Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

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I find it fascinating that this is still making the rounds. When I read this it was immediately obvious that the author was using a non-web enabled AI which was just hallucinating; there were none of the inline indications that GPT was using the web. Additionally, it must be an old model; even the cheapest, lowest powered models on chatgpt.com today search the web when I ask them questions about articles as the author did. (I just signed out of chatgpt.com to get the worst available model, and it does summarize the linked article correctly.) Note that link to the transcript on chatgpt.com is provided, even though it's trivial to create a shared link to a conversation.

I am confused about what to take away from the article. It feels akin to someone reading a book for the first time, it ends up being "Harry Potter", and they somehow get 10,000 likes on Substack because they took it literally and crashed into the wall when they tried to walk into platform 9 3/4. Am I being unfair? Are these the same people that are claiming that AI is all a sham and will have no impact on society?

We're nerds. We understand the nuance, we understand the way these tools work and where the limits lie. We understand that there is web enabled and not web enabled. Regular people do not understand any of this. Regular people type into a textarea and consume the response.

The take away from this article should be that you are vastly overestimating how people understand and interact with technology. The author's experience of ChatGPT is not unique. We have spent decades building technology that is limited but truthful, now we have technology that is unlimited and untruthful. Many people are not equipped to handle that. People are losing their minds. If ChatGPT says "I read your article" they trust it, they do not think, "ah well this model doesn't support browsing the web so ChatGPT must be hallucinating". That's technobabble.

https://futurism.com/openai-investor-chatgpt-mental-health

https://futurism.com/televised-love-declaration-chatgpt

https://futurism.com/chatgpt-users-delusions

You are being unfair and you should be more empathetic.

> Are these the same people that are claiming that AI is all a sham and will have no impact on society?

That is the view of a subset of nerds, not regular people. The author of that piece is a writer not a nerd.

> We're nerds. We understand the nuance, we understand the way these tools work and where the limits lie. We understand that there is web enabled and not web enabled. Regular people do not understand any of this. Regular people type into a textarea and consume the response.

The exact opposite is true. I'd word it as

"We're nerds, we don't understand nuance, we understand the way these tools work and where the limits lie. We understand that there is web enabled and not web enabled. Regular people are not nerds

> ChatGPT says "I read your article" they trust it, they do not think, "ah well this model doesn't support browsing the web so ChatGPT must be hallucinating". That's technobabble.

No, that's humans. Happens literally every day at every workplace I've ever been in

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