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We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

simonwillison.net

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Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#91

Post by gWPVhyxPHqvk »

simonw wrote: post #38
gWPVhyxPHqvk wrote: post #29

After a few weeks playing around with ChatGPT, my workflow with it has become: 0. Try to sign in, see the system is over capacity, leave. Maybe I’ll try again in 10 minutes. 1. Ask my question, get an answer. I’ll have no idea if what I got is real or not. 2. Google for the answer, since I can’t trust the answer 3. Realize I wasted 20 minutes trying to converse with a computer, and resolve that next time I’ll just ty…

I pay for ChatGPT Plus, and use it with no delays at all dozens of times a day. The more I use it the better I get at predicting if it can be useful for a specific question or not.

I pay $0 for Google with no delays. I don’t understand why I’d want to pay for information that’s less reliable. (I’m being slightly dense, but not really)

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#93

Post by elif »

it's way more than lying. it's more like gaslighting.

LLM will make up citations and facts entirely.

GPT3.5 gave an athlete I was asking about 3 world titles when he won zero.

GPT even correctly identified his time in one of the events, but not that the time was only good enough for 8th place.

GPT made up his participation in the other 2 world championships.

GPT gave me a made up link to justify benchmarking figures that don't exist.

Whether a LLM is capable of intentional deception or not is not a prerequisite for lying. Wikipedia pages can lie. Manpages can lie. tombstones can lie. literal rocks.

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#94

Post by adroniser »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #77

People need to be told that ChatGPT can't lie. Or rather, it lies in the same way that your phone "lies" when it autocorrects "How's your day?" to "How's your dad?" that you sent to your friend two days after his dad passed away. They need to be told that ChatGPT is a search engine with advanced autocomplete. If they understood this, they'd probably find that it's actually useful for some things, and they can also av…

[flagged]

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#96

Post by codeflo »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #77

People need to be told that ChatGPT can't lie. Or rather, it lies in the same way that your phone "lies" when it autocorrects "How's your day?" to "How's your dad?" that you sent to your friend two days after his dad passed away. They need to be told that ChatGPT is a search engine with advanced autocomplete. If they understood this, they'd probably find that it's actually useful for some things, and they can also av…

Tell me you haven't read the article without telling me you haven't read the article.

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#97

Post by admissionsguy »

zmmmmm wrote: post #52

I think characterisation of LLMs as lying is reasonable because although the intent isn't there to misrepresent the truth in answering the specific query, the intent is absolutely there in how the network is trained. The training algorithm is designed to create the most plausible text possible - decoupled from the truthfulness of the output. In a lot of cases (indeed most cases) the easiest way to make the text plaus…

> In a lot of cases (indeed most cases) the easiest way to make the text plausible is to tell truth

No, definitely not most cases. Only in the cases well represented in the training dataset.

One does very quickly run into its limitations when trying to get it to do anything uncommon.

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#98

Post by SanderNL »

toss1 wrote: post #75
retrac wrote: post #2

Indeed. We are anthropomorphizing them. I do it all the time and I should know better. There are already a few reports floating around of people who have seemingly been driven mad, come to believe strongly that the language model they're using is a conversation with a real person. A lot of people will really struggle with this going forward, I think. If we're going to anthropomorphize, then let us anthropomorphize wi…

ChatGPT4 is the human equivalent of a primate or apex predator encountering a mirror for the first time in their lives. ChatGPT4 is reflecting back at us an extract of the sum of the human output it has been 'trained' upon. Of course the output feels human! LLMs have zero capability to abstract anything resembling a concept, to abstract a truth from a fiction, or to reason about such things. The generation of the mos…

Lying implies a hefty dose of anthropomorphism. Lying means a lot of things, all of which have to do with intelligence.

By telling it lies you actually make it seem more intelligent.

> human intelligence is not merely pattern matching

Citation needed

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#99

Post by greenpeas »

simonw wrote: post #59
thewataccount wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you use it for? I'm assuming code related? I've found it useful for some boilerplate + writing tests and making some script and some documentation. I'm curious what you or others that use it all day use it for especially if it's not for programming?

There are some examples of code things I've done with it here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/7/chatgpt-lies/#warn-off-... In terms of non-code things, here are a few from the past couple of days: - Coming up with potential analogies to explain why it's OK to call something a "language" model even though it doesn't have actual understanding of language - Exploring outliers in a CSV file (I was playing with the ne…

How can you trust that whatever the expression used in Finnish to denote "Artificial Intelligence" uses "wit" when translated back into English? Words in one language often don't have an exact counterpart in another language, and I'd be especially wary when it comes to languages from different families: Finnish is notorious for being one of the few European languages not part of the Indo-European family.

It may very well turn out to be the right translation, with the appropriate connotations; but without some clarification and confirmation from a native speaker, I would not trust it.

Re: We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics

#100

Post by luckylion »

I'm annoyed by the destruction of language for effect. "The machines are lying to us". No they're not. "Cars are literally murdering us", no they're not, dying in a car accident is tragic, but it's neither murder, nor is the car doing it to you.

Yes, this will bring more attention to your case. But it will come with a cost: do it often enough and "lying" will be equivalent in meaning with "information was not correct". Someone asks you the sum of two numbers and you miscalculate in your head? You've just lied to them.

It's the boy crying wolf on a linguistic level. Is your message important enough to do that? I don't think so.

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