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Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

I hope either the information you needed was just personal curiosity or that you verified with sources what ChatGPT was reporting. The hallucination problem is still terrible with no real solutions from OpenAI apart from "we're working on it."

IMHO, fully cosigning that google search has gotten worse and the AI shit is only going to make that even worse, using ChatGPT as a replacement feels crazy to me. Like yeah, Google gets it wrong sometimes, sure, but ChatGPT just makes shit up. Is a dumbass better or worse than a confident liar? Guess that's up to the user to decide.

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False information problem is terrible as well on the internet. And if I were to guess based on usage, GPT generates an order of magnitude less error than a random reddit or stackoverflow or quora answer.

Reading posts like this I'm reminded of the teachers who told me not to cite wikipedia because it's not reliable who 20 years later are spouting whatever right wing nonsense is the flavour of the month on facebook.

Close enough is good enough. It doesn't need to be perfect, it needs to just not be catastrophically wrong.

But many chatgpt hallucinations are catastrophically wrong. For example when querying for things related to advanced scientific subjects in physics and medicine for starters from my own experience.

I really want to give this a pass but the worst thing is that you can't really see where it turns from correct to incorrect, like you would usually pick up with a human teacher or peer when you start to get a feeling they really don't know what they're talking about. ChatGPT will gladly keep hallucinating references and reasonings that sound superficially plausible until you look them up, because that's what it's trained to output..

If they could just find a way to cut it off when it starts to become too unsure, it would be a big improvement.

I love that in our current moment if you will, that Luddism has been reduced to a binary, with zero nuance whatsoever. Either you are FOR every introduction of technology, every automation, every convenience, every new product regardless of it's demonstrated, documented deleterious effects, or you're an extremist boomer who refuses to learn email. There's no in-between at all.

I recall a time when a popular joke amongst tech people was that a tech enthusiast was someone who had every new smart home accessory and every new gadget and used them all, and a tech engineer was someone who had nothing more advanced in his house than a laser printer and he kept a gun in the same room in case it ever made a noise he didn't recognize.

I guess we're just more enthusiastic than we used to be. I like my smart switches, but I don't like the notion of all human knowledge being only accessible to me through the filter of a word generator. If that makes me a Luddite, then Luddite I am.

I apply the Gell-Mann Amnesia test to my sources. Wikipedia mostly lines up with what I know. ChatGPT is usually batshit insane

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