Hacker News Reader

Comment by motoboi | Hacker News Reader

GPT is not a search engine for the human knowledge.

It's a large language model.

The difference is that a search engine tries to find your query in a database of entries while a language model will _produce_ text that is coherent with a given piece of text (a prompt).

There is a hidden initial prompt given to it with every prompt you give. It's inserted before your text. It tells the model to produce text in a manner of an virtual assistant that answer questions.

So it's more like role playing. The produced text will be coherent with a question an answers text. Even with the answers are not "real"

View on HN

In principle, you're right. But many people have been toying around with it since its demo release and many have touted "it's better than google" or "google is fu*ed" and so on with regards to using it as a kind of search engine. So what happens is that many more people start to use it as a search engine, disregarding entirely what it was made for. Then they complain when they can't get their hammer to place a screw without breaking their table (:

This has been driving me crazy on twitter lately and it really just goes to show how little scrutiny many people give to work that "looks correct" and matches whatever goal / output they were expecting. On so many of the "college kids will never write another essay" posts if you dig into the comments there is usually at least one subject matter expert who read the essay pointing out a bunch of errors and poor reasoning. It's very frustrating that people refuse to dig even a little beneath the surface on these things.

Guess what, actual school essays also tend to have a bunch of errors and poor reasoning... especially those by kids who would be inclined to cheat rather than write their own essay.

Sure, you can nitpick for errors, but do you really think something like this wouldn't cut it at school? We are not talking about writing technical papers or laws, but about writing at a relatively novice level...

> Write a school essay on why you should never order pizza with pineapple.

> Pizza is a beloved food enjoyed by people all over the world, but one topping that has been the subject of much debate is pineapple. While some people argue that pineapple adds a sweet and tropical flavor to the pizza, others believe that it is a misguided and unacceptable topping that ruins the inherent goodness of the pizza. In this essay, I will argue that pineapple should never be ordered on a pizza, and explain why it is an abomination in the eyes of true pizza lovers.

First and foremost, pineapple does not belong on pizza because it goes against the fundamental principles of pizza making. Pizza is a delicate balance of flavors, with the savory and slightly tangy sauce, the rich and salty cheese, and the crisp and chewy crust all coming together to create a perfect symphony of flavor. Adding pineapple to the mix disrupts this balance, and the sweetness of the fruit clashes with the other flavors in an unpleasant and unappetizing way.

Furthermore, pineapple does not have the same texture as the other toppings commonly found on pizza. The traditional pizza toppings, such as pepperoni, mushrooms, and olives, have a firm and slightly chewy texture that complements the crust and the sauce. Pineapple, on the other hand, is soft and mushy, and it can make the pizza soggy and unappealing. The different textures of the pineapple and the other toppings can also be off-putting, and can make the pizza difficult to eat.

In addition to the flavor and texture issues, pineapple on pizza is simply a gross and unappetizing concept. The combination of pineapple and pizza is unnatural and bizarre, and it goes against everything that pizza stands for. Pizza is a savory and satisfying food, meant to be enjoyed with friends and family, and adding pineapple to it just makes it weird and unappealing.

In conclusion, pineapple should never be ordered on a pizza. It goes against the fundamental principles of pizza making, it has a texture that does not complement the other toppings, and it is simply gross and unappetizing.

At the high school level especially?

I just asked it to write an essay on the Battle of Agincourt. Perfectly serviceable prose that looks accurate to me. I'm sure I could flesh it out using some follow-on questions. What were the causes? Describe the reign of Henry V. Describe the English tactics and why they won. Etc.

Add a few convincing references to any of the doubtless many books on the subject for sale on Amazon and I could have a perfectly adequate high school or maybe even low-level college essay in an hour tops.

(And I did run some random sentences through Google looking for exact matches and didn't find them.)

The Battle of Agincourt was a significant event in English and French history, as it was a major victory for the English army against the French during the Hundred Years' War. The battle took place on October 25, 1415, near the town of Agincourt in northern France.

The English army, led by King Henry V, was vastly outnumbered by the French forces, which were estimated to be around 30,000 soldiers compared to the English army of just 6,000. Despite the odds, the English were able to emerge victorious thanks to their superior tactics and weaponry.

The English army was composed of mostly longbowmen, who were able to shoot arrows with great accuracy and power. The French, on the other hand, relied heavily on heavily-armored knights, who were less effective in the muddy and wet conditions of the battlefield. The English were also able to take advantage of the narrow front of the battlefield, which allowed them to focus their firepower and overwhelm the French forces.

The battle lasted for several hours and was marked by intense hand-to-hand combat. In the end, the English emerged victorious, with the French suffering heavy casualties. The English lost only a few hundred soldiers, while the French lost thousands.

The victory at Agincourt was a major turning point in the Hundred Years' War, as it weakened the French army and boosted English morale. It also cemented King Henry V's reputation as a great military leader and helped to solidify English control over parts of France.

The Battle of Agincourt is still remembered today as a key event in English and French history, and it continues to be celebrated in popular culture, such as in Shakespeare's play "Henry V." Overall, it was a significant military victory for the English and a crucial moment in the history of the Hundred Years' War.

I'm answering both you and the previous one in the chain. I used huggingface's OpenAI detector[0], the pizza example is detected as fake with 99.98% probability, whereas the Battle of Agincourt text is also reported as fake with over 99% probability. I don't have any example at hand of how much "real" text on these topics to try and see what that model detects, but up to this point[1] this text is reported as 99% real. You can play and see how much % it assigns to different examples.[2]

[0] https://huggingface.co/openai-detector

[1] I had to cut somewhere to copy and paste into the detector, so [1] is the cutting point

[2] My whole response was still detected as 99.98% real, and copy-pasting the Agincourt bit at the end still reported as 99.98% real. However, moving it to the start (having my answer as a last paragraph) made it detect as 97.71% real. Deleting only "huggingface's" balanced it as 54% real. You can play around with the demo to test different variations of any text you analyze with it.

Very interesting, I didn't know that detector. But making small local changes, it's easy to make the probability of "fake" go down, while still benefitting from the automatically-written essay. As long as students have access to the same tools as teachers, it will be easy for them to get away with automatically generated essays.

You play with ChatGPT a bit and you do start to see certain patterns in the results. So I guess if you train on the outputs it gets relatively straightforward to recognize other examples that are just cut and pasted from the ChatGPT--even if, in isolation, it seems like something a person might write.

The "weird" (or "funny" or whatever you want to call it) thing is that the detector I linked was originally made for GPT-2, but still works reasonably well for GPT-3 (and derived) output.

I agree with you. People treating it like a search engine will be up to a rough wakening.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com