How can you tell if ChatGPT is lying to you and what you're learning is total hogwash?
You take about low stakes but fiction is a massive industry. In making what is essentially Star Wars fanfic with ChatGPT, I’ve realized why AI was such a contentious point for the recent writers strikes.
I’ll just pick a topic and then ask for a summary and then ask clarifying questions.
Podcasts tend to be relatively terrible, accuracy wise. If the alternative is learning from ChatGPT, your odds of getting correct information is substantially higher.
Podcasts are entertaining! But not where I would go to learn anything.
At one point I came across this series of "are CJK languages related" questions in Quora with cached ChatGPT responses[1], all grammatically correct and very natural, largely turboencabulators, sometimes contradicting even within a single response.
Podcasters? They're not _this_ inconsistent.
Even worse, I think they actually prime it with answers already posted on the thread, or even just related threads. For example, one of the answers to the first question mentions the same Altaic root as ChatGPTs answer, and I've found multiple people that are seeing their own rephrased answers in the response.
If you preprompt ChatGPT with questionable data, then the answer quality will be massively degraded. I've noticed many times now that Bing will rephrase incorrect information or construct a very shallow summary out of unrelated articles when internet searches are allowed, but is able to generate a cohesive and detailed summary when they're disabled.
Throwing random answers - some contradicting each other and some talking about subtly different aspects of the topic - into a session without further guidance just isn't a great idea.
My problem is not that GPTs are too often wrong, it's that they always prioritize syntax over facts since they are _language_ models.
The sentence "Colorless green ideas" always make more sense to LLM than "Water is wet", simply because the latter is syntactically invalid, and that would be problematic for many use cases including Podcast replacement. Sometimes us humans want AI to say "water is definitively wet", and that has been attempted by forcing LLM to accept that factoids are more syntactically correct, but that isn't a solution and it's still an architectural problem for these pseudo-AGI apps.
There are podcasts for almost every topic where experts are present. Journalists, Scientists, Activists, Researchers etc. can be heard in podcasts, I don't really see why it's generally a mistake to listen to a podcast to learn important information.
During the pandemic my partner was attending university from home and listening to their professors via MS Teams, these classes were also recorded so that they could listen to them at a later point. In some ways that's just a professional podcast.
And depending on the class and the institution, I may still trust ChatGPT more than what gets taught.
There are tons of podcasts involving experts talking about their field of expertise, how can it be a mistake to listen to such podcasts to gather information?
There is no “sort by accuracy” button in any podcasting app, nor are they peer reviewed.
Furthermore, podcasts are not a review of the body of knowledge on a subject; they’re often a complete layperson interviewing a single member of a given field, at best. Almost never do the views of any individual actually represent any field as a whole.
So once we’ve thrown out the concept of accuracy and completeness, ChatGPT fares exceedingly well in comparison. You’d do much worse than ChatGPT for idle conversation level accuracy.
Yes, they have.
Setting aside the many individuals who currently lead their fields, history is filled with groundbreaking heretics.
https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/mavericks-...
You, most importantly, are complete garbage at telling the difference between a crackpot and an innovator in a field you know nothing about.
Trying to drink unpasteurized knowledge will infect you a lot more quickly than it will enlighten you.
It's not censorship, propaganda and official disinformation, it's "Pasteurized Knowledge®"
That's what flat-eartherism is, that's what jewish space lasers are. The argument you're giving is a tacit endorsement of that kind of "inquiry", which for reasonable people is unconscionable.
In the beginning people were skeptical but over time, as Wikipedia matured, the answer has become (I think): Don't blindly trust what you read on Wikipedia but in most cases it's sufficiently accurate as a starting point for further investigation. In fact, I would argue people do trust Wikipedia to a rather high degree these days, sometimes without questioning. Or at least I know I do, whether I want to or not, because I'm so used to Wikipedia being correct.
I'm wondering what this means for the future of LLMs: Will we also start trusting them more and more?
This argument is so dishonest its infuriating.
The main thing I’m getting from this discussion is that a lot more very smart people seem to have deluded themselves into thinking knowledge is objective or “locked in” than I had initially realized. The desire for certainty is an extremely human thing, but it’s a dead end, intellectually.
with chatgpt i don't know it's "experience" or "education" on a topic and it has no social accountability motivating it to make sure it gets things right so i can't estimate how much i should trust it in the same way.
The paranoia around hallucination is wildly overblown, especially given the low stakes of this context.
It’s very good at things like that. Go down a whole Roman Empire rabbit hole, have fun with it!
This is what an idle afternoon talking to ChatGPT is about, not trying to get it to do your job for you.
Nero was a Roman Emperor from 54 to 68 AD, known for his controversial and extravagant reign. He was the last emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Here are some key points about his life and rule:
1. *Early Life and Ascension*: Nero was born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus in 37 AD. He was adopted by his great-uncle, Emperor Claudius, becoming Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus. He ascended to the throne at the age of 17, after Claudius' death, which many historians believe Nero's mother, Agrippina the Younger, may have orchestrated.
2. *Reign*: Nero's early reign was marked by influence from his mother, tutors, and advisors, notably the philosopher Seneca and the Praetorian Prefect Burrus. During this period, he was seen as a competent ruler, initiating public works and negotiating peace with Parthia.
3. *Infamous Acts*: As Nero's reign progressed, he became known for his self-indulgence, cruelty, and erratic behavior. He is infamously associated with the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD. While it's a myth that he "fiddled while Rome burned" (the fiddle didn't exist then), he did use the disaster to rebuild parts of the city according to his own designs and erected the opulent Domus Aurea (Golden House).
4. *Persecution of Christians*: Nero is often noted for his brutal persecution of Christians, whom he blamed for the Great Fire. This marked one of the first major Roman persecutions of Christians.
5. *Downfall and Death*: Nero's reign faced several revolts and uprisings. In 68 AD, after losing the support of the Senate and the military, he was declared a public enemy. Facing execution, he committed suicide, reportedly uttering, "What an artist dies in me!"
6. *Legacy*: Nero's reign is often characterized by tyranny, extravagance, and debauchery in historical and cultural depictions. However, some historians suggest that his negative portrayal was partly due to political propaganda by his successors.
His death led to a brief period of civil war, known as the Year of the Four Emperors, before the establishment of the Flavian dynasty.
Does this make sense? Notice how little it matters if my understanding of Nero is complete or entirely accurate; I’m getting a general gist of the topic, and it seems like a good time.
Put more simply: I would rather have no information than incorrect information.
I work in a field of tech history that is under-represented on wikipedia, but represented well in other areas on the internet and the web. It is incredibly easy to get chatGPT to hallucinate information and give incorrect answers when asking very basic questions about this field, whereas this field is talked about and covered quite accurately from the early days of usenet all the way up to modern social media. Until the quality of training data can be improved, I can never use chatgpt for anything relating to this field, as I cannot trust its output.
In life, you exceptionally rarely have “enough” information to make a decision at the critical moment. You would rather know nothing than know some things? That’s not how the world works, not how discovery works, and not even how knowledge works. The things you think are certain are a lot less so than you apparently believe.
i think maybe your earlier comment was about the average trustworthiness of all podcasts vs the same for all gpt responses. i would probably side with gpt4 in that context.
however, there are plenty of situations where the comparison is between a podcast from the best human in the world at something and gpt which might have less training data or maybe the risks for the topic aren't eating an uncooked turkey but learning cpr wrong or having an airbag not deploy
No one person is particularly worth listening to individually, and as a podcast??? Good lord no.
LLMs beat podcasts when it comes to, “random exploration of an unfamiliar topic”, every single time.
The real issue here is that you trust podcasts so completely, by the way, not that ChatGPT is some oracle of knowledge. More generally, a skill all people need to develop is the ability to explore an idea without accepting whatever you first find. If you’re spending an afternoon talking with ChatGPT about a topic, you should be able to A) use your existing knowledge to give a rough first-pass validation of the information you’re getting, which will catch most hallucinations out of the gate, as they’re rarely subtle, and B) take what you learn with a hefty grain of salt, as if you’re hearing it from a stranger in a bar.
This is an important skill, and absolutely applies to both podcasts and LLMs. Honestly why such profound deference to podcasts in particular?
That said there are a few topics I’ve asked where I know enough to know (I had a grad degree in US history) and I’ve found it’s about on par with what you’d dig up through Google.
I’ve also found recently that it’ll state when it can’t equivocally say something. Or, in some cases, when I have misunderstood something and repeat it back incorrectly to try and clarify, it’ll correct me. 6 months ago, over text interface, it never would have corrected me: it almost always assumed the user was right and went along with it.
But again - it’s not like I’m fact checking Frank at the water cooler (or, often anyway). It’s shooting the shit and it’s great for that.
If my mom asks it questions about my work industry, they are vague and high level enough that chatgpt is very accurate in it's answers.
If I ask it probing questions I care about my industry it hallucinates or fails to grasp key terminology.
So, if I was OP, likely asking it broad questions about things I know very little about is quite safe. Going too far down a rabbit hole to something super specific I would want to verify on Wikipedia.
Perhaps you're one of the people who think they're above it, and hence haven't developed that ability?
In the future I see two big risks with the tech, approach and ownership:
1) short term, SEO is going to move into trying to influence the LLMs to push products unwittingly. Companies will be getting great offers from shady SEO outfits promising to make their products the default answers for broad questions?
2) mid term, now that all sense and pretence of safety and greater good are gone from openai, openai will be working out how to insert and see ads in the results? There will probably even be product placement in the results coming from the paid-for in-ms-office version.
No actually, you can pay people to lie less and prove that they do so. We pay $20/month for ChatGPT to straight up lie to us and we know we need to sort it out.
ChatGPT lies to me but only in a specific way.
2. No, ChatGPT is borderline schizophrenic. I trust a human and team of writers and producers to be more consistent in their bias and truthiness outright than a do a program that's trained on Reddit / Twitter and has almost no grounding.