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Comment by ornornor | Hacker News Reader

How can you trust it though? It notoriously hallucinates and makes things up in an otherwise plausible way, and the only way to tell is to already be knowledgeable about what you’re asking about… which makes the whole exercise useless.

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There are more situations than you might think where the correct answer is easy to verify but hard to find. If you are building something concrete you can just check if it works. If you are trying to understand something, it can be that ChatGPT makes the pieces fall into place and you can verify that you really understand now because everything adds up logically.

I recently asked it to provide the meaning of a song. I gave it the artist and the song. It responded with a thoughtful(ish) explanation of the potential meaning of the song. I then asked it if it could share the lyrics of the song with me because some of the quotes it referenced weren't in the song. It provided lyrics that weren't the song I was asking about at all. I then asked what song it was, it apologized and it told me the artist and title of the song... I looked up that artist and title and it was also not the song that it provided the lyrics/meaning to. Ultimately, I determined that it just made up lyrics to a song. It was very apologetic.

Sounds like turbo aka the free (and dumb) 3.5 version. GPT-4 would deliver better results with less hallucination but if you want it to really work well you should include the lyrics in the prompt as context. It's not a search engine, if you want that then use Bing.

Q: How can You trust StackOverlfow, Reddit, or anything on the Internet? The stuff I read online is often wrong.

A: Check it yourself.

Well, you still can't trust everything, but voting mechanisms tend to help filter out some of the BS.

Voting mechanisms sometimes help drown the worst comments. Often voting doesn’t help the best comments float to the top, because the best comments are often replies to other low-vote comments.

Dan Luu writes insightfully about HN comments here: https://danluu.com/hn-comments/

I asked it how to scroll to an element taking into account a fixed header. It helpfully described the `offsetTop` parameter to `Element.scrollIntoView`. Only problem is, that parameter doesn’t exist.

I tested it, from scratch in a complete different context.

You could just test it

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