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by Kiro 951 days ago
Imagine reading this comment thread a few years back. Just getting an answer to this question at all from a generic bot would be considered science-fiction and now we're dismissing it based on technicalities.
1 comments

Not a technicality. It's like inventing a proper head of government that wasn't there.

Also, knowing German chancellors was always easy, so that fact that a machine falls behind any normal dictionary or the German Chancellor's website is poor form.

It's like a calculator getting basic addition wrong. I don't want a future full of poorly performing machines.

He was acting Chancellor. It's like saying a red apple is not an apple. It's a technicality. The fact that we have a completely reasonable explanation to why GPT-4 includes him in the list and you guys still make it sound like the AI is a complete moron is just hilarious to me.
A "red apple" is an apple that is red. An "acting officeholder" is not an officeholder who is acting, but a person who is acting as if they have the office (... with institutional support - Norton was not acting Emperor).

It's a technicality, but a valid technically and it's a technical question. I agree that it's wrong in a relatively small and surprisingly human way, but it's wrong in a way that including a red apple amongst apples is not.

There is no "Acting Chancellor", that is a poor translation of what the job is. There is only a Chancellor, not an "Acting Chancellor" - you have to trust that the Germans and their institutions kind of know who was Chancellor and who was not.

The machine is a complete moron for not being able to get basic data from basic sources right.

> Scheel became acting Chancellor

> Chancellor of Germany, Acting, 7 May 1974 – 16 May 1974

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Scheel

I know, but the German wikipedia gets it right: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Scheel

(And so does the German Chancellor: https://www.bundeskanzler.de/bk-de/kanzleramt/bundeskanzler-...)

There is zero ambiguity about who was Chancellor and who was not.

It says "geschäftsführender Bundeskanzler".

Even on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancellor_of_Germany he's listed as "Vice Chancellor Walter Scheel served as acting Chancellor from 7 May to 16 May 1974" between 4 and 5.

There's obviously some ambiguity to it considering we are two humans discussing this with a claimed discrepancy between English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia, but your conclusion is still that the AI is spitting nonsense.

So the English Wikipedia author is a moron, or is there ambiguity when describing the role in English?
> The machine is a complete moron for not being able to get basic data from basic sources right.

I'm just going to point out that you're calling an AI moronic for not getting this right when a bunch of humans are also disagreeing with you. Frankly, this really undermines your case that this is an AI failure.

What is wrong with me wanting my machines to stick to the actual definitions?