What do people ask chatbots? It's a lot of sex and homework

The main thing I use ChatGPT for at this point is tip-of-my-tongue type questions... "What's the name for when you..." or "What's the word for...". I didn't see that in any of the examples they listed, but it is the one category of question ChatGPT has never failed to nail for me, and basically the only thing I trust it to do anymore without double-checking its responses, or feeling like I've just wasted my time.

I have a funny anecdote from a colleague of mine who is a university professor. She showed me some hand-written answers of students on a closed-book, no-device test. The question was something to the effect of, "if I had voltage source of 5 volts across a resistor of 1 ohm, how many watts of heat would be generated? show your work".

The intended answer was to simply write the equation for ohm's law: I=V/R, P=IV => 5 volts / 1 ohm = 5A, P = 5A*5V = 25 watts (or something like that). Several students wrote their response in this way: "To find how many watts of heat are generated given a voltage and a resistance, you need to use ohm's law which is I=V/R. ... (about a paragraph of hand written text) ... in summary, the heat generated by a voltage source of 5 volts across a resistor of 1 ohm would be 25 watts"

I would have thought that the students were sneaking their phones in and copying results straight from chatGPT except she said the devices were left at the door and it was a strict pencil and paper test. It's remarkable to me how much text they wrote to answer such a simple question, and how much their impression of a response to a question is modeled after what ChatGPT does...

The headline doesn't match the article all that well. It talks about sex, but that isn't even a category on their chart later in the article, except possibly under the "jailbreak" category at 4%. I do suspect that the number would have been much higher if the bot did not have NSFW filters in place.

A bit surprising how this text only bot was used to generate prompts for Midjourney or Stable Diffusion some 6% of the time. I would have thought that would be a far more niche activity.

The homework category at 18% doesn't even include the "search and other inquires" at 17%, which suggests cheating on homework might be the #1 use for LLMs, at least the ones that ban porn.

The better title would have been "What do people ask chatbots? It's a lot of writing and homework."

I haven't asked them much about sex, but I have "role played" with them to discuss health issues and drugs. Otherwise you just get an endless string of canned warnings and non-answers. It's tedious.

The dataset: https://wildchat.allen.ai

Before ChatGPT we had GPT-2 which had a penchant to turn any text completion exercise that involved people into a rauncheaus orgy description after a few paragraphs, no matter the subject at hand.

Sometimes, I have to remind myself that a lot of people on the web are 13 years old.