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I Have Blocked OpenAI

gavinhoward.com

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Re: I Have Blocked OpenAI

#31

Post by plufz »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #17
EatingWithForks wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People who use LLM’s already know they can give wrong information I think this is unfortunately much less true than expected... Lawyer using chatgpt.. teachers using chatgpt... even professors using chatgpt... as if its a source of truth.

There have been a few instances, sure, and they made headlines, but that was pretty early on when LLM behavior was not well understood. I think that fake citations (as the most obvious and well documented example) are a well understood problem now, and if you google “ChatGPT fake citation” you only get a few articles mostly referencing the same couple of cases from months ago. It doesn’t seem pervasive at all.

Anecdotal, but everytime I tell someone that the citations from ChatGPT can be bogus they are very surprised. They know that the answers can be incorrect, but they don't understand the process behind an LLM well enough to understand that a citation can be generated in the same way the rest of the text is.

Re: I Have Blocked OpenAI

#32

Post by gavinhoward »

circuit10 wrote: post #29
gavinhoward wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would bet good money that, as a use case becomes more niche, an LLM's output becomes more wrong. If that's true, your assertion would be wrong.

It does become more wrong, yes, but blocking it isn’t going to help it get any better. The idea that everything an LLM does can be replaced by documentation isn’t true

> The idea that everything an LLM does can be replaced by documentation isn’t true

An LLM is false value, so I'm not worried about that.

Re: I Have Blocked OpenAI

#33

Post by circuit10 »

gavinhoward wrote: post #28
circuit10 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could suggest that anyway without intentionally making it even worse at it (though honestly I don’t think this will have any effect anyway)

I could, but with so many people trusting GPTx too much, I suspect that they would not come to me with questions, but bug reports and insist that my software has the bug even if it does not. By saying that GPTx just doesn't know my stuff, it would be easier to tell them to go away.

I don’t see why you can’t just tell them that GPTx makes things up sometimes, and still tell them to go away (not literally because that would be rude)

Re: I Have Blocked OpenAI

#34

Post by sigilis »

You should take down the documentation entirely, if you want to prevent incorrect interpretations of things. The LLMs won’t be the ones emailing you, the people who would get things wrong if the LLM provided some kind of confident wrong answer would probably simply not read your documentation as the vast majority of users do not. You’re just shifting some, but not all, misunderstandings into totally uninformed questions that will mean an additional email pointing them to RTFM.

All of these “we’re not letting bots crawl our site!” posts make me feel like I’ve travelled back in time to when having web spiders crawl your site was a big deal. You can’t really prevent people from using tools wrong, and it is odd that so many people care about this futile attempt to insulate yourself from stupid users that I managed to see it on the front page of HN.

The worst part is, if an LLM has already read in your docs and the interaction you fear your users having with LLMs comes to pass: they will have misapprehensions about the old version of your docs which will be even more wrong.

Allow me to prepare you for the future now before you have to hear it from someone else, you will be getting email spam about LLM Algorithm Optimization soon. LLMAO firms are probably already organizing around the bend of time, we’re just a little before they become visible.

Re: I Have Blocked OpenAI

#36

Post by niederman »

gavinhoward wrote: post #8
Racing0461 wrote: post #2

unpopular opinion: llm responses being wrong is still valuable to me since it gives me a better jumping off point to exploring than nothing at all. especially with something like coding that can easily be back-propagated due to something not compiling/not working as intended. could be harmful in other areas tho.

Author here. My docs will include tutorial links at the top, and those tutorials will focus on accomplishing common tasks. I believe that's a good jumping off point.

I can promise you your tutorials will offer far fewer jumping-off points than an LLM.

Re: I Have Blocked OpenAI

#37

Post by gavinhoward »

circuit10 wrote: post #33
gavinhoward wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could, but with so many people trusting GPTx too much, I suspect that they would not come to me with questions, but bug reports and insist that my software has the bug even if it does not. By saying that GPTx just doesn't know my stuff, it would be easier to tell them to go away.

I don’t see why you can’t just tell them that GPTx makes things up sometimes, and still tell them to go away (not literally because that would be rude)

Because even when you tell people that, they don't believe you.

Re: I Have Blocked OpenAI

#38

Post by gremlinsinc »

gavinhoward wrote: post #20
Cantinflas wrote: post #16

> But here’s the problem: it will answer them wrong. There is no way to know that, and even if it ends up being true, blocking openai will likely make the problem worse, e.g. the ai answers will be worse without access to the documentation.

But if people come to me with problems, I can give them a link to that post and say, "GPTx does not know my stuff. You will want to read the docs yourself."

Most people who have any logic sense will likely try chatGPTs answer if it's wrong they'll go to the docs and try to see why it's wrong or they'll tell chatGPT it's wrong give a link to the docs to clarify and ask why, if using something like phind.com. Plus just because openai doesn't index it doesn't mean you can't use langchain to scrape the site and ingest the data. I'm pretty sure this is how phind works when I reference a specific page.

For example it gave me really wrong info when I requested info on the latest version of nextjs, I asked it if it could double check on their website at url, and it said sorry here's the correct info and all was good. I've never gotten wrong answers I couldn't have it fix assuming it has Internet access.

Re: I Have Blocked OpenAI

#39

Post by gavinhoward »

sigilis wrote: post #34

You should take down the documentation entirely, if you want to prevent incorrect interpretations of things. The LLMs won’t be the ones emailing you, the people who would get things wrong if the LLM provided some kind of confident wrong answer would probably simply not read your documentation as the vast majority of users do not. You’re just shifting some, but not all, misunderstandings into totally uninformed questi…

It's easier to put one link into an email than to try to explain things to people.

Re: I Have Blocked OpenAI

#40

Post by gavinhoward »

niederman wrote: post #36
gavinhoward wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. My docs will include tutorial links at the top, and those tutorials will focus on accomplishing common tasks. I believe that's a good jumping off point.

I can promise you your tutorials will offer far fewer jumping-off points than an LLM.

I can promise you that my fewer tutorials will be correct, not incorrect. An incorrect jumping off point is worse than none at all.
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