| Yesterday, I had a sticky Swift/iOS issue. Checked SO, Apple Discussions, etc. Then, on a whim, I asked ChatGPT for a suggestion. > They are also prone to confident assertions of statements that are blatantly false. It suggested something that referenced a nonexistent property of a standard UIKit class. It wouldn't even compile. It was quite positive that this would fix my issue. After refreshing a couple of times (and also mentioning the first one sucked), it finally gave me something that still didn't work, but gave me an avenue that I could explore, and that finally yielded the solution. I suspect that the reason for the confident assertion that included an illegal property, was because it was trained on Swift code that was extended (I do that a lot, myself. In fact, I ended up creating my own extension that added the nonexistent property). Modern programming languages allow you to extend even language primitive types, and JavaScript has allowed that kind of thing for many years. It may be a while before we can entirely trust ChatGPT to give us all the answers. To be fair, however, it did help me to land upon the correct solution, but I still had to fire up some candlepower of my own. |
I find the whole premise of ChatGPT -- or indeed, neural network systems in general -- to be untrustworthy. That does not mean useless! But more like a first approximation solution that still needs to be checked.
I expect that, with more and more training, GPT systems will make fewer and fewer errors, but I still find the fundamental concept something that needs to be double-checked through some other (possibly automated) means.