Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by raydiatian 1276 days ago
I didn’t mean to offend. In fact if anything, I said that ChatGPT is the equivalent intelligence of a teenager. How is that not significant, how is that not praise when competing systems have at best been like, what, 6-7yo? ChatGPT is great but it’s not perfect, and there is no harm in acknowledging that. Even ChatGPT acknowledges that.

It’s not all bad, and it’s way better than just learning by Google search alone. There are plenty of places in the last few weeks that it has done fantastic. For instance, I wanted to freshen up on a few physics concepts, around Maxwell’s equations. It did an exceptional job not only summarizing but getting into the details. I was flabbergasted, it was like having a personal Feynman right there in my pocket.

> Why would you trick it into contradicting itself?

Because ChatGPT is not my coworker. If anything, it is an interviewee. I’m trying to understand what it knows, and how it thinks. If I’m considering relying on it as a teacher, I should know to what extent it is reliable as a teacher. A teacher can point out when a student has the concept backwards.

> Would you ever attempt to trick and leave your coworker in a confused state?

By that logic, is the student who fails to clarify a teacher’s lesson “maliciously stupid”? Teacher: “Earth is round” Student: “so Earth is a flat circle?” Teacher: “no you little fuck”

Where is the documentation on how to modulate the behavior of ChatGPT? All I see is a little collection of boxes saying what it can and cannot do: Examples/Capabilities/Limitations. Why wasn’t I escorted through a UX that teaches me how to properly interface with ChatGPT?

And worst of all, why can’t I use newline characters in my chat prompts?

In conclusion, you kind of sound like a mother who thinks I’m another parent who pushed your kid down on the playground or something. I’ll remind you how many times ChatGPT told me it doesn’t have feelings, nonetheless I constantly asked it questions with “please and thank you”.

1 comments

>And worst of all, why can’t I use newline characters in my chat prompts?

You can, just hold shift and press enter. Like many other text input elements in numerous applications.

As far as documentation and how to modulate behavior, you are human. You should be smart enough to understand and figure out that AI systems of today are still young with equivalent intelligence of a teenager, as you suggest. Use your soft skills as a human, lest today's AI turns you into an example of Roko's basilisk in the future.

More generally, if you want to learn how to use ChatGPT, you should learn how to use a language model, because that's exactly what it is.

It should be ctrl+enter as well

> like so many other text input elements in numerous applications