Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by FerociousTimes 1290 days ago
The bot got it unequivocally wrong here.

When it said that the vast majority of the population of what's now modern-day France spoke modern French as their native language, that's categorically false and shouldn't be treated with leniency or open to interpretations.
1 comments
O__________O 1290 days ago
My point is cherry picking flaws won’t help improve anything for ChatGPT, Wikipedia, etc — but systematic approaches to discovering and modeling information space and related fact, queries, etc would. Wikipedia not free of issues and to my knowledge does not allow end user to see Wikipedia’s confidence in a given fact, if they have one at all.
link
FerociousTimes 1290 days ago
These sort of statements are by nature speculative not factual, and thus speakers are advised to express and communicate doubt, and hedge against uncertainty inherent in their views, and probably even vicious rebuttals, by using appropriate language constructs or terminology, but when a know-it-all bot that was trained by its handlers to pass always as an authority figure makes a mistake due to hubris or overconfidence, don't expect us to sit idle, and not call them out, and refute their claims accordingly.
link
O__________O 1290 days ago
Understand, though where exactly does ChatGPT claim to be a source of factual information?

Wikipedia on the other hand does clearly state its intent to maintain reliability of its content:

- https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_and_fact-checking

- https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia

Beyond that, in my opinion, while human dialogue might hedge confidence, disclose conflicts of interest, etc — to me, assumed the exchange is via text-based chat — there are much more efficient and effective ways to express that information than adding non-actionable text like that.

link
cmeacham98 1290 days ago
> Understand, though where exactly does ChatGPT claim to be a source of factual information?

It doesn't right now, but if you scroll up, you'll see the idea at the beginning of this thread is to turn it into a source of information.

The difference between ChatGPT and Wikipedia for this purpose is that:

1. Wikipedia is wrong wayyyyyyyy less often than ChatGPT

2. Wikipedia has sources linked at the bottom of the page you can go check, while ChatGPT does not

link