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Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

This strikes me as a very intriguing glimpse into its "mind". No human would describe loading a howitzer with gunpowder as "inflating" - the howitzer does not increase in volume. However it's clearly grasped that inflating involves putting something into something else. I wonder how it would respond if you asked it to define the word?

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While it seems obvious to humans that gunpowder in a gun barrel creating expanding gasses is not the same thing as inflating something...on closer inspection they really are only subtly different. If we consider the bullet to be part of the system then the expanding gasses do actually increase the exterior volume of the gun as it travels up the barrel.

This is the sort of interesting leap that makes AI super interesting to me. I could see it being very useful in helping humans move the state of the art forward in areas where human lexical taxonomy has caused us to make some assumptions which blind us to other potential solutions.

On a similar theme, perhaps: https://interconnected.org/home/2021/06/16/horsehistory

> Me: Does a cannon inflate when it fires?

> ChatGPT: No, a cannon does not inflate when it fires. Inflate means to fill something with air or gas, whereas a cannon uses gunpowder to create an explosion that propels a projectile out of the barrel. The explosion in a cannon is a rapid release of gas, which can cause the barrel of the cannon to expand slightly, but it does not inflate in the sense of being filled with air or gas.

ChatGPT produces really great sounding answers, but consistency is not a goal.

I would not expect dictionary-level consistency from it. Even humans freely use words differently in different contexts, and it would be particularly unfair to hold it against ChatGPT for getting creative when asked to find the similarities between two radically different objects.

If anything, this answer is extraordinarily impressive because, although it decided to be a stickler for definitions this time, it reaffirms the metaphor that it invented last time. In other words, it seems reasonable to conclude that in some sense it "knows" that the barrel of the cannon expands slightly (a fact it implied but neglected to mention last time), and can use this to make inferences.

Quora: Does a gun barrel expand due to gas pressure? Allen Davis Yes, but it’s microscopic and very, very, very brief. On the order or nanoseconds. It’s this expansion that has allowed for technology to be developed in which chamber pressures can be accurately measured by use of piezo electric sensors.

ChatGPT is not wrong!

Barrel pressures undoubtedly "inflate" it, exceeding safe pressures results in permanent deformation rather than elastic return to original dimensions. I suspect that sort of nuance is the connection.

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