[Rinzler89]

What does GPT consider being "average wealth and income". Statistics? Or biased weights from anecdotes he formed on the anecdotes he scraped off the internet on how wealthy people say the feel?

Would be cool to know how LLMs shape their opinions.

[LeoPanthera]

You can just ask it, you know.

GPT-4o:

“Average wealth and income” can vary significantly by region and context. However, in the United States, as a rough benchmark, the median household income is around $70,000 per year. Wealth, which includes assets such as savings, property, and investments minus debts, is harder to pinpoint but median net worth for U.S. households is approximately $100,000. These figures provide a general idea of what might be considered “average” in terms of wealth and income."

[lambdaxyzw]

I like that it immediately assumed the US, even though nothing in your question suggested it. I love that all LLMs have a strong US centric bias.

Btw I'm not personally a lawyer, but I've heard that GPT is especially prone to mixing laws across the borders - for example you ask a law question in language X, and get a response that uses a law from a country Y - and it's extremally convincing doing that (unless you're a lawyer, I guess).

[LeoPanthera]

ChatGPT has user-customizable "instructions", and mine are set to tell it where I live. Any user can do the same, so that it will not make incorrect assumptions for you.

[d3m0t3p]

You might increase the probability of getting a correct answer for your region, but imo you decrease your awareness to allucination. Overall you can still get a wrong answer

[fjdjshsh]

This is my experience with Hackernews. If the comment doesn't specify the country, it's an American talking about the USA

[LordDragonfang]

I mean, to be fair, if you're speaking English to it, the most likely possibility is that you're inside the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

I know there's a lot of complaints about things being US-centric, but the US is a very large country.

[ordersofmag]

Well, except the number of English speakers outside the US is much larger than inside the US (as per the wikipedia page you point to) by 5 to 1. Granted many folks are speaking it as their 2nd (or nth) language. But when you take into account the limited set of languages supported by ChatGPT one could reasonably assume English-speaking (typing) users of ChatGPT are from outside the U.S. as non-U.S. folks are in the majority of 'folks for whom english would be their first option when interacting with ChatGPT'. Even if you only count India, Nigeria and Pakistan.

Though of course OpenAI can tell (frequently, roughly) where folks are coming from geographically and could (does?) take that into account.

[duskwuff]

> but the US is a very large country.

Indeed - the US is a very large country, and consists of over 50 different jurisdictions, each with their own slightly different laws. An answer to a legal question which is correct in one state will often be subtly incorrect in another, and completely wrong in yet another.

[Rinzler89]

>You can just ask it, you know.

But my question will not be part of the context of that conversation.

[LeoPanthera]

Mine was. I asked it the first question, first.

[Rinzler89]

The original conversation I mean, of the grandparent. Me starting an identical conversation will not guarantee an identical context.