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Drew Kadel

My daughter, who has had a degree in computer science for 25 years, posted this observation about ChatGPT on Facebook. It's the best description I've seen:

Something that seems fundamental to me about ChatGPT, which gets lost over and over again: When you enter text into it, you're asking "What would a response to this sound like?" If you put in a scientific question, and it comes back with a response citing a non-existent paper with a plausible title, using a real journal name and an author name who's written things related to your question, it's not being tricky or telling lies or doing anything at all surprising! This is what a response to that question would sound like! It did the thing! But people keep wanting the "say something that sounds like an answer" machine to be doing something else, and believing it *is* doing something else. It's good at generating things that sound like responses to being told it was wrong, so people think that it's engaging in introspection or looking up more information or something, but it's not, it's only, ever, saying something that sounds like the next bit of the conversation.
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Kyozou

@DrewKadel She’s right. And that being the case, why on earth is anyone using it? If it’s not providing correct information, WTH is the point?

I just saw a post that cites info from ChatGPT about companies doing business in TN. As if it’s an authoritative source…

Drew Kadel

@kyozou People use it because it's attractive and talks in language we can understand. Some sophisticated users can get it to do things like aspects of coding-but as a shortcut & they know how to test for reliability. But, good grammar aside, it's not ready for use in the humanities or scholarship. Ironically, its big weakness is that it doesn't give right answers about things found in uncontrolled natural language--though it's all about natural language.

Apr 07, 2023, 12:35 PM·Public
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