[go_elmo]

I agree - it has no direct use to the wellbeing of humans - Id say if the indirect use (e.g. humans saving time [which itself is probably the most energy intensive thing, food, housing, entertainment], gaining knowledge has to surpass the costs in Order for the investment to make sense.

[MrMcCall]

No one is 'gaining knowledge'. LLMs are just black-box tools that compute pseudo answers based upon a somewhat arbitrary set of training data. It's a crapshoot that looks good like ELIZA looks good.

[soulofmischief]

Me: Please tell me an interesting fact I don't know.

GPT: Did you know that octopuses have three hearts and their blood is blue? Two of their hearts pump blood to the gills, while the third pumps it to the rest of the body. Interestingly, when an octopus swims, the heart that supplies blood to the body actually stops beating, which is one reason they prefer crawling to swimming—it’s less stressful on their system! Their blue blood is due to hemocyanin, a copper-based molecule that is more efficient than hemoglobin in cold, low-oxygen environments.

Me, after researching and corroborating each claim, which you should always do for any source: Wow, I didn't know some of that! Thanks for sharing!

---

This was no different than googling "interesting facts about octopuses" and skimming the first few links. And if I'd done that, you wouldn't be claiming that I didn't "gain knowledge". But by all means, commence the mental gymnastics that "prove" I haven't gained knowledge. Perhaps because I had to corroborate the information? No, you should always do that for anything. But I'm eager to hear your explanation for what really happened.

[MrMcCall]

That's a lot of energy used to save you going through the octopus section of Wikipedia.

If only there was a test to find out if the person using it was a moron. Then it might be useful. Of course, Dunning-Kruger dictates that no one using such a system would ask such an important question. Also, the world is obviously well short of the necessary training data.

I've got yer real intelligence right here, dude. Ask away. I even know how to tell you that your question is a waste of time.

[soulofmischief]

Amazing, you chose to move goalposts. No longer are you bothering to defend your original claim that no knowledge was gained. But now, your claim is "you could have just used another source"! That's great, thank you.

I can't tell if your deliberately pretending like I didn't give you a toy example or if you truly think I sit around querying animal facts all day.

> I even know how to tell you that your question is a waste of time.

The only waste of time has been attempting to engage with you intellectually, when all you're really interested in doing is "proving" that you're right. But if you're just going to keep moving goalposts we can just end this discussion here.