Re:Neil Postman: A civilized man in a century of barbarism (...
by TeMPOraL on Monday May 08, 2023 @07:08AM
(#35860269)
> ChatGPT takes that to an entirely new level.
ChatGPT is a mirror. GPT-4 more so than GPT-3.5, but in both cases: you get out what you put in. You may need to learn how to manage the conversation on a meta level (e.g. asking it to use a different style, as by default, it's overly polite and is padding its answers like it was writing a lifestyle magazine for an easily distracted audience), but if you want to go deep instead of wide, you can easily do that.
(At least as long as you avoid the topics where OpenAI lobotomized ChatGPT through RLHF and whatever other hacks they use to short-circuit the conversation. In those cases, I'm sure Postman would recognize the broader mechanism at play and its implications, from various socio-political transformations around the world in his youth and adult life.)
ChatGPT is a mirror. GPT-4 more so than GPT-3.5, but in both cases: you get out what you put in. You may need to learn how to manage the conversation on a meta level (e.g. asking it to use a different style, as by default, it's overly polite and is padding its answers like it was writing a lifestyle magazine for an easily distracted audience), but if you want to go deep instead of wide, you can easily do that.
(At least as long as you avoid the topics where OpenAI lobotomized ChatGPT through RLHF and whatever other hacks they use to short-circuit the conversation. In those cases, I'm sure Postman would recognize the broader mechanism at play and its implications, from various socio-political transformations around the world in his youth and adult life.)