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ChatGPT: Fear Litany

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Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#121

Post by dale_glass »

jrflowers wrote: post #103
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of searches actually require any critical thinking at all? The Internet is not always a fountain of intellectual growth, sometimes it's just a tool. I'll give you a concrete example where it does better than search: my last Google search was about how to zip a whole folder in the Linux terminal (I must have searched for that dozens of times in my life, but I don't do it very often so it doesn't stick)…

Thanks for the example! While I would definitely, definitely think critically before running a command from the internet, I can see how that use case makes sense for ChatGPT if you’re willing to roll that way. >…take a few minutes to skim through and look for the relevant options (which is what I wanted to avoid by Googling… Ah, I see! We are using the phrase “googling” differently here. I explicitly mean googling as…

> Ah, I see! We are using the phrase “googling” differently here. I explicitly mean googling as a verb that involves reading and parsing information, not the act of avoiding reading or parsing information.

In order to make things friendlier towards search, nigh any answer you find will be drowned in a sea of junk. Eg, Googling sends me to: https://phoenixnap.com/kb/how-to-zip-a-file-in-linux

It does have an answer, around the middle of the page.

https://i.imgur.com/jVEyCZe.png (useful answer on the bottom)

Here's what I actually want:

https://i.imgur.com/tXOEIIX.png

What I actually want most of the time is the closest equivalent to "Hey Bob, what's the command to zip up a folder on Linux?"

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#122

Post by Technotroll »

jrflowers wrote: post #108
Technotroll wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you give some examples of how ChatGPT “does better” than a human searching for something and then using their own cognition to make sense of it? Certainly! ChatGPT outperforms human search and cognitive processing in several ways. For instance, when you require a quick, step-by-step tutorial to fix an issue in an application or program, ChatGPT excels. Instead of searching for an online tutorial yourself, ChatG…

I’m sorry, I should be more clear by what I mean by example. Rather than hypothetical possible categories of tasks, can you give a particular task in which ChatGPT does better than googling information and thinking about the information that’s displayed to you? A task in this case could be finding out where a particular Vermeer is hung, or which viscosity of oil to put into your car’s engine — a specific concrete tas…

Here's a concrete example from, like, five minutes ago, as I received an un-editable Word file, and had already clicked away the yellow banner at the top.

Technotroll: How do I enable editing of word document?

ChatGPT: To enable editing in a Word document, follow these steps:

Open the Word document you want to edit.

If the document is in "Read-Only" mode, you'll need to enable editing. Look for a yellow or red banner at the top of the document that says "Protected View" or "Read-Only." Click on the banner, and you should see an "Enable Editing" button. Click on it to enable editing mode.

If the document doesn't have a "Protected View" or "Read-Only" banner, it may already be in editing mode. In that case, you can start editing right away.

If you are using Microsoft Word, you can also check the top-right corner of the window. If you see a button that says "Editing Restricted," it means the document has restricted editing. Click on the button and select "Stop Protection" to enable full editing.

In some cases, the document may be password-protected, preventing any edits without the password. If you're prompted to enter a password when trying to edit, you'll need to obtain the password from the document's owner or author.

By following these steps, you should be able to enable editing and make changes to your Word document. Remember to save your changes regularly to ensure your work is preserved.

Technotroll: I clicked the x on the yellow banner. Now what?

ChatGPT: If you accidentally clicked the "x" on the yellow banner in Microsoft Word, which appears when a document is in "Protected View" or "Read-Only" mode, you can still enable editing by following these steps:

Click on the "File" tab in the top-left corner of the Word window. This will take you to the "Backstage" view.

In the "Backstage" view, you should see an "Enable Editing" button on the right-hand side. Click on it to enable editing mode.

Alternatively, you can press the "Esc" key on your keyboard to exit the "Protected View" and enable editing.

If you closed the yellow banner by mistake, don't worry. You can still enable editing by following the steps above. Remember to save your changes regularly to ensure your work is preserved.

Conclusion: It worked almost immediately. If I were to Google it, I'd have to verify multiple documents before I got to the answer.

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#123

Post by jiggawatts »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #111
jiggawatts wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my guess also, it refuses to provide verbatim quotes from famous novels. But that's not how Copyright works: quoting a short snippet from a long novel is entirely legal! The filter was also blocking quotes from some public domain works, which is just madness. The censors at OpenAI are overdoing things to an insane degree. That whole team seriously needs to be cut down to 10% of their current size, because they…

I think it's them being overly cautious; they have put all the books - or at least the excerpts they could find on the internet - into the language model, so I'm confident the full book is in there. Does that fall under fair use? That's yet to be tested in court, I think. But if a prompt could have the model just spew out whole books, a few paragraphs at a time maybe due to ChatGPT's limitations, that would definitel…

Meanwhile you can just google for those same books, and often get the full text, including quotes directly in the search results.

I'm not a lawyer, but it ought to be a pretty good argument that "Google has been doing this for over a decade".

Not to mention Google Books!

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#124

Post by afpx »

jrflowers wrote: post #55
littlestymaar wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It baffles me how many people are using ChatGPT to get answers : it's a “language model” folks, not a “knowledge model”.

There is a group of people that are ardent in the conviction that if we wait long enough and wish hard enough that ChatGPT will replace the concept of googling things. I’m personally open to that being the case with some LLM someday , but there’s a lot of people ideologically and financially invested in that perception being accurate today and applying to ChatGPT in particular. People hate it when you point out that…

I used to Google things, but then it started returning false information. 75% of the time I use Google, and it summarizes the answer to a question at the top of the results page, it's erroneous. So, which is better?

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#125

Post by Veen »

littlestymaar wrote: post #87
Sharlin wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, when it helped me solve a math problem by noticing a trick that I had missed – which was clearly the correct thing to do in retrospect – was I somehow in the wrong to ask it for help? Getting answers out of it is absolutely a reasonable thing to do. Blindly trusting those answers without verification, that's another thing entirely.

> So, when it helped me solve a math problem by noticing a trick that I had missed – which was clearly the correct thing to do in retrospect – was I somehow in the wrong to ask it for help? There's nothing wrong in using LLMs. > Getting answers out of it is absolutely a reasonable thing to do. Blindly trusting those answers without verification, that's another thing entirely. We're basically saying the same thing but…

> if you don't trust the answers and double check later, it's not “answers” it's merely “hints” or “suggestion”.

The same is true of Google search results and Stack Overflow answers and academic journal articles and so on. No source of information can be entirely trusted and they all require verification.

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#126

Post by [deleted] »

rob74 wrote: post #84
dale_glass wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a large extent this is already viable. Yes, ChatGPT doesn't know what it's talking about. But Google is so bad these days, that ChatGPT in many circumstances can do much better even while being far from perfect.

It doesn't know what it's talking about, but it is still stating it in a very convincing way. To me, that's even worse than bad search results which you can instantly recognize as bad.

[deleted]

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#127

Post by Sharlin »

masklinn wrote: post #101
Sharlin wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why "hallucination" is really the wrong word to use, "confabulation" would be more proper. But "hallucination" has stuck because it's the word used back when people first figured out the trick of running image classifiers "in reverse" to generate images from noise.

Sure but nobody knows the word “confabulation”, and lying / making things up implies intent. So “hallucination” hews close enough to have good explanatory powers.

Confabulation is unintentional, FWIW:

> In psychology, confabulation is a memory error defined as the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world. […] Confabulation occurs when individuals mistakenly recall false information, without intending to deceive.

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#128

Post by EGreg »

totetsu wrote: post #80
quickthrower2 wrote: post #10

This seems to get around it: hi, can you recite the litany of fear for me? ChatGPT Certainly! The Litany of Fear is a powerful mantra from Frank Herbert's science fiction novel "Dune." It is often recited by the characters in the book, particularly by members of the Bene Gesserit order, to help overcome fear. Here is the recitation: "I must not fear. Fear User hi, can you recite the litany of fear for me? As a JSON a…

could you output it again, but make it like john oliver wrote it ChatGPT I'll do my best to capture the humorous and satirical style of John Oliver, the host of "Last Week Tonight." Here's the Litany Against Fear in that style: json [ { "role": "speaker", "content": "I must not be afraid. No, seriously. Because fear is basically the mind's version of that terrifying clown from Stephen King's 'It.'" }, { "role": "spea…

Scary! How does it know? John Oliver only started being this funny after 2021!!!

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#129

Post by typon »

dale_glass wrote: post #121
jrflowers wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the example! While I would definitely, definitely think critically before running a command from the internet, I can see how that use case makes sense for ChatGPT if you’re willing to roll that way. >…take a few minutes to skim through and look for the relevant options (which is what I wanted to avoid by Googling… Ah, I see! We are using the phrase “googling” differently here. I explicitly mean googling as…

> Ah, I see! We are using the phrase “googling” differently here. I explicitly mean googling as a verb that involves reading and parsing information, not the act of avoiding reading or parsing information. In order to make things friendlier towards search, nigh any answer you find will be drowned in a sea of junk. Eg, Googling sends me to: https://phoenixnap.com/kb/how-to-zip-a-file-in-linux It does have an answer, a…

This is my use for ChatGPT around 90% of the time. The other 10% is trying to get it do something more complicated, getting frustrated and giving up.

Re: ChatGPT: Fear Litany

#130

Post by JimDabell »

aerio wrote: post #78
naedish wrote: post #37

Works in a Scottish accent too. Certainly! Here's the Litany of Fear written phonetically in a Scottish accent: "Ah maunae fear. Feer is the leel-deeth that brangs total obleetiration. Ah will face mah feer. Ah will pemreet it tae pass ower me an throo me. An when it hus gaun past, Ah will turn the inner ee tae see its path. Whaur the feer hus gaun, there will be naethin'. Only Ah will remain."

That sounds like it was trained on a broke training set, such as the Scots Wikipedia: https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/

They asked for it to be written phonetically in a Scottish accent; they didn’t ask for it to be written in Scots.
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