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Re:Google is freaking out about ChatGPT by irq-1 on Sunday January 22, 2023 @03:14PM (#34481746)
This sounds like experts criticizing Wikipedia, before it dominated. Mostly true and mostly accurate information is useful beyond what we normally think.

Remember how people use to criticize the newspapers? They'd say they read an article on a subject they new something about and were shocked at how bad it was. Then they'd conclude that the rest of the news was just as bad. What wasn't acknowledged was the utility of having imperfect information.

Re:Google is freaking out about ChatGPT by ghusbands on Sunday January 22, 2023 @04:19PM (#34482349)
While I use ChatGPT myself, its ability to invent true-seeming information is insidious.

One of the early popular examples was asking ChatGPT what the downsides are of generics in TypeScript, and it cited that they're not compatible with some browsers/runtimes. It's entirely believable, but entirely wrong, and actually quite hard to confirm either way with internet searches. It's the sort of thing people would readily believe and pass around, though.

Similarly, when I was trying to concatenate video in ffmpeg, it produced convincing-seeming command lines, almost none of which worked properly, but almost all of which used actual ffmpeg command line parameters with appropriate-seeming formats and names. I wasted significant time on debugging those before realising quite how wrong ChatGPT was.

Re:Google is freaking out about ChatGPT by twoodfin on Sunday January 22, 2023 @08:13PM (#34484238)
I like to describe ChatGPT as a highly weaponized form of Gell-Mann Amnesia.
Re:Google is freaking out about ChatGPT by datavirtue on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @01:36PM (#34507926)
I would ask it if it's sure.
Re:Google is freaking out about ChatGPT by pasabagi on Sunday January 22, 2023 @05:45PM (#34483071)
> What wasn't acknowledged was the utility of having imperfect information.

That's an interesting take, and one I haven't heard before. My main squeamishness with bad journalism, and even worse, with chat gpt, is not truth-content, but rather sourcing.

If you know the source, you can account for its biases, or, your reader can do so. As such, well-sourced quotes of complete nonsense tend towards adding to the sum total of truth in the world, because it was true that somebody said it, and their perspective is part of what's interesting in whatever event you're discussing.

If you scrub the data of its sources (like journalists do routinely, and chatgpt does by necessity) important information is lost.

Re:Google is freaking out about ChatGPT by viscanti on Sunday January 22, 2023 @09:07PM (#34484598)
Anyone criticizing ChatGPT now isn't thinking about what's possible with GPT-4 or GPT-5 when lots of research has gone into getting it to be better with answering accuracy. It doesn't take too much of an imagination to see a path where people aren't doing nearly as many searches on a search engine and just asking questions to something like ChatGPT.
Re:Google is freaking out about ChatGPT by bamboozled on Monday January 23, 2023 @02:17AM (#34486334)
I can also see this being a major drawback.

Any bias is everyone’s bias. Not saying it doesn’t happy at all today . But wow, scary

Re:Google is freaking out about ChatGPT by brewtide on Monday January 23, 2023 @06:59AM (#34487823)
It's always been my belief that the full on faith put into future AI will be "how the AI takes over".

We will look at these things as devine correctness, and eventually forget their human construction entirely.

Re:Google is freaking out about ChatGPT by bamboozled on Monday January 23, 2023 @06:53PM (#34496886)
...and overlook their faults?