Drew KadelMy daughter, who has had a degree in computer science for 25 years, posted this observation about ChatGPT on Facebook. It's the best description I've seen:
Nate Gaylinn@DrewKadel Love this. We want so badly for ChatGPT to produce answers, opinions, and art, but all it can do is make plausible simulations of those things. As a species, we've never had to deal with that before.
ani betts@ngaylinn @DrewKadel to be fair, most people on the Internet given a question, write the right answer rather than everyone consistently writing the same wrong answer!
(* For most things, I'm sure there are several compelling counterexamples)
@anizocani @DrewKadel Oh, totally. Often the most statistically likely response is also the correct response. Just... not always.
Maltimore@ngaylinn @anizocani @DrewKadel
I wish more people would understand this.
That's why I really dislike the take that it's "just fancy autocomplete". In order to have a *really* good autocomplete, you'd have to in one way or another internalize much of the world's knowledge. So, "just fancy autocomplete" is really not the witty criticism some think it is.
Mark Otway@maltimore
The reason we call it spicy autocomplete is because it is just a prediction model on the stuff it's ingested. What you seem to miss is that we already had all this, with Google. All LLMs have done is make it feel like something is answering, instead of being honest and returning results that match a search query.
@markotway @maltimore @ngaylinn @DrewKadel babe. it's two years later. you've been in a coma ever since the accident.