[paxys]

There's this internet phenomenon (common on Reddit and other such forums) where you find high-quality discussions on a variety of topics and everyone seems so clever and informative, until you come across a thread on a topic that you are actually an expert on and find that every top-voted comment is objectively incorrect. ChatGPT is essentially that but on steroids. Its primary ability is being able to sound extremely confident in all its responses.

[danielvaughn]

I think a lot of overly-eager and under-informed people are jumping on the bandwagon and shouting half-baked proclamations from the rooftops to get clicks and views.

But underneath all the bullshit is something truly useful, so I wouldn't necessarily say that Confidently Incorrect™ is ChatGPT's primary ability.

Coincidentally, over the past few weeks of this ChatGPT craze, I've needed to create a lot of fake data to seed a database. Normally not a big deal, but these records need to have foreign keys pointing to one another. I wondered whether ChatGPT could help me out, so I briefly described the fields I needed, their format and data type, the type of information they contained, etc etc. It did it almost perfectly, and fixing the little errors was trivial. I was dreading having to do this because it's such a pain in the ass.

To me that kind of thing is going to be the most useful application. Everyone's freaking out (in both the "scared" and "excited" sense) over AI's ability to replace creativity, but I'm focused on it's ability to replace toil.

[paxys]

While I agree with your premise, the "toil" that you mention is a very small use case for a tiny minority of people. And automating it away has always been trivial. What would have taken 30 minutes to write a Python script now takes 5 minutes to come up with the perfect prompt. And then you have to test and be sure that it does what you want. Neat, but not world-changing.

Meanwhile ChatGPT is already being hailed as the Google killer. People are using it to write essays and form opinions. Plenty of online and offline debates contains phrases from ChatGPT repeated verbatim. It's being adopted in newsrooms around the world. So what it is good for in theory and what people are actually using it for are worlds apart. IMO the technology is going to have its "self driving car kills pedestrian" moment very soon because of over-eager and careless users, and that is going to set the entire field back.

[turtlebits]

I disagree. Toil is part of everyone’s job and what creates procrastinators. I used it recently to help me write a browser extension, where I find writing vanilla js and xpath expressions very tedious (just a bunch of syntax lookup) and would not have even bothered in the first place.

If you approach it with the right mindset, it’s extremely valuable.

[SamPatt]

Increasing software development speed 6x would be fairly world changing already, wouldn't it?

Add in all the automation of customer service via actually good Chatbots and lots of very cheap (and fairly high quality) copywriting and it seems world changing to me.

[vkou]

> Meanwhile ChatGPT is already being hailed as the Google killer.

The only Google-killing aspect of it is a better understanding of user queries.

Although given how often I have to remind it of the details of my questions, maybe it's not even good at that.

[fock]

Given it has probably "hardcoded" a lot of questions by the usage of "finetuning" via RL, probably the latter statement is true. Also it has one way only to understand your query. If that way is wrong: welcome synonyms replaced by the tokenizer, welcome hallucinations by raising the temperature. Or you can introduce "context" (8000 tokens) or retrain.

[hungryforcodes]

> ...a better understanding of user queries.

No, lack of ads. Before content marketing, Google was pretty useful

[vkou]

How do you think it's going to be monetized, if not by ads?

[hungryforcodes]

In what sense? Google has many revenue streams -- the year is 2023, not 1997. Just HAVING the number one search engine without ad revenues brings mind share, intelligence on trends, what people are searching for, advanced notice on possible disasters...the list is endless.

[soco]

Like said somewhere on the internet, we don't need AI to create art, we need AI to do the dishes and free our time to create art.

[theonlybutlet]

But art's the easy part, I wonder if that's why it's fun...

[hungryforcodes]

...not done well though. Dishes are much easier to do well.

[prox]

When I want a quick insight to launch me into further inquiry, chatgpt has been so much more useful than regular search with the first 10 hits of AI generated advertisement spam. I use one that provide its source as well, so I can check.

Reddit tends to be a second best bet, and the most upvoted is not always the best, on a busy thread some ‘real’ experts are usually a bit down with lengthy descriptions of their analysis.

Search is third, it’s quick but I do often need to append stackoverflow and reddit to get meaningful answers. I forgo Google completely more and more since the quality is so low, perhaps 2% of my queries go there tops.

[ikekkdcjkfke]

Absolutely. I know what i want, i know how to do it, but i don't want to type it out.

[Felminor]

Just imagine how many little code snippets you used (at least I did) to make my life easier and faster

A script which parses jaon for a specific key or transforming a table from y to z.

Now everyone has this available to them.

It's great already!

[harperlee]

But those are the low hanging fruit that help me avoid rusting skills… and this is a common phenomenon on automation: you destroy the first rungs on the experience ladder, that no one wants to do but are essential to develop foundational skills.

[danielvaughn]

That's a pretty good point. I'm looking at this from the perspective of having done this for over a decade. All that stuff feels like a waste of time to me now. Even as I was using ChatGPT for my fake data, I was thinking to myself "this is like having a junior dev assisting me". So yeah, those little micro tasks that build muscle memory are going to vanish.

[kristopolous]

That's almost every reddit thread I've been involved in.

Oratory prowess is way more important than accuracy. If you ever want to "lose a debate" on reddit, pick something that's counter-intuitive or widely misunderstood and use nuance and citations in your defense. You'll get cyberbullied every time - sometimes even banned from the sub.

[smogcutter]

From those examples, I think you’re maybe also running up against people generally having a low threshold for giving a stranger on the internet the benefit of the doubt.

It’s hard to be surprised that “eugenics, but the good kind, just hear me out!” and “state’s rights, but not the disingenuous lost cause kind, just hear me out!” are a tough sell with complete strangers who have no prior reason to trust you or be interested in your opinions.

[kristopolous]

correct!

Btw, I removed them from my examples, didn't want to "discuss" that here.

I'm kind of a history nerd and it's like a fishing hook with delicious bait when I see stuff like that. "Oh wait! You think it was just the south that argued states rights?! Actually (brings up fugitive slave clause jurisprudence)"

Or how manner and conduct books of the 1800s, eugenics texts, and jordan peterson's 12 rules for life are basically dots in a straight line. That stuff is just catnip.

I just need to stop being distracted and go write actual books or something.

[nqrac]

Peterson an academic who is clueless about the real world. His best work was discussing politics in connection with liberty, especially the Trucker protests.

His biggest flaw is that (like the other Daily Wire pundits) he never goes into economics and has absurd ideas that we live in a competence hierarchy.

The whole "intellectual dark web" imploded after the start of the Ukraine war, when they first went full neocon, then realized that their audience does not like that and now start backpedaling massively.

[kristopolous]

I'd like to recommend "decoding the gurus" podcast which is probably the best treatment of this material I've seen.

It's still lacking but I should "put up or shut up". They're doing a fine job

[pfannkuchen]

I’m no fan of Peterson, but I’m curious— how are intentionally altering the gene pool of a group and cleaning your room colinear?

[kristopolous]

Look at the table of contents of this book titled "Eugenics" https://archive.org/details/naturessecretsre00shan/page/6/mo...

There were multiple points of interest for the Eugenicists. One of them was for the general public and how to get them to have a proscribed conduct and behavior.

Maybe you've seen those diagrams where they have 2 life paths depicted from the Victorian era. That's from Eugenics. Example: https://ia800301.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages....

Here's "The Road to Success" for "The Young Man" https://archive.org/details/naturessecretsre00shan/page/244/...

Again, this is part of Eugenics. We focus on the part that was removed (race science) and leave mostly unexamined the parts that were reinvented or repurposed as say, "The Power of Positive Thinking".

Eugenics books, for the general public, were a different beast. Probably the best succinct description for how they thought of themselves can be summarized in this 1921 diagram: https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/efc97918-8073-4...

It is a dangerous psuedoscientific epistemology - a practice with a bunch of faulty logic and ways of knowing that can lead to disasters and it's alive and well - for instance, assuming a social structure in lobsters applies to humans. That these adherents tend to be revealed as secretly racist and thus subscribe to the part which was removed, should be of no shock.

We've mischaracterized Eugenics[1] and allowed it to fester by other names or as Maurice Bardèche, the french neo-fascist observed about fascism in the 60s, "With another name, another face, and with nothing which betrays the projection from the past, with the form of a child we do not recognize and the head of a young Medusa, the Order of Sparta will be reborn"

The point is that if you don't draw the perimeter right around an idea, you can't reign it in. It'll just escape from your hands and re-emerge as something else. So, for instance, the slave plantation becomes the prison farm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_farm).

We tend to, for good reason, ignore societal trainwrecks and blights on our past. But trainwrecks are the most important thing to study if we strive to build safer trains and seek to avoid similar disasters in the future.

Things have to be accurately tackled with in order to defeat them.

---

[1] it's worth noting it's a big topic and some "real" science has also come out of it, such as biosocial theory and biostatistics studies. Peer reviewed journals such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Heredity used to be eugenics journals. This is, however, a very small minority.

[barrysteve]

Manners and conduct existed before eugenics and continues to exist after eugenics. You can't pull one blighted moment in the 1920s as proof the whole idea is faulty.

There is little accuracy in your description of events. Peterson said we share serotonin with lobsters and it fuels a victory/defeat set of behaviours. If you drop the serotonin from his idea, it's no longer what he was talking about.

Your description falls to my mind as a velvet blanket to hide underneath from scary racist and nazi ideas that have nothing to do with Victorian era manners and metaphors about behaviour, expanded out of natural science.

You can't draw a 'perimeter' around the wind.

[wholinator2]

This doesn't make sense to me. But isn't there a difference between senior engineer and jail? Are you saying we should have no input on how children grow up or society behaves because some eugenics people picked the idea up once? Why must we be afraid of _everything_ the eugenicists _ever said_. Can't people sometimes have even a single good idea? I'm not in favor of eugenics at all. But social conduct and manners? That sociology, social psychology, we should grow away anything from any field that has ever been touched by _bad people_?

When i was younger the things Jordan Peterson said actually helped me. This whole "Reverse Midas Touch" thing is getting really out of hand. Just because a person has had bad ideas, doesn't make the person bad or require destruction of every idea they've ever held or spoken. Just because a group of racist and ignorant people held bad beliefs, doesn't mean every possible belief they held was bad and must be destroyed. This whole argument is just, "but the bad people thought that so it must be bad too", without ever establishing what's actually bad about it. Tell me what's wrong with the ideas without mentioning a group of bad people, tell me about why the ideas are bad. Tell me about the people who "manners and proper behavior" has hurt, and then explain to me why it can't possibly be different. Speak about the ideas, not the people. Everyone knows why those people were bad. Now tell me about the ideas

[gsinclair]

Awesome comment; thank you.

[jiggawatts]

I post on both Reddit and YC News regularly, and it is fascinating to see the differences in biases, counter-arguments, or outright rejections of reality.

YC News people generally seem to prefer to hear the truth, especially from sources that appear knowledgeable. I've had people here comment in reply to me saying I've "changed their mind". That never happens on Reddit.

Reddit has cliques, quasi-religions, and fads. Anything contrary to the group-think is mercilessly voted down. Intelligent, thought-out counter arguments that aren't entertaining are especially likely to garner lots of downvotes. Not only do the readers feel "personally attacked" by contrary opinions, there is also that ever present undercurrent of anti-intellectualism of typical Americans that makes intelligent discourse distasteful to them.

[avgcorrection]

It’s amazing to me in all my years on the internet how many communities I insert myself into, then in private feel like a pretender, and yet how relatively uncommon it is that people call me an idiot.

[smcl]

Good afternoon, fellow Imposter Syndrome Haver :) Just jumping in to say that you are most likely not a pretender or an idiot, you're probably just very self-conscious, hold yourself to high standards and give yourself lofty goals.

[alophawen]

Can confirm. Was banned from /r/golang for speaking well of Rust. I use both.

[pyuser583]

I’ve been quizzing ChatGPT about it’s knowledge of the oil industry - it has no idea what’s talking about.

For example, I ask it to simulate a discussion between a flow engineer and a geologist, and it doesn’t seem to understand they work together regularly.

Not like there’a a stack overflow for this sort of thing.

[stevenhuang]

you need to prompt it with more specific knowledge; if you're generic in your prompts it will be generic in its responses. inject some field-specific terminology and be esoteric in your queries, etc

its latent representation is vast, I find you can get much higher quality+interesting responses if the prompts are tuned appropriately

[IIAOPSW]

This is at best going to slightly improve the output. I asked about something hyper specific and also extremely trivial: transit wayfinding type queries specific to the NYC subway. All the semantics are services and stations. A service is nothing more than a list of stations it stops at and a station is nothing more than a list of services which stop at it. Eg if I tell it "I'm on the F, how do I get to Time Sq", it should cross reference the service/station lists, find the commonality, and tell me "switch to the A at W 4th".

No context about anything in the outside world or even about the physical nature and purpose of commuting is needed to comprehend and answer these questions. There is no external context or sophisticated logic beyond just matching those sorts of lists to each other. Its a wholly closed system of highly standardized tokens.

I ask it what stops the F and A have in common. 125th St is on the list. I know that's wrong. I ask it to list all the services that go to 125th. The F is not on the list (correctly so). I point out the inconsistency between the two outputs. It says sorry and does nothing. I tell it to remake the list of stops the F and A have in common. It is now missing a few stations from before, and has added new incorrect results.

This is just a snippet. I went in circles with it for probably an hour playing wack a mole with its inability to correctly recall more than 10 true details in a row. These were not obtuse, esoteric, or even logically complicated queries. Nor was it ambiguous stuff open to interpretation. Nor was it even something that you'd need a real meatspace body to comprehend, like the feeling of the sun on a summer day. This should have been a language models bread and butter.

[stevenhuang]

You're right, it seems particularly bad in navigation. I lead with some general queries on the NYC system, asked it for the common stops for service lines F and A, and it also hallucinated. The wiki for the service lines have pretty complete representations here, so this data should be suitably represented in its training corpus.

Would be interested in how a multimodal LLM such as PaLM-E (trained on maps, etc) fair in these sorts of queries.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/11krgp4/r_...

[IIAOPSW]

I'm not hopeful that "seeing the map" (multimodal training) will make the difference everyone is hoping for. The transit map is going to be the exact same information as the lists, but coded in the learned design language of colored lines and dots. The words-only version should work just as well or better because it shortcuts the implicit OCR problem of trying to make it learn off the map. Indeed transit maps other than NY are often abstracted and have nothing to do with the underlying geography. So abstract representations (such as lists of words) should be fit for purpose.

Here's another one that fails spectacularly. The digits 0-9 drawn as an ASCII 7 segment display. It gets it mostly correct, but it throws in a few erroneous non-numbers and repeated/disordered/forgotten numbers. Asking it for ASCII drawings of simple objects can really go off the rails quickly.

The fault mode is very consistent. When a prompt forces it to be specific and accurate on an unambiguous topic for 10 or more line items, it will virtually always hallucinate at least one or two. Especially if the topic is too simple to hide behind a complex answer. Even if its learned not to hallucinate 90% of the time, and even if that's good enough to pass at first glance, within a list of 10 things it only has a 35% chance of not hallucinating any of them.

For what its worth, it did very well on law questions. Try as I might, it refused to accept that there's a legal category known as "praiseworthy homicide". Though, I suspect this has less to do with the underlying model and more to do with openAI paying special attention to profitable classes of queries.

I'm sorry to say, I think the problem maybe more intrinsic to the current approach to AI. Frankly, LLM works unreasonably beyond my expectations, but its making up for a lack of a real first principles theory of cognition with absurd amounts of parameters and training.

[ChatGTP]

Here’s the thing though, when you keep having to “prompt it”, are you really doing the work yourself by coaxing a good enough bullshit answer that you’ll believe it? It could still be useful, not sure.

[stevenhuang]

A minimum sort of knowledge of the field would be helpful.

But I feel that if one is inquisitive enough, they'd know when exploring a topic to ask broad questions of the sort:

- what are the common types of problems encountered in X field

- what are the main roles and responsibilities of personnel in X field

- list some open questions in the field of X

After these open-ended questions one can dive into each of them with:

- what are some common solutions to X, compare and contrast X vs Y

The risk of seeing hallucinated info is always there, but just for an example when I was exploring the types of space-time metrics and asking chatgpt which tensors are most suited for which scenario (and also which coordinates are best for which scenario, such as moving from Schwarzchild to Eddington Finkelstein coordinates to deal with the event horizons near black holes), their individual wiki pages said generally the same things.

I was able to ask ChatGPT in very naïve "idk please explain like im 5" ways and it was able to very patiently rephrase dense jargon into surprisingly understandable explanations.

I'm sure if an expert in GR were to drill down deeper into the details they will find inaccuracies in ChatGPT's responses, but for the inquisitive information sponge user, a dive through ChatGPT to get a general feel of a topic is insanely useful. After that, one could dive into the appropriate books/papers/primary sources to start the real learning once they find what they're interested in.

[aliasxneo]

Can you give an example? I see this advice a lot but usually devoid of practical tips.

[stevenhuang]

Here's an attempt. Looks pretty good to me.

It's sort of like, how would you imagine an expert would respond if all you said was "simulate a discussion between a flow engineer and geologist". Without providing any further context or hints into what you want, I also wouldn't be surprised if I get a generic response. But instead if you sort of know what you want to ask, they'd have more to work with and be able to better answer your query.

Note I know nothing about this field, I just looked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_geology#Soil_and_r... and understood this was for oil and gas, so:

> Simulate a discussion between a flow engineer and a geologist in the planning phases of a drill operation. Use field-specific terminology and aim for accuracy, the scenario will be used to teach a petroleum engineering class focused on deformation monitoring.

Flow Engineer: Good morning, I'm the flow engineer for this drill operation. Nice to meet you.

Geologist: Hi, I'm the geologist in charge of the geological analysis for this project.

Flow Engineer: Great, I understand we need to work together to ensure the success of this drill operation. Can you tell me more about the geological features of the area we're drilling in?

Geologist: Sure. We're drilling in an area with significant deformation, caused by tectonic activity. There are a variety of rock formations, including sandstone, shale, and limestone. There's also a possibility of encountering fault zones, which could pose a risk to the drilling operation.

Flow Engineer: Thanks for the information. We'll need to take into account the deformation and rock properties when designing the wellbore trajectory. Have you conducted any geomechanical analysis?

Geologist: Yes, we've conducted a rock mechanics study to determine the stress and strain characteristics of the formations in the area. Based on the results, we recommend using a multilateral well design with a horizontal section to avoid encountering the fault zones and minimize the impact of deformation.

Flow Engineer: That's helpful. We'll need to ensure that our drilling fluid properties are appropriate for the formations we'll be encountering. Can you tell me more about the porosity and permeability of the rock formations?

Geologist: The porosity and permeability of the sandstone formations vary, but in general, they're relatively high, which means we'll need to be careful when selecting our drilling fluid to avoid fluid loss into the formation. The shale formations are less porous and permeable, which means we'll need to use a different type of fluid to avoid damaging the formation.

Flow Engineer: Thanks for the information. We'll take that into account when selecting our drilling fluid. We'll also need to monitor deformation during the drilling process. Do you have any recommendations for deformation monitoring tools we should use?

Geologist: Yes, we recommend using acoustic emission sensors to monitor rock fracturing and deformation, as well as tilt sensors to monitor any changes in the wellbore inclination. We also recommend conducting periodic borehole imaging to ensure that the wellbore is remaining stable.

Flow Engineer: Excellent. We'll ensure that we incorporate those tools into our drilling plan. Thank you for your time and expertise. I'm looking forward to working with you on this project.

[fock]

Oh yeah - and now I change this and suddenly the thing is fun and slightly unreal:

"Simulate a discussion between a project manager and a public health officer in the planning phases of a drill operation. Use field-specific terminology and aim for accuracy, the scenario will be used to teach a petroleum engineering class focused on public relations."

GPT: > Project Manager: Good morning, I'm glad to have you here to discuss the planning phases of our upcoming drill operation. As a project manager, my priority is to ensure that all aspects of the drill operation are conducted in a safe and efficient manner.

> Public Health Officer: Good morning. As a public health officer, my role is to ensure that the drill operation does not pose a risk to public health and the environment. I'll be happy to discuss our strategies for achieving that goal.

> Project Manager: Great. One of the first things we need to do is to identify potential health hazards associated with the drill operation. As you know, drilling involves the use of various chemicals, which can pose a health risk if not handled properly.

> Public Health Officer: Absolutely. We'll need to carefully review the chemicals being used and ensure that they are being handled in accordance with proper safety protocols. We'll also need to develop emergency response plans in case of accidental spills or leaks.

> Project Manager: Agreed. Another concern is air quality. The drilling process can generate dust and emissions, which can have adverse effects on air quality.

> Public Health Officer: That's right. We'll need to monitor air quality throughout the operation to ensure that it meets the standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency. We'll also need to take measures to minimize dust and emissions, such as using dust control equipment and properly maintaining all equipment.

> Project Manager: And what about water quality? We'll be drilling in close proximity to bodies of water, and we need to ensure that we don't contaminate them.

> Public Health Officer: Yes, that's a critical concern. We'll need to make sure that all wastewater and other fluids are properly contained and disposed of. We'll also need to monitor water quality regularly to ensure that there are no leaks or spills.

> Project Manager: It sounds like we have a lot of work to do to ensure that this drill operation is safe and environmentally responsible.

> Public Health Officer: Indeed. But by working together and following proper protocols and procedures, we can ensure that the operation is successful without posing a risk to public health or the environment.

I guess there was some confusion about roles/at the existing temperature roles swap (if you rerun it, you get different results, essentially swapping the lines...)

EDIT: and third try actually arrives at really nice hallucinations:

> Project Manager: Good morning, Dr. Smith. Thank you for taking the time to meet with me today. We are in the planning phases of a drill operation and we want to ensure that we are following all necessary public health protocols. Can you provide some guidance on what we should consider?

> Public Health Officer: Absolutely, it's my pleasure to help. The first thing you should consider is ensuring that all workers on-site are up-to-date with their immunizations, particularly for diseases such as tetanus and hepatitis.

> Project Manager: Understood. We require all our workers to have up-to-date immunizations before starting work, but we will double-check to ensure that all workers have the necessary immunizations.

> Public Health Officer: That's great to hear. In addition to immunizations, you should also consider providing training on proper hygiene practices, such as hand-washing and avoiding contact with contaminated materials.

[pyuser583]

Sounds like it was written by David Lynch.

[oefrha]

In the pre-LLM world we already had rumors/myths/lies/propaganda becoming "facts" after being reinforced through repetition without verification. (Relevant xkcd: Citogenesis https://xkcd.com/978/.)

Now, instead of authoritative sounding humans who are possibly wrong or with an agenda, we have an "infallible", "impartial" oracle capable of inventing whatever it wants to. Yes, I have seen ChatGPT treated as infallible on this very forum: "you are wrong because ChatGPT says <insert nonsense here>". Can't wait to see LLMs taking "post-truth" to a whole new level. The propaganda potential is immense, to point out just one application.

[theonlybutlet]

Perhaps it's a good thing, everyone will have to become experts in discerning the truth. Much like Video Game graphics looked "real life" until the next gen came out, perhaps society will start to see through any rumours/myths/lies/propaganda. Either that or we descend into a state of anomie.

[oefrha]

Doubt it. I can hardly verify things happening in my city even if I try, let alone e.g. things happening on the other side of the globe which the media keeps telling me about in order to drum up the next cold/hot war. I used to be able to tell Photoshop jobs by non-experts, but soon enough everyone and their mum will probably be able to produce completely fake videos indistinguishable from real ones, so even "video evidence" will mean little.

[brewtide]

100% on how it "takes over the world". We treat it like an oracle, hand it over willingly in mindset alone.

[nuclearnice3]

Before the had the internet, back when we still had newspapers, we had a similar phenomenon referred to as Gell-Mann Amnesia.

> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues.

> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

[tshaddox]

I think the effect is a bit overblown. Yes, I have noticed coverage of topics I know about that are oversimplified or straight up mistaken. But these are technical topics that I don’t expect journalists to get right (and in many cases I’d prefer they didn’t try to cover them at all). And I also won’t implicitly trust coverage about other technical subjects that I’m unfamiliar with.

I would argue that national politics and international affairs as they are covered in mass news media is a different type of coverage. It’s not about learning technical details and explaining them. It’s more about observing actions and broad sentiment and literally reporting those observations. I wouldn’t trust a reporter to get scientific details correct about some chemical process that’s the subject of some debated EPA regulation, but I could trust a reporter to summarize the debate and report on the sentiment of politicians, public sentiment based on opinion polls, etc. It would be weird to say “that newspaper screwed up the difference between a dominant 7th chord and a major 7th chord in a story about a famous songwriter, therefore I can’t trust them to report which politicians gave the most heated arguments in the debate about the EPA bill.”

[zoklet-enjoyer]

Check out this excerpt from a local news story I saw yesterday. You know what else acetic anhydride is used in? Production of aspirin. This is basic scare tactics to manipulate people and I see it everyday. A combination of ignorance, laziness, and being the voice of those in power. Fake news and manipulation of the public.

https://www.valleynewslive.com/2023/03/09/fargo-cbd-store-ow...

"“Semi-synthetic derivatives, or chemically derived cannabinoids, refer to certain types of substances that are produced by converting a cannabis extract into a different substance through chemical reaction,” said forensic scientist with the North Dakota State Crime Laboratory Charlene Rittenbach at the March 3 committee hearing of the bill.

For example, according to the Addiction Prevention Coalition, to make THC-O: you need to extract CBD, extract Delta 8 THC from the CBD and then add acetic anhydride.

The National Library of Medicine says acetic anhydride is corrosive to metals and tissue, and it’s used to make fibers, plastics, dyes and explosives."

[zoklet-enjoyer]

This is why I've said Trump is right about fake news. When I say that people think I'm a weirdo Trumper.

[nuclearnice3]

One nuance might be that those are two difference senses of fake news. In one case, we have news that is wrong. In another case, we have an insult aimed at reporting that we don't like, regardless of accuracy.

[zoklet-enjoyer]

I haven't trusted the news since the time I participated in manipulating local news stations to create stories about jenkem. More modern equivalent is Momo. It's all fake

[kragen]

This sounds interesting! What did you do?

[zoklet-enjoyer]

Some of us from the forum totse emailed local news stations, schools, and police departments pretending to be concerned parents. I wrote my high school and local news and said that my child was using jenkem and linked to an article from a local news station from somewhere else in the country to kind of back up my claims.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jenkem/

[remarkEon]

Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect but at scale. I find this all the time when reading the NYT, or Washington Post, or whatever, about something I'm intimately familiar with. ChatGPT just does this as a sort of carnival trick, and people seem to think it's funny for some reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...

>Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

>In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

[LordAtlas]

Reddit version of Gell-Man Amnesia: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/

[WelcomeShorty]

> There's this internet phenomenon (common on Reddit and other such forums) where you find high-quality discussions on a variety of topics and everyone seems so clever and informative, until you come across a thread on a topic that you are actually an expert on and find that every top-voted comment is objectively incorrect.

Sounds like the old days to me, where we would meet up , discuss the world and what have you, without any means to fact check anything online.

Changes there was a real expert on the subject in your circle was at best 20% So we just enjoyed / continue our life. No harm done as long as nobody took the discussion as gospel.

[squarefoot]

That was also common on TV. Everyone seems credible, until we spot errors when someone in our field starts talking.

edit: minor typo

[helsinkiandrew]

When I've asked ChatGPT about things I know a little about I find its response is often wrong. So much so that I always respond with "Are you sure that's correct?" it then often responds "I'm sorry you are right, I should have said... " and then says something a little closer to the truth.

I wouldn't rely on ChatGPT or any system that relies on it, except perhaps for summarising/rephrasing a single, known document. It worries me that people are using it for software development - creating stubs, bootstrap code. It's perhaps OK if you know the language/platform well enough to fix issues, but if you then use it on something that your not an expert in, what is the outcome.

For example:

Finding the source of literary quotes - miss attributing them - took 5 or 6 QA responses for it to get close.

Explaining how a p-channel enhancement mode MOSFET works - explained n-channel

Explain regex - often gets the technical parts right but can make very bad suggestions on what the regex aim is.

Name some classic cocktails created in Europe - suggested Manhattan, which it said was acceptable because it was popular in Europe

Suggest some gin based cocktails that don't include citrus, suggested those with lemon juice.

[chrstphrknwtn]

This generalises very broadly.

I have some expertise and knowledge is one or two specialised fields, and when I read Wikipedia, news articles and blogs about those fields, it's maddening how incorrect many people are, whilst sounding perfectly knowledgeable.

[nonethewiser]

Therefor you have to verify the answer or accept that it may be wrong.

I’m finding that it’s fairly good for code snippets. You can test that pretty quickly. But asking it something you don’t know and can’t verify is a huge risk.

[Kiro]

> common on Reddit and other such forums

It's especially common on Hacker News.

[Pxtl]

"mansplaining as a service" is the term I've seen used. Or Artificial Cliff Calvin.

[dragonelite]

I compared ChatGPT to a middle tech manager that just heard he has to create a last minute presentation. He knows all the current buzz words to sounds smart.

[alextheparrot]

My first recollection of this sentiment pertained to the New York Times, for what it’s worth.

[gonzo41]

Same effect happens with newspapers. Check your sources.

[lordnacho]

Sounds like internet version of Gell-Mann effect

[taskforcegemini]

it is not limited to the internet. this is also applicable to any news company

[_0ffh]

I don't think it's an internet phenomenon. It's a human phenomenon. It doesn't matter if it's a conversation or a piece in a newspaper (c.f. the Gell-Mann amnesia effect).