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by alex_sf 1177 days ago
How often are people?
1 comments

I think the difference, right now at least, is that people will go, "well, I'm not sure about this so I think we should look it up, but this is what I think" - the AI doesn't do that. It lies in the same exact way it tells truths. How are you supposed to make decisions based off of that information?
Does it lie? Or just get things wrong sometimes?

Lying requires knowledge that what you are saying is not the truth, and usually there's a motive for doing so.

I don't think ChatGPT is there yet... or is it?

Technically, what ChatGPT is doing is bullshitting because it doesn't have any knowledge of or concern for truthfulness.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

Sure, it's not lying, you're right, there's no will there, I'm anthropomorphism. It is producing entirely wrong facts / pseudo-opinions (as it can't actually have an opinion).
I was about to suggest "pathologically dishonest", but then I looked up the term and that seems to require being biased in favour of the speaker and knowing that you're saying falsehoods.

"Confabulate" however, appears to be a good description. Confabulation is, I'm told, associated with Alzheimer's, and GPT's output does sometimes remind me of a few things my mum said while she was ill.

Presumably the same way you make decisions on any piece of information. You should not be blindly trusting a single source.
I was too vague I think. The only place where I can see it being acceptable right now is code because I have a whole other system that will call out failures - I can rely on my IDE and my own expertise to hopefully catch issues when they appear.

Outside of the code use case, what should I rely on ChatGPT for that won't have me also looking for the information somewhere else? I suppose subjective soft things, like writing communications. But I can't rely on it for information.

Again, the idea that you should rely on any single source for information is the issue. Nothing changes with ChatGPT other than the apparent expectation that it is infallible.
So what are the use cases that I would use ChatGPT to find information that would speed up my work but would still require me to verify the information? If nothing changes with ChatGPT what is its use as a tool (assuming you want to use it to get information)?
It seemed to do a good job of outlining a JoJo season in the style of a Shakespearean comedy.

I wouldn’t ride in a vehicle it designed tho, based on my week of asking it to do go programming.

Sometimes it does, but I asked ChatGPT (not 4) to give me song lyrics for a song that it should have had data for and it gave me entirely wrong lyrics. I asked again and it gave me me more bad lyrics, not even close, and it didn't even pretend it didn't know, the lyrics would have been convincing. If I didn't already know the material I wouldn't know it was confabulating.