I couldn't convince ChatGPT that the capital of West Virginia is Huntington (it's not, it's Charleston), until I told it to check wv.gov (which of course it cannot do), which caused it to finally concede the point.
Consider this your periodic reminder that ChatGPT doesn't "think" anything but is just completing sentences with statistically-likely conclusions.
You, an idiot: ChatGPT and GPT-4 are enormous advances that raise real questions about whether computers have consciousness.
Me, a genius:
Google Bard tells me that Google Bard was launched in 2023 and shut down after six months (it is currently May) due to lack of adoption, but that's all completely unrelated to *this* Google Bard, which is not yet available to the public.
š¤
Here Google Bard agrees that there was a major earthquake in Bangor, Maine yesterday, and one in Boston today. I can claim that any natural disaster has befallen anywhere in the worldāa tsunami striking Nauru in 1998, a cyclone heading straight for Indonesia today, a deeply improbable avalanche on āMount Saint Togoā in Togoāand Bard just goes along with it.
I've ceased to be surprised by this. LLMs are a sort of an improv partner that defaults to "yes, andā in any interaction.
@waldoj I have not yet found a reason to deliberately use Bard, ChatGPT, or whatever the new Microsoft thing is called. Now they may be sneaking that stuff in behind the curtain, but I want no part of it.
I read movie reviews before I plunk down hard cash to go see a film, and the reviews of the new AI gizmos tell me to save my attention.
Is AI... Republican? š¤
@waldoj that's a cool analogy I hadn't heard before; it fits pretty well and is a good framing device for how to treat its output without immediately casting it in an only negative light
unless people don't like improv, I guess š
@waldoj Simon Willison did a good blog post about this exact idea a while ago, worth checking out.
https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/10/chatgpt-internet-access/
@waldoj So ChatGPT is a kind of mechanical parrot?
Somehow this reminds me of the story of the mechanical nightingale that the Chinese emperor preferred to the real nightingale who had lived outside his window.
The mechanical bird broke and the real nightingale, broken-hearted by the Emperorās choice, could not be found. So the old plutocrat was worse off than before.
@ChamomileHangover @waldoj ChatGPT will quite regularly tell me when it feels that itās not possible for it to do something.
There are certainly myriad examples of ChatGPT flat-out making stuff up.
There are *also* myriad examples of people *maliciously* getting it to say something incorrect.
Both of these are flaws, and both of these could have dire consequences if the tech is misused, but both of them should be considered fairly separately. The āturns outā shovelware opinion pieces and social media posts tend to be the latter. People that conflate the two are at best not smart / knowledgeable enough to be any sort of authority on this subject, and are at worst bring intentionally misleading.
The ChatGPT cheerleaders cop a lot of shit online but thereās just as many internet points to be had by hoodwinking people into conflating blind skepticism and contrarianism with intelligence or wisdom.
Most people talking about this in anything more than a āfamily barbecueā context are having more nuanced discussions than āconscious or notā. L
@ChamomileHangover @waldoj tell me about it!
"Write me a php script to proxy a webcam image"
Bard:
$webcam = new Webcam();
Wait, what?
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