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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

I've been feeling exactly like this from the start. It's been very clear and very public from the very minute ChatGPT came out, that it's not concerned with the truth and simply makes things up as it goes along.

It can be fun to use for creative writing -- why not? Creative writing is about making shit up.

But for gathering information it's the opposite of what we want. Integrating it with a search engine is not just ill-advised, it's incredibly stupid.

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> Creative writing

I tried to get it to write _1984_ erotic fanfiction, which it did - but everything it spewed out was a cliche. I imagine it had read all of FFN and AO3.

> gathering information

It will probably be like the Google infoboxes and “People Also Search” entries we’ve had for a while, only more superficially coherent.

It seems like the “fake it until you make it” craze has fully taken over the AI/ML scene.

it produced cliche because of the cliche quality of the prompt. You can’t expect it to be original when you’ve asked it for a tiresome combination of genre and a canonical work.

If the outputs are boring it ain’t chatgpt at fault…

Actually, ‘cliche’ is an extremely good evaluation:

It is assessing the quality of the output as if a human had made it. Most of human writing is cliche. Expecting it to produce good output is, as you say, a matter of prompt engineering.

It would seem that, when you try too hard at being creative, chatgpt usually just loses it completely - in my experience, it often starts falling back on even worse cliches, or it stops making sense altogether. (Or it might just time out.)

I don’t know the technical details of chatgpt but other language models have a sort of randomness tuning that makes them produce more unlikely stuff. Chatgpt appears to be deliberately tuned to produce very likely, very cliche, very rote output. Great for bloggers or people who want text summaries or boring professional content, not great for creativity. It’s not a ‘fault’ of chatgpt per se but it a consequence of chatgpt’s intentions, not the user’s.

Isn‘t it kind of ironic that we complain about ChatGPT not being „creative“ enough on a thread complaining it fakes academic papers? How can the same bot be limited to only produce „facts“ and at the same time would be useful to generate great „fiction“?

But I completely agree with you: it’s often spitting out boring stuff. And yes, it makes almost everything up based on language statistics and similarities.

Perhaps, we are just in a hype cycle? There are lots of specialty tools and bots available based on GPT-3 customized for different tasks. Complaining that ChatGPT or Bing+ aren’t equally suited for every task gets tiresome. Especially if more than 2/3 of the examples simply follow the pattern „junk in - junk out“.

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