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by pcblues
988 days ago
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I'm not sure whether neurofancy people confabulating should be given an honest bill of truth health based on their category. Sounds like #believeallconfabulators :) Honest communication is difficult for some people to assess, and not for others. But I think we should learn from any recent #believeall... that we shouldn't base trust ratios on categorisation. Honest communication is difficult to do, like weight-lifting, and takes a lot of practise to do well. It also makes your BS meter more finely attuned, so is a good practise. With that in mind, you will think this is arrogant to say if you lie for a living but not if you regularly tell the truth:
Liars lie with liars and lie to rid themselves of truth troubles. Think about that when you next talk to a chatbot/human confabulator :) |
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But, I'm not talking about any society wide issue or philosophical treatise about trust and breakdowns in communication. Just talking about day to day interactions, where the stakes are completely different.
Trivial Example: If the sign on a mailbox says "Last pickup 5:00pm," what exactly does that mean? Will it be picked up, processed, and sent out of town that same day? Or just merely picked up, to be processed and sent the next day. This piece of written communication isn't a purely useful truth - it's ambiguous.
Pretend that this is an important behavior to know for your business, like if you were mailing huge checks for some obscure financial process. So you call up the local post office and ask. The worker who picks up the phone might know exactly what you are talking about and helpfully tell you the right answer. Or they might not, and tell you honestly that they don't know. Or they ask their supervisor, transfer you, make something up, tell you it doesn't matter, mail will get where it goes, or that you shouldn't worry about it, it's just mail.
ChatGPT could give you same distribution of answers as that worker did: helpful truth, meaningless equivocation, reassurance, redirection, confabulation, or lie to you. ChatGPT can be just as useful as talking to people in spite of those flaws, because people do the same thing.
This is reliant on the prior assumption that you gracefully handle unreliable communication, and that communication with people is useful. While this might seem a bit farfetched to some people, remember that we have a ready analog in computer science - networking TCP over UDP.