It’s Not What You Say…

[AgentPete]

Now that everyone's voted in the ChatGPT poll, I thought I could bring this news to your attention without influencing the verdict.

Some research from Purdue University shows that 52 percent of ChatGPT’s answers to technical questions are incorrect. You’d get the same level of accuracy by flipping a coin.

However, what’s really interesting is that when asked to judge, people preferred ChatGPT’s incorrect answers to correct answers that were produced by humans!

ChatGPT’s quasi-authoritative style is to blame.

“It is apparent” said the researchers “that polite language, articulated and text-book style answers, comprehensiveness, and affiliation in answers make completely wrong answers seem correct”.

Wow.

 

[Pamela Jo]

Thing is-that's always been true. This is why we have slander and libel laws that news sources used to have to answer to. The days when every newspaper had an in-house lawyer who checked every story before it ran , dont seem that far off to me. My husband said when he tried Chat GPX it invented sources that sounded VERY credible. Like they SHOULD exist.

 

[Brooke]

it's great that AI can provide detailed, comprehensive answers and all... but maybe someone should remind it that the answers actually have to be true, y'know?

 

[CageSage]

The VOICE of Authority. Even if all it spouts is BS.

 

[Pamela Jo]

Maybe we should just rename Chat GPX, Engineer Julia. Actually a remake of 1989 with two AI engines taking the parts of Julia and Winston could be interesting.

The Dark Ages were not dark because they were difficult or terrible, but because the light of knowledge died. Literacy and books. Except in Ireland, the land of saints and Scholars. This is what I loved about Bernard Cornwell's Arthurian trilogy. And Marty Stewart's. That feeling of lost civilisation. One scene of Cornwell's where the characters are in a steaming marble bath built by Romans and its source of heat is thought to be magic captures the Dark Ages for me.

The New Dark Ages where the past is lost seems more Orwellian.

 

[E G Logan]

when asked to judge, people

It would be good to know more about these people. Who were they? Where were they? And, more importantly, how big was the sample?

 

[AgentPete]

Good point. There's a link to the study above.

 

[LJ Beck]

A friend told me that her son-in-law asked ChatGPT for career advice and he felt that the answers helped him in such a way that nothing else (he's tried other things, although I'm not sure what or to what extent) ever had before. ChatGPT was polite, considerate, asked questions, and gave him advice that he then... implemented into his career! Apparently he's thrilled.

I did not know how to respond to that. I simply said, "I wonder if career coaches and possibly therapists are concerned?"