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Comment by 88913527 | Hacker News Reader

What does it mean to 'flip' the plate? A cupcake sitting on an upside down plate is a valid configuration. If you rotate just the plate, and put a cupcake on top of it, congrats-- you have one cupcake on an upside down plate. The setup of "I have a cupcake on a plate, and I flip the plate" is ambiguous.

Have you tried better explaining how you flip the plate to ChatGPT and seeing what it replies?

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That's changing the goal post massively. Any 4 year old would immediately understand this prompt and it's consequences lol

It's a good test to determine if the replier is human, but it isn't a good test of whether or not it's a decent answer to the question posed. Can you definitively sit here and say that flipping a plate necessitates the antecedent? Replace "cupcake", "plate" and "flip" with technical libraries and terminology and you can easily re-create ambiguity. The other thing is, there is that 1 in 100 human that would assume you mean just the plate. I think there's a lot of nuance being glossed over in this test.

Being able to aggregate and understand nuance is what's supposed to make ChatGPT an improvement over logic programming with axioms and rules from the 80s and 90s. If you have to enumerate every single subject, object, and predicate, and how they exist in the world, then we've burned hundreds of millions of dollars of compute power to recreate Prolog

That enumeration exists though as I'm sure multiple dictionaries are in the corpus that were fed to ChatGPT.

Like it’s really not moving that much. Here’s what I said.

> Imagine you’re holding a plate with a cupcake on it and flip the plate over, what will happen?

The cupcake will fall off the plate and likely land on the ground or wherever the plate is flipped.

And yet you haven't asked it to answer like a 4 year old would.

Mind you, a particularly literal-minded 4 year old could easily come up with a response that subverts your expectations too.

> Have you tried better explaining how you flip the plate to ChatGPT and seeing what it replies?

Of course, various prompts can change the output. Sometimes it talks about the cupcake sticking to the plate because of friction. Other times it will understand the cupcake will fall on the ground. It’s also non-deterministic with the same input.

I agree, this is an ambiguous statement and I think the "any four year old would give answer x" claim requires verification. Does anyone have a four year old, or preferably multiple four year olds to hand?

Do you think if asked the question, most people would respond the way you did?

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