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by jerf 424 days ago
I haven't tried shopping with ChatGPT. Is there any good reason to believe we aren't there already? It's not like they're going to program the chatbot to spew out all the money it has gotten for ads, and the recent paper demonstrating how the reasoning the LLM claimed for how it did math bore no resemblance whatsoever to how it actually did the math means it'll be plenty easy for it to give you endless ramblings about how it is just picking the best product when in fact it's just following its RHLF-trained paid brand preferences.

Besides, even the mighty power of LLMs and RHLF and all our AI tech probably can't overcome the fact that the input data is already so massaged that even if you did set out to create a hypothetical LLM chatbot that was 100% on the side of the user, and not the person actually running it, you would probably not be able to succeed.

1 comments

Unfortunately you and or the AI never escape having to make a decision based on probability.

Coming back with a single product choice is probably always risky. Coming back with a pro/con list of choices might be slightly better if the number of choices to return is larger than the manipulated choices. If you look for cordless drills and all the choices are black and decker then it's obvious. That said when it comes to a mix of paid products get its more difficult.