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Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

Joe Rogan has made tons of money off talking without providing factual information. Hollywood has also made tons of money off movies "inspired by real events" that hallucinate key facts relevant to the movie's plot and characters. There's a huge market for infotainment that is "inspired by facts" but doesn't even try to be accurate.

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You listen to Joe Rogan with the idea that this is a normal dude talking not an expert beyond martial arts and comedy.

A person who uses ChatGPT must have the understanding that it's not like Google search. The layman, however, has no idea that ChatGPT can give coherent incorrect information and treats the information as true.

Most people won't use it for infotainment and OpenAI will try its best to downplay the hallucination as fine print if it goes fully mainstream like google search.

Give people more credit. If you're using an AI these days, you have to know it hallucinates sometimes. There's even a warning about it when you log in.

I'll give tech people credit, but non-tech people I'm not so sure. A good example is the cookie permissions or app permissions. A great number of non-tech people don't even know or care what they mean.

You gotta stop bucketting people like that. People may not know terms "cookie permissions" or "app permissions" but they sure as fuck understand the idea of user tracking or handing a company access to your mic/camera. And to say they don't care about these things is simply not true.

There's a contingent of the population passing videos around on tiktok genuinely concerned that AIs have a mind of their own

no I will not give the public credit, most people have no grounding to discern wtf a language model is and what it's doing, all they know is computers didn't use to talk and now they do

Which people? If you are software engineers or AI researchers, sure. Otherwise, it probably won't matter to you.

Wait until you learn about the mainstream media.

For a certain demographic and generation, Joe Rogan is the mainstream media.

Rogan is literally the largest podcast on the Spotify. It's the definition of mainstream.

If that’s your benchmark, I don’t want your AI.

OpenAI isn't marketing ChatGPT as, "infotainment."

now that you mention it, a big "for entertainment purposes only" banner like they use to have on all the psychic commercials on tv would not be inappropriate. it's incredible that LLMs are being marketed as general purpose assistants with a tiny asterisk, "may contain inaccuracies" like it's a walnut contamination

Not sure what's being incredible here. GPT-4 is a stellar general-purpose assistant, that shines when you stop treating it as encyclopedia, and start using it as an assistant. That is, give it tasks, like summarizing, or writing code, or explaining code, or rewriting prose. Ask for suggestions, ideas. You can do that to great effect, even when your requests are underspecified and somewhat confused, and it still works.

I just wish they were advertised for generative tasks and not retrieval tasks. It's not intelligence, it's not reasoning, it's text transformation.

It seems to be able to speak on history, sometimes it's even right, so there's a use case that people expect from it.

FYI I've used GPT4 and Claude 2 for hundreds of conversations, I understand what its good and bad at; I don't trust that the general public is being given a realistic view.

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