[twoodfin]

Ben’s got it just right. These things are terrible at the knowledge search problems they’re currently being hyped for. But they’re amazing as a combination of conversational partner and text adventure.

I just asked ChatGPT to play a trivia game with me targeted to my interests on a long flight. Fantastic experience, even when it slipped up and asked what the name of the time machine was in “Back to the Future”. And that’s barely scratching the surface of what’s obviously possible.

[slibhb]

> Ben’s got it just right. These things are terrible at the knowledge search problems they’re currently being hyped for. But they’re amazing as a combination of conversational partner and text adventure.

I don't think that's exactly right. They really are good for searching for certain kinds of information, you just have to adapt to treating your search box as an immensely well-educated conversational partner (who sometimes hallucinates) rather than google search.

[esperent]

> rather than google search.

It's important to remember that Google search also returns false results for all kinds of searches and that's it's been getting slowly worse for years.

Recently I searched Google for "bamboo sign" because I was designing a 3d model building and I wanted a placeholder texture for the sign.

What I got was loads of results for "bamboo spine" which apparently is a skeletal disorder of some kind. Putting "sign" in quotes or the entire "bamboo sign" in quotes didn't make any difference, Google had decided I was looking for information about spines and that was it.

I switched over to duckduckgo and got the results I wanted immediately (Duckduckgo, of course, is bad at loads of other things that Google would do better at).

Before people dismiss chat based search for sometimes being incorrect, I think we need a comprehensive test: ask both Google search and the new Bing Chat search a few hundred simple questions on a broad range of topics and see which gives more incorrect answers.

[bentcorner]

IMO it's only a matter of time before someone hooks up a LLM to a speech-to-text recognizer with a TTS engine like something from ElevenLabs, and you have a full blown "AI" that you can converse with.

Once someone builds a LLM that can remember facts tied to your account this thing is going to go off the rails.

[gfd]

If you're familiar with vtubers (streamers who use anime style avatars), there are actually now AI vtubers. Interaction with chat is indeed pretty funny.

Here's a clip of human vtuber (Fauna) trying to imitate the AI vtuber (Neuro-sama): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxsZlBryHJk

And neuro-sama's channel (currently live): https://www.twitch.tv/vedal987

[ericlewis]

Funny you mention that… I have done exactly this. Including using ElevenLabs for TTS. And also teaching it “facts” about me / calendar for the day in a hidden prompt when launching a conversation. It works pretty well.

[kyriakos]

I like ChatGPT talks too much and would be annoying for this purpose.

[djcannabiz]

this is absolutely me anthropomorphizing them, but i found it quite funny how stiff chat gpt sounds compared to the (at times) completely deranged bing chat. its allmost like they have personalitys

[williamcotton]

That's funny, I've been using ChatGPT to answer questions like this:

  What is the population of Geneseo, NY combined with the population of Rochester, NY, divided by string length of the answer to the question 'What is the capital of France?'?

The answer it gave back is 43780.4.

Short explanation: Get GPT to translate a question into Javascript that you execute and to use functions like query() to get factual answers and then to do any math using JS.

You can see the log outputs of how it works here, complete with all the prompts:

https://gist.github.com/williamcotton/3e865f33f99627b29676f1...

[Andaith]

I've been doing this as a text adventure roguelike. It's surprisingly fun, and responds to unique ideas that normal games would have had to code in.