Chat GPT

Have you guys tried it?

I ran by it some recent questions here in The Cove, and it blew me away. Not that the answers are especially insightful, of course. But that they are more than coherent at all!

Disruption incoming!

I’ve tried and it is impressive. Some spammers might use it to pretend they are knowledgeable and prevent being kicked out before they accumulate the 10 posts they need to start hyperlinking unwanted material here.

Interesting. Chat GPT just came up last week in another discussion forum (TalkStats). I had not heard about it before.

... And this is first-generation stuff. In a few decades this technology could really start to take away jobs in certain sectors.

I doubt it will be decades. It already answers Cove questions quite well. It could quickly reduce the relevance of discussion forums. Or maybe swamp them with pseudo-experts that copy from this bot and its successors. Could the internet as we know it morph into a giant know-it-all chat session?

I doubt that the internet will imminently morph into a giant "know-it-all" session, something that has been projected since the 90s of the the last century, and has not become reality so far. My guess is that there will be a lot more elaborate pseudo-information than nowadays, and bots becoming more sophisticated; maybe soon you would run tools like this ChatGPT detector in addition to "googling" relatively dull copy&paste snippets.

But yy personal hope is that discussion forums, such as the Cove, become even more relevant, by offering more "expertly" advice than an AI could do at least in the next 10 years.

The challenge is how we continue to gain knowledge. If ChatGPT becomes ubiquitous and humans no longer study these subjects as intently, how do we continue to expand those areas? ChatGPT may be an expert in assimilating current knowledge and perhaps deduction but what structure must we put in place to keep expanding?

I am not sure whether knowledge expansion is really endangered by such software or whether ChatGPT will be just another tool in the box for cheating in research.

Anyway, it seems that ChatGPT is on the track of becoming ubiquitous by potential integration into the MS Office suite.

I've been dealing with a variety of 'beta versions' of (some, predictable) downsides of "collective intelligence" for years, keep reading. What I currently imagine to be the greatest danger is the human nature to accept 'appeals to authority'... that is, after a quick consultation: "how wrong could ChatGPT really be?", especially if it confirms a pre-existing belief.

I've had plenty of circumstances in my more recent professional career that are more towards the end of 'cut-and-paste from an internet source' of the information spectrum. For example:

1. I had a colleague who didn't like a well-established, particular, and specific use of a technical term and dropped 10 pages of google results on my desk to explain why the term was being misused. My (literal, hah!) response: "take it to the Microsoft forums, it is their term".
2. Similar to above, I had a colleague (in medical device manufacturing) that came from pharmaceutical manufacturing and would not use the medical device industry definitions of IQ/OQ/PQ. This particular colleague kept pointing to the wrong industry's references while ignoring the correct one.
3. Pre-internet, I had to deal with a number of electrical designs that were cobbled together from the sample circuits in the backs of datasheets that failed to implement basic (and necessary) circuit design elements. "But that isn't on the datasheet?!". See also picking the wrong tranzorbs because not knowing the difference between an AC and DC rating.
4. Similar to point 3, more recently (internet era) I had to deal with mechanical engineers who would constantly specify materials based only on what was on the drawing from which they were copying drawing elements, and then would use google search to rationalize their choices.

The dumbing down of people. Used to be that the watch phrase was “don’t believe everything you see on the internet”. Now it seems to be “I know it’s true cuz I saw it on the internet”. It certainly short cuts the ability to think and reason. And of course it’s effecting all areas of life.