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Re:ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time by pdonis on Friday February 03, 2023 @01:08PM (#34645288)
> I can very simply verify the answers are good with my FAA Pilot Handbook

Thank you for agreeing with my point.

If you need to check the answers with your FAA Pilot Handbook, wouldn't it be simpler just to read the FAA Pilot Handbook? That handbook, unlike the text generated by ChatGPT, was written by a process that was aware of the semantic relationship between the text being written and the things in the world that the text was referring to. That is what makes the FAA Pilot Handbook a reliable source of information about flying. ChatGPT is not any such process. That's why it is not a reliable source of information--as you agree, since you need to check what it says about flying with the FAA Pilot Handbook.

Re:ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time by Throwaway78389 on Friday February 03, 2023 @01:24PM (#34645572)
I don't think I agreed with anything you said.

I work with all available material in many different ways (Anki cards, videos, different explanations of the same thing, etc), and ChatGPT is another way to learn and help me generate learning material. For example I have it ask me questions like a tutor would. Or I ask various questions when I'm unsure about the wider context - e.g. it provides much more about the underlying physics than the Pilot Handbook itself. If I don't understand, I can ask for clarification, or an explanation like I am 5.

Reading the Pilot Handbook is a big part of learning but being limited to it would be hard. I'm very happy about having Chatgpt available.

Re:ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time by hn_throwaway_99 on Friday February 03, 2023 @03:29PM (#34647282)
> If you need to check the answers with your FAA Pilot Handbook, wouldn't it be simpler just to read the FAA Pilot Handbook?

No, absolutely not. It's much easier to verify a couple specific pieces of information that you're unsure of then go hunting through a large corpus of information trying to pick out the bits that are specific to what you want.

I've used ChatGPT across lots of different areas and I find it incredibly useful. I'm not blindly trusting what it spits out, but it's pretty simple to verify what it's saying. While I definitely do have concerns about the impacts of ChatGPT on a societal level, and what will happen when so much computer-generated content can flood the Internet, but, at a personal level, the complaint that ChatGPT "bullshits with confidence" is not really that much of a problem for what I use it for.

Edit: To give a specific, real-world example, there was a post recently about using ChatGPT to replace a SQL Analyst. Now, ChatGPT definitely will and did churn out wrong answers, but it was incredibly useful to use as a starting point for some complex queries. When it fails, it tended to fail in pretty obvious ways, and to the complaint that it can fail in more subtle ways that look correct, I've certainly dealt with tons of human-generated queries that had the same issues. Are those all useless?