approach a ChatGPT session in a field you're not an expert in or maybe even one you are, and evaluate it right... The only normal human perspective that fits what ChatGPT is actually like is the one we take on people we think are terrible, so that is why I say it's awful, although it's just a machine.

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