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I Have Blocked OpenAI

gavinhoward.com

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Re: I Have Blocked OpenAI

#41

Post by frizlab »

plufz wrote: post #31
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My CTO showed me oh so ever happy that he translated in English something I did in French to send it to a foreign corporation. I read it, the first word was wrong. Most of the rest had more or less the same meaning, but not that first word. I argued ChatGPT is dangerous because he was gonna send an incorrect document because of it (he had not sent it yet), but he straight up _refused_ to admit the word was wrong and saying “the meaning is almost the same!” Well it was not… So yeah some people are not aware ChatGPT can be wrong/dangerous, and some people are worse, and refuse to believe/listen to actual people and prefer a robot.

Re: I Have Blocked OpenAI

#42

Post by kristianp »

IIRC LLMs also use common crawl data for training. Are they also blocking common crawl?

Another thing is that chatgpt 4 can do live retrieval of websites in response to users questions. That is a different crawler doing that I imagine. Are they going to block that too?

Re: I Have Blocked OpenAI

#43

Post by circuit10 »

gavinhoward wrote: post #37
circuit10 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then why would they believe that it doesn’t know anything about your software?

Re: I Have Blocked OpenAI

#44

Post by circuit10 »

gavinhoward wrote: post #32
circuit10 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is it false? I’d say an LLM is like the output you’d get if you forced someone to write something with a strict time limit and without being allowed to go back and edit things or look anything up - likely to be wrong about anything that needs deep thought, but not entirely useless for simple things that are just tedious like boilerplate code

Re: I Have Blocked OpenAI

#45

Post by Thorrez »

gavinhoward wrote: post #39
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.

Isn't it still possible to put one link into an email without blocking the crawler?

Re: I Have Blocked OpenAI

#46

Post by dwaltrip »

frizlab wrote: post #41
plufz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My CTO showed me oh so ever happy that he translated in English something I did in French to send it to a foreign corporation. I read it, the first word was wrong. Most of the rest had more or less the same meaning, but not that first word. I argued ChatGPT is dangerous because he was gonna send an incorrect document because of it (he had not sent it yet), but he straight up _refused_ to admit the word was wrong and…

It sounds like he was excited about it using some new tech and then was upset when you blithely smashed on him.

Would it have been more emotionally mature of him to put that aside and listen to your criticisms? Yes, of course. But you probably could have saved some trouble and conflict by sharing in his joy a little before helping him understand the pitfalls and issues.

Re: I Have Blocked OpenAI

#48

Post by gavinhoward »

Thorrez wrote: post #45
gavinhoward wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Isn't it still possible to put one link into an email without blocking the crawler?

I'd have to explain that AI is wrong to most people who take it as gospel.

Re: I Have Blocked OpenAI

#49

Post by davely »

gavinhoward wrote: post #12
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #10

This is such a technopurist take. People who use LLM’s already know they can give wrong information. Your documentation won’t be able to cover every single possible contextual scenario that an LLM can help with. I think there are valid reasons to not allow OpenAI to spider you, but this is just a really silly one that feels pretty egotistical. People aren’t going to this guy saying “well OpenAI said your software wor…

They're only not doing that because my software is not common yet. But look at GitHub issues for any semi-famous project, and you'll see a lot of questions about misunderstandings, and that's before LLM's poisoned everything.

> But look at GitHub issues for any semi-famous project, and you'll see a lot of questions about misunderstandings

This usually happens because people don’t read documents to understand why something isn’t working in the first place or the documentation is not clear.

If anything, an LLM makes this sort of stuff more accessible.

Anecdotally, I find using something like ChatGPT to rubber duck engineering problems with various libraries to be much more enjoyable and useful than going to Stack Overflow or mucking through overly verbose (or not verbose enough) docs.

Re: I Have Blocked OpenAI

#50

Post by Racing0461 »

gavinhoward wrote: post #40
niederman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> An incorrect jumping off point is worse than none at all.

incorrect.

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