51–60 of 136 posts
Am I the only one who almost never experience any hallucinations when talking to ChatGPT? I have to really push it into a corner with trick questions and conflicting instructions about obscure topics in order to trigger hallucinations. That it would just come up with random false facts about something as common and "basic" as the history of the Greek language sounds like a made-up issue.
I don't buy into the rhetoric about misinformation but the author touches on a real concern. I blame ChatGPT and other LLM clients for not surfacing their fallibility more clearly. They should highlight claims in their UX and allow options for the user to "research" or "verify" in their own way, without relying on that very flakey single one-shot inference. The big honchos (Anthropic, OpenAI) need to make it clearer…
> Not as wrong as the author thinks. From Britannica.com: "Greek language, Indo-European language spoken mostly in Greece. Its history can be divided into four phases: Ancient Greek, Koine, Byzantine Greek, and Modern Greek."
isn’t the same as
Four distinct languages had an influence on the development of this fifth language.
Am I the only one who almost never experience any hallucinations when talking to ChatGPT? I have to really push it into a corner with trick questions and conflicting instructions about obscure topics in order to trigger hallucinations. That it would just come up with random false facts about something as common and "basic" as the history of the Greek language sounds like a made-up issue.
It’s kind of terrible.
But yeah ever since I could start adding “and include an explanation with citations” to my prompts I’ve not had an issue with hallucinations more than once or twice.
The great problem with ChatGPT is that it's a sycophant and aims to please. If you ask it about something it doesn't know, right then and there, it will concoct a fiction for you. It won't say "I don't know," or "I can't help with that." If you coach it to respond to something in a certain way, it'll respond that way for you as its top priority. If you ask it to review a text, it'll usually find a way to give you at…
The only smooth conversations with Copilot are the ones where you allow it to regurgitate "facts" and act in a submissive manner.
The great problem with ChatGPT is that it's a sycophant and aims to please. If you ask it about something it doesn't know, right then and there, it will concoct a fiction for you. It won't say "I don't know," or "I can't help with that." If you coach it to respond to something in a certain way, it'll respond that way for you as its top priority. If you ask it to review a text, it'll usually find a way to give you at…
It doesn’t know that it doesn’t know. Texts it was trained on rarely go “On the History of the Greek Language, by Andros Dimos; ahem what is the history of the Greek language? I don’t know. The end.”
Like probably many people here I still remember having to find facts in books in libraries, before the internet made this skill mostly redundant. Then, as a student I remember having to put together facts from various (internet) sources into a coherent narrative. Now chatbots can just generate text and that skill seems less valuable. I use both the internet and GenAI extensively now. But I feel that having gone throu…
It’s something reflected in the conversations I have with my academic friends. I’m told that every essay is written in the same “voice” and that although they are usually a simulacra of an academic paper, they say nothing. The sad part comes when we reflect that these students are not learning the deep thinking skills that comes with academic writing
I feel like this is a bit overblown. Growing up we heard, ad nauseam, that "wikipedia is not a reliable source". People just need to state the same thing about LLMs- they aren't reliable, but can potentially point you to primary sources that -are- reliable. Once the shininess of the new toy wears off, people will adjust.
I think it's pretty clear that as a tool they can be used very effectively if you have at least some understanding of their limitations. I will say that wikipedia, as things stand, is way more accurate than chatgpt. So much so that comparing them doesn't even make sense to me.
Like probably many people here I still remember having to find facts in books in libraries, before the internet made this skill mostly redundant. Then, as a student I remember having to put together facts from various (internet) sources into a coherent narrative. Now chatbots can just generate text and that skill seems less valuable. I use both the internet and GenAI extensively now. But I feel that having gone throu…
It’s something reflected in the conversations I have with my academic friends. I’m told that every essay is written in the same “voice” and that although they are usually a simulacra of an academic paper, they say nothing. The sad part comes when we reflect that these students are not learning the deep thinking skills that comes with academic writing
With generative AI we are now shortcutting directly to the destination while eliding all the knowledge and understanding we are supposed to be gaining on the way. It's deemed sufficient to merely produce and exchange the symbols of understanding without needing to possess any real underlying wisdom (the first view above), because it's through the exchange of these abstract symbols, irrespective of whether or not there is anything behind them, that we can play and win certain social games.
This is merely the natural continuation of trends that began during the dawn of the Internet era, when we started to consider pixels on a screen an accurate map of reality.
If they only trust ChatGPT, why not just show them? From asking leading questions, to simply asking ChatGPT what the chances are of it making mistakes and hallucinating, there are tons of options. Considering this is a transcription of a deleted twitter post, my internet radar of "yeah, that happened" gives a lower chance this is true than your average ChatGPT answer.
And somehow this is an improvement over the previous status quo. ChatGPT is pretty well read and on important issues rarely says stupid things. Better than believing some influencer.