• @FinishingDutch@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Ugh. Don’t get me started.

    Most people don’t understand that the only thing it does is ‘put words together that usually go together’. It doesn’t know if something is right or wrong, just if it ‘sounds right’.

    Now, if you throw in enough data, it’ll kinda sorta make sense with what it writes. But as soon as you try to verify the things it writes, it falls apart.

    I once asked it to write a small article with a bit of history about my city and five interesting things to visit. In the history bit, it confused two people with similar names who lived 200 years apart. In the ‘things to visit’, it listed two museums by name that are hundreds of miles away. It invented another museum that does not exist. It also happily tells you to visit our Olympic stadium. While we do have a stadium, I can assure you we never hosted the Olympics. I’d remember that, as i’m older than said stadium.

    The scary bit is: what it wrote was lovely. If you read it, you’d want to visit for sure. You’d have no clue that it was wholly wrong, because it sounds so confident.

    AI has its uses. I’ve used it to rewrite a text that I already had and it does fine with tasks like that. Because you give it the correct info to work with.

    Use the tool appropriately and it’s handy. Use it inappropriately and it’s a fucking menace to society.

    • @ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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      66 months ago

      I gave it a math problem to illustrate this and it got it wrong

      If it can’t do that imagine adding nuance

    • JackFrostNCola
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      6 months ago

      I know this is off topic, but every time i see you comment of a thread all i can see is the pepsi logo (i use the sync app for reference)

    • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ
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      6 months ago

      Wait, when did you do this? I just tried this for my town and researched each aspect to confirm myself. It was all correct. It talked about the natives that once lived here, how the land was taken by Mexico, then granted to some dude in the 1800s. The local attractions were spot on and things I’ve never heard of. I’m…I’m actually shocked and I just learned a bunch of actual history I had no idea of in my town 🤯

      • @FinishingDutch@lemmy.world
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        26 months ago

        I did that test late last year, and repeated it with another town this summer to see if it had improved. Granted, it made less mistakes - but still very annoying ones. Like placing a tourist info at a completely incorrect, non-existent address.

        I assume your result also depends a bit on what town you try. I doubt it has really been trained with information pertaining to a city of 160.000 inhabitants in the Netherlands. It should do better with the US I’d imagine.

        The problem is it doesn’t tell you it has knowledge gaps like that. Instead, it chooses to be confidently incorrect.

        • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ
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          16 months ago

          Only 85k pop here, but yeah. I imagine it’s half YMMV, half straight up luck that the model doesn’t hallucinate shit.

    • GHiLA
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      56 months ago

      “Did you ChatGPT it?”

      I wondered what language this would be an unintended insult in.

      Then I chuckled when I ironically realized, it’s offensive in English, lmao.

  • @Takumidesh@lemmy.world
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    226 months ago

    GPTs natural language processing is extremely helpful for simple questions that have historically been difficult to Google because they aren’t a concise concept.

    The type of thing that is easy to ask but hard to create a search query for like tip of my tongue questions.

    • @AstralPath@lemmy.ca
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      256 months ago

      Google used to be amazing at this. You could literally search “who dat guy dat paint dem melty clocks” and get the right answer immediately.

      • burgersc12
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        26 months ago

        I mean tbf you can still search “who DAT guy” and it will give you Salvador Dali in one of those boxes that show up before the search results.

    • @zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
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      136 months ago

      I’ve had people tell me “Of course, I’ll verify the info if it’s important”, which implies that if the question isn’t important, they’ll just accept whatever ChatGPT gives them. They don’t care whether the answer is correct or not; they just want an answer.

      • @IronKrill@lemmy.ca
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        46 months ago

        That is a valid tactic for programming or how-to questions, provided you know not to unthinkingly drink bleach if it says to.

      • @Leg@sh.itjust.works
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        06 months ago

        Well yeah. I’m not gonna verify how many butts it takes to swarm mount everest, because that’s not worth my time. The robot’s answer is close enough to satisfy my curiosity.

        • @Leg@sh.itjust.works
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          06 months ago

          For the curious, I got two responses with different calculations and different answers as a result. So it could take anywhere from 1.5 to 7.5 billion butts to swarm mount everest. Again, I’m not checking the math because I got the answer I wanted.

  • @ch00f@lemmy.world
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    166 months ago

    Last night, we tried to use chatGPT to identify a book that my wife remembers from her childhood.

    It didn’t find the book, but instead gave us a title for a theoretical book that could be written that would match her description.

    • @Anticorp@lemmy.world
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      96 months ago

      I’m somewhat surprised that ChatGPT has never replied with “just Google it, bruh!” considering how often that answer appears in its data set.

    • @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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      86 months ago

      Google intentionally made search worse, but even if they want to make it better again, there’s very little they can do. The web itself is extremely low signal:noise, and it’s almost impossible to write an algorithm that lets the signal shine through (while also giving any search results back)

  • AnimalsDream
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    76 months ago

    I say, “Just search it.” Not interested in being free advertising for Google.

  • ChatGPT is a tool under development and it will definitely improve in the long term. There is no reason to shit on it like that.

    Instead, focus on the real problems: AI not being open-source, AI being under the control of a few monopolies, and there being little to none regulations that ensure it develops in a healthy direction.

    • Sculptus Poe
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      16 months ago

      AI is pretty over-rated but the Anti-AI forces way overblow the problems associated with AI.

  • Sculptus Poe
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    56 months ago

    I wonder where people can go. Wikipedia maybe. ChatGPT is better than google for answering most questions where getting the answer wrong won’t have catastrophic consequences. It is also a good place to get started in researching something. Unfortunately, most people don’t know how to assess the potential problems. Those people will also have trouble if they try googling the answer, as they will choose some biased information source if it’s a controversial topic, usually picking a source that matches their leaning. There aren’t too many great sources of information on the internet anymore, it’s all tainted by partisans or locked behind pay-walls. Even if you could get a free source for studies, many are weighted to favor whatever result the researcher wanted. It’s a pretty bleak world out there for good information.

  • Madrigal
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    46 months ago

    Google isn’t a search engine any more. It stopped being that some years ago.

    Now it’s more accurately described as a shitty content feed that can be weakly filtered using key words.