Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lambdaxyzw 740 days ago
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).
3 comments
LeoPanthera 740 days ago
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.
link
d3m0t3p 740 days ago
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
link
fjdjshsh 740 days ago
This is my experience with Hackernews. If the comment doesn't specify the country, it's an American talking about the USA
link
LordDragonfang 740 days ago
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.

link
ordersofmag 740 days ago
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.

link
duskwuff 740 days ago
> 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.

link