[hannob]

You usually expect people to cite sources. Granted, that very often doesn't happen, and the amount of citing expected depends on the context. But ChatGPT just doesn't cite sources at all. I think there's a case to be made that they should.

[ericd]

People don’t remember the sources that formed their opinions, it’s just baked into the structure of their brain after reading, same for the model.

[stevesearer]

With search engines, it does feel like there was is a more clear trade of scraping access in exchange for web traffic.

With ChatGPT the traffic benefit isn’t there, so it feels like it isn’t a fair trade.

Google adding the context and data to their search results page also started blurring this trade making it unnecessary to click to the site the info was cleaned from.

[williamcotton]

How does someone site a source when they are using GPT to convert a box score into an entertaining paragraph about a baseball game? Or to convert a natural language command into a JSON format ready for downstream processing?

[ericd]

Right, it’s a gestalt from a huge set of sources. It’s not copying single text sources verbatim into your output.

[rom-antics]

Humans have a pretty good sense of when you need to cite sources, and when you don't. For example, long ago I learned from some website how to write a for-loop in python, and now I write them all the time without giving credit. I'm okay with ChatGPT writing a for-loop without citing its source.

I would say most knowledge about words/grammar/laws of nature can be taken for granted without a citation, but there are some important exceptions where things must be cited. I don't know how you'd reliably teach the difference to a computer though.

[candiodari]

And yet, exactly in this example, I HATE that people don't put sources. Perhaps not for "for loops", but search anything simple in python. "Python JSON output", for example, and you will find a billion articles that describe a simple python library ... but DON'T link to python.org or the "javadoc". They're always dicussing the most blatantly obvious simple thing, never remotely complete, never link to where you can actually find more info (but jobs, courses, ads, ... those will be linked)

It's getting me to the point of refusing to use Google, or only use Google with "site:...". I mean, the site varies, but without site limits Google's becoming useless.

[lolinder]

ChatGPT doesn't have a concept of sources. It has weights that together define a function that allow it to guess the most likely next word from the context. As a neat side effect of this contextual next-word guessing, it often can share accurate information.

If ChatGPT were to be required to share its sources, they would need a completely different approach. I'm not commenting on whether or not that would be a bad thing, but it would render the current iteration completely useless. You can't strap a source-crediting mechanism on top of a transformers-based model after the fact.

[anonymouskimmer]

> You can't strap a source-crediting mechanism on top of a transformers-based model after the fact.

I've read that ChatGPT is not connected to the net, but if it was: Couldn't you have it do a google search (or better yet corpus search) for the string it generated and then return the most significant matches (significance by string matching, not google rank)? It would be really crude, but wouldn't this just be a handful of lines of code that don't interfere with the "transformers-based model" code at all?

[shagie]

Why couldn't you, as a human do that to verify it?

The other day I had GPT write a rap battle between Burger King and Ronald McDonald. One of the stanzas came back:

    Burger King:
    Your burgers are plain, your buns a bore.
    Your clown's been around since '63,
    I'm sure my flame-grilled taste will leave you impressed
    My burgers are fresh, my fries are the best

It turns out that yes, Ronald McDonald was first introduced in 1963. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:McDonald%27s_commercial_(... (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Scott#Created_Ronald_M... )

So here's the challenge for you - who do you compensate for that line?

The complaint that people have isn't that GPT isn't citing its sources but rather that it isn't compensating the people who created the data that has that information.

... and now, if you're ever asked about historical clown trivia and pull out the "Ronald has been around since 1963", who should you give a royalty to? Me (for writing this), GPT (for making me aware of it), Wikipedia (for the source of my links in this post), the estate of Willard Scott for the Joy of Living (which Wikipedia cites), some random blog author that had some clown trivia on it that happened to have been part of the training set for GPT?

[anonymouskimmer]

Because I want to credit not verify? Because I want to trace the flow of information?

It isn't just monetary compensation that's important here.

I come at this from the point of view of a scientist who is expected to reference ideas. Not necessarily back to their original source, but at least back to a source that can theoretically point back to another link in the chain.

Sure, I can manually search for a reference based on what ChatGPT gave me. Or someone could spend a few minutes adding a few lines of code to ChatGPT to save millions of people some minutes of time.

-----

What would be awesome is an LLM that you can feed data to, and it can then write a paper based solely on the data you feed it.

[shagie]

I've still got the question - who should I credit with the bit that Ronald has been around since 1963?

I had it write a poem the other day in the style of Roses are read about coffee and bacon.

   Roses are red
   Bacon is greasy
   My coffee is hot
   Together they please me

If this is something that someone considers to be a derivative work of other things... who do I credit?

    Identify a word that have different meanings to two different professions at the same time and the professions that use them.  Give the definition of the word for each profession. Write a joke using this word.

to which I got back:

    The word is "band." 

    Definition for a Musician: A group of musicians who play music together.
    Definition for an Astronomer: A dark region in the sky with less stars.

    Joke: What did the astronomer say when the musician asked him to join his band? "I'm sorry, I don't do solos in the dark!"

How do you credit that?

---

> What would be awesome is an LLM that you can feed data to, and it can then write a paper based solely on the data you feed it.

https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/fine-tuning

[anonymouskimmer]

> If this is something that someone considers to be a derivative work of other things... who do I credit?

Based on a quick search the best credits would be ChatGPT as the arranger, and "Roud Folk Song Index number 19798" as the inspiration.

> "Joke: What did the astronomer say when the musician asked him to join his band? "I'm sorry, I don't do solos in the dark!""

> "How do you credit that?"

That you credit to ChatGPT. It's not referencing facts or discoveries, so credit isn't as important as it is for articles. If you want to credit an inspiration then I'm sure there's an index of joke forms out there that has an appropriate number to cite.

I can't actually find a definition for band in astronomy that is "a dark region in the sky with less stars." So it seems to be a pretty poor joke.

> https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/fine-tuning

This does it solely based on the data you feed into it? And by data I mean scientific data that you discovered, and want formatted into a particular research article style.

Edit to add: Possible sources for the line "together they please me":

1) https://www.google.com/books/edition/Poetical_Works_of_Louis...

2) https://www.google.com/books/edition/Florio_s_First_fruites/...

[christkv]

The bing leak seemed to mention sources.

[pixl97]

Hello [Oxford Dictionary: 1827]

Oh, wait, I'm not going to cite sources in a non-scientific work as this leads to madness. The following is a previous post of mine on HN

"Your mind exists in a state where it is constantly 'scraping' copyrighted work. Now, in general limitations of the human mind keep you from accurately reproducing that work, but if I were able to look at your output as an omniscient being it is likely I could slam you with violation after violation where you took stylization ideas off of copyrighted work.

RMS covers this rather well in 'The right to read'. Pretty much any model that puts hard ownership rules on ideas and styles leads to total ownership by a few large monied entities. It's much easier for Google to pay some artist for their data that goes into an AI model. Because the 'google ai' model is now more culturally complete than other models that cannot see this data Google entrenches a stronger monopoly in the market, hence generating more money in which to outright buy ideas to further monopolize the market."