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Comment by jazzyjackson | Hacker News Reader

That's good. 1 800 chat gpt really let me down today, I like calling it to explain acronyms and define words since I travel with a flip phone without google, today I saw the word "littoral" and tried over and over to spell it out but the model could only give me the definition for "literal" (admittedly a homonym but hence spelling it out, Lima indigo tango tango oscar Romeo alpha Lima, to no avail)

I said "I know you're a robot and bad at spelling but listen..." And got cut off with a "sorry, my guidelines won't let me help with that request..."

Thankfully, the flip phone allows for some satisfaction when hanging up.

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> I said "I know you're a robot and bad at spelling but listen..." And got cut off with a "sorry, my guidelines won't let me help with that request..."

For some reason I like when they do that. My fondest memory was chatting with Copilot (when it was called Sydney), challenging it to a game of rock-paper-scissors, asking it to choose first, and winning every round to its increasing astonishment, until it suspected I was cheating and ended the conversation. So smart and so dumb.

Did you try "literal but with an o"?

Even search engines have trouble with that, they assume you're looking for the literal (letter) named "O".

The trouble:

Did you meant litoral?

Sure a search engine might, but this is what LLMs excel at

I tried it and 1-800-ChatGPT got it immediately. "What's the word that sounds like literal, but then it's spelled with an O in it".

It asked if I was thinking of littoral (spelled out), I confirmed, and it gave me the meaning

I know this word, it's French and it means coastline, coastal, something at the edge of the land and sea ! We use it in French a lot to describe positively a long coastline. I'm surprised it's used in an English context, but all French words can be used in English I guess if you're a bit "confiant" about it !

A very quick search suggests that the word entered English before French. (I could be wrong, I just found it interesting).

It is a latin word.

Is also a Spanish word used today.

There is not much latin wrote around the world nowdays.

The point is that english didn't get it from french. Both languages got it from latin. Please concentrate.

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