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Comment by __MatrixMan__ | Hacker News Reader

95% of what I search for, I can independently confirm once I have it in hand. For the other 5%, I avoid ChatGPT.

Reminds me of Knoll’s law of media accuracy:

“everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true, except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge”.

Humans are pretty good bullshitters too!

Bing generating snippets of text from websites isn't going to generate hallucinations like you think it is.

It totally would, if Bing doesn't return relevant results.

I've asked BingGPT about myself and it gave me three answers. One was more or less on-point (it found my linkedin profile), and the other two were hallucinations. What happened was Bing found two unrelated pages and GPT has tried and failed to make sense of them.

Either that, or I am a prince whose name means "goose" in Polish.

Newspapers print their errata though. Does ChatGPT ever admit to making a mistake?

It can pick up on inconsistencies, especially when pointed out, and can say it was wrong, and try to reconcile the information.

Errata are extremely rare. Gross misrepresentations and errors are not, unfortunately.

All the time, but only when prompted. You have to have a conversation with it and provide more detail which exposes the flaws in its previous answers, then it will happily apologize for its mistakes. (For me, this usually looks like me pasting an error message that its code caused.)

I really hope they find a way to have it apply context from future conversations such that when it learns the error of its ways it emails you a retraction, but that's probably a ways out because humans can't be trusted to not weaponize such a feature into sending spam.

But it doesn't learn its error, that's the whole problem. It only responds to 'accusations' from user in the most common way, which is 'apologies-like'.

The weight of phrases like "you are wrong" is in fact so strong, that it fools the chatGPT to apologize for its 'mistakes' even in the scenarios where its text was obviously correct - like telling it 2+2 doesn't equal 4

Well yeah, it's an imperfect tool, and you have to treat it as such. Probably there's a lot to be discovered about how to use it most effectively. I just don't find that it's more problematic than the other tools in my box.

Sure, grep has never flat out lied to me the way chatGPT does, but it's a statistical model, not a co-worker, so I don't feel betrayed, I just feel... cautioned. It keeps you on your toes, which isn't such a bad state to be in.

Problematically, they're much better bullshitters than ChatGPT. And if you used Google to find them, they're probably either selling you something, or you had to navigate a minefield of people who are in order to find them.

It’s great too when you don’t know exactly what to search for, especially for acronyms.

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