| > Its trustworthiness is not near zero It is, because it can give you correct answers as well as entirely stupid ones (like the infamous “horse eggs” example of a few month ago). > basic science questions, For math it's pretty much hit or miss, even for straightforward stuff (and I'm not talking about doing calculation) > and widely known historical facts. This is really something you should not use ChatGPT for, because it knows urban legends much more than it does know actual facts (for obvious reasons, because these are repeated as facts everywhere) > You need to be aware of the flaws and develop an intuition for when spot-checking is necessary. Every time you don't already know the answer beforehand, that's the intuition you should have. And keep in mind that cross-checking is a much more difficult task that looking up, because we humans are prone to anchoring bias and confirmation bias. Want to use ChatGPT to learn something? Exploit its ability in understanding natural languages in order to get the actual name of the thing you describe (this is a pure language task, and ChatGPT is an enormous asset in that regard), and then search this. |
I think you overstate the frequency of which it hallucinates for simpler questions. I am usually using GPT-4, which is more reliable. For the types of questions I’m talking about, I’d say GPT-4 is at least 90% accurate.
Often times, I’m just looking something up due to curiosity while discussing with friends. It’s replacing a google search. The failure mode is that there is small chance I’m passing along incorrect information to my friends. Not a big deal.
If 90% accuracy is not good enough or if the question is not simple, then I’ll take more care.
Perhaps we are also getting into a semantic debates about what “trustiworthiness” means…