Arvind NarayananDec 6, 2022

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined bullshit as speech intended to persuade without regard for the truth. By this measure, ChatGPT is the greatest bullshitter ever. Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained to produce plausible text, not true statements. So using ChatGPT in its current form would be a bad idea for applications like education or answering health questions.

Despite this, there are three areas where LLMs can be extremely useful: https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/chatgpt-is-a-bullshit-generator-but

ChatGPT is a bullshit generator. But it can still be amazingly useful

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined bullshit as speech that is intended to persuade without regard for the truth. By this measure, OpenAI’s new chatbot ChatGPT is the greatest bullshitter ever. Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained to produce

AI Snake Oil
Show threadArvind NarayananDec 6, 2022

Here are three kinds of tasks where @sayashk and I think ChatGPT can shine, despite its inability to discern truth in general:

1. Tasks where it’s easy for the user to check if the bot’s answer is correct, such as debugging help.

2. Tasks where truth is irrelevant, such as writing fiction.

3. Tasks for which there does in fact exist a subset of the training data that acts as a source of truth, such as language translation.

https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/chatgpt-is-a-bullshit-generator-but

ChatGPT is a bullshit generator. But it can still be amazingly useful

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined bullshit as speech that is intended to persuade without regard for the truth. By this measure, OpenAI’s new chatbot ChatGPT is the greatest bullshitter ever. Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained to produce

AI Snake Oil
Show threadJonatan HildénDec 6, 2022
@randomwalker @sayashk
This sort of tool will be very useful for making things like regular expressions, which are annoyingly difficult to remember and write correctly for (most) humans.
Show threadJonatan Hildén
@randomwalker @sayashk a thing which I haven’t seen discussed much is the model’s performance in languages other than English. It can generate text in a small language like Finnish as well, but the level of prose is an uncanny hybrid of third-grader and machine translation.
Dec 6, 2022 at 9:46pmWeb