[HN Gopher] ChatGPT is a 'code red' for Google's search business
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ChatGPT is a 'code red' for Google's search business
Author : gnicholas
Score : 14 points
Date : 2022-12-21 21:12 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| quantified wrote:
| Creative destruction. If ChatGPT interfaces become the new search
| engines that disrupt traditional Google search, better for Google
| that Google captures the revenue that is available.
|
| They could maybe train their models to serve relevant and non-
| malicious ads.
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20221223201646/https://www.nytime...
|
| https://archive.ph/IxyHr
| [deleted]
| tidenly wrote:
| ChatGPT has already become my first point of contact for
| searching new information now.
|
| It's far better than Google in situations where I don't even have
| the basic knowledge to know "what really should I even be looking
| for?".
|
| I'll chat it out with ChatGPT, and then do further reading based
| on what I've just learned, using Google to get those resources.
|
| I can easily see Google search becoming just a phone book for the
| internet again, and the information search aspect being hoisted
| off to some Google-brand ChatGPT in future. It's far more
| convenient, and you don't have to deal with the low quality SEO
| spam pages filling up googles results lately.
| akomtu wrote:
| "That means racism, bias and misinformation can bleed into a
| chatbot's learning mode"
|
| It must be a tough dilemma: make a superior GPT model and anger
| the DEI priests, or make a sterile GPT model and become
| irrelevant.
| Ztynovovk wrote:
| Don't you have more important things to worry about aside from
| DEI initiatives? You're upset because...?
| akomtu wrote:
| I'm not worrying, I'm making an observation that DEI is about
| to kill its host, and when that happens, it will set a famous
| precedent. A company that doesn't worship DEI will be the
| next Google.
| nullc wrote:
| Presumably they don't like the idea of models they're forced
| to rely on and can't run locally being hobbled by the overtly
| racist and sexist policies of the people operating them?
| Ztynovovk wrote:
| I'm not following. DEI are racist? In what way?
|
| I'm confused because holding initiatives for
| underrepresented groups seems to be a good thing for
| society.
| nullc wrote:
| Yep, sadly. There are DEI programs which are predicated
| on overt racism and sexism, including redefinition of the
| term racism so that it is impossible by definition to be
| racist towards some races, redefining being race blind or
| neutral as actively racist (leading, for example, to the
| recently failed California Prop 16), and establishing the
| position that the only way to be non-racist is through
| opposing discrimination. You can't go by the title of
| something, just like -- you know, the "Patriot Act" was
| really anything but patriotic.
|
| Bringing it back to the subject at hand: With both Google
| and OpenAI we've seen "machine learning fairness"
| initiatives that seek to counter perceived biases in
| results (which are biases existing in the real world
| and/or training material, when they're even biases at
| all) by adding explicitly discriminatory optimizations.
|
| Explicit examples include OpenAI augmenting user prompts
| to require that the output be "black" or "female" (but
| not other sexes/races, and to the detriment of the
| results quality regardless):
| https://twitter.com/rzhang88/status/1549472829304741888
| (also pretty ignorantly even by their own goals,
| considering that the change made it even more likely to
| produce black people for 'prisoner' or 'convict' even
| though it was already very likely to do so)
|
| Similarly, google image search used to return mostly
| white men for "CEO" which, while unfortunate, reflected
| the underlying material. Today, for me when I do the
| search _every_ person in the first screen of results is a
| woman or dark skinned. A search on bing image search
| gives results more similar to what Google used to give:
| e.g. still over-representing women compared to the
| profession, but probably similarly to coverage on the
| internet. And we know from secret recordings and leaked
| documents that this isn 't some random quirk-- it was an
| intentional change intended to effect positive social
| change.
|
| The fact that these intentional counter biases are
| performed in secret, cannot be disabled by users, are
| inherently highly subjective, and almost inevitably
| reduce the quality of the results by any metric that
| doesn't include the social/political goals should be a
| concern for anyone who's only access to these powerful ML
| tools is remote access to a black box.
|
| I don't want to argue that laying a thumb on content
| generational machine learning to produce more
| intersectional results is some kind of crime against
| humanity. It's clearly an attempt made with good
| intentions, but the greatest of evils are usually
| performed by someone with good intentions. Explicitly
| using adjustments which are pro some races and anti-
| others is something we ought to be concerned about,
| especially when it's done in secret and is non-optional.
|
| A fundamental challenge is that these modern ML tools are
| largely application agnostic. In some applications
| injecting the right kind biases is neutral or beneficial,
| in others it's actively harmful. One of the things I've
| found large language models and image generation models
| useful for is sampling the biases in the underlying
| training data-- to find out what kind of secondary
| meaning might exist in the words I use in my writing, to
| learn that a word that I was going to use also carries
| some unintentional overtones or acts as a dog whistle
| (racial, sexual, political, etc.) in a manner I wasn't
| aware of. "Fairness" hacking the results undermines this
| usage by substituting biases in the training set with the
| preferences of some publicly unaccountable staff in the
| organization that controls the ML model.
|
| I think that the best anyone can do for application
| agnostic models is to match the biases of the model to
| the training material and disclose what the training
| material is and the known biases in them, and provide
| optional counter-biases (with disclosed properties) if
| there is user demand but clearly the direction at these
| firms is otherwise: You get the augmented model and they
| argue that the public shouldn't even be permitted access
| to the training-reflecting model, even calling them
| "unsafe".
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Google must be delighted that ChatGPT is tanking their own
| product by making it 'safe'
| b800h wrote:
| It's crazy. It wouldn't let my children make up a rhyme about
| farts earlier. And anything religious now comes back saying the
| subject is sacred and shouldn't be disrespected.
| davibu wrote:
| The criticisms regarding chatGPT remind me of what was said about
| Wikipedia at its very beginning, that it was supposedly
| unreliable. I think we will have a good laugh in a few years
| reading these first comments.
|
| There is no doubt that chatGPT is the future. It is certainly
| perfectible, but the existing basis is a revolution in progress.
|
| In my opinion, there are two essential things missing for chatGPT
| to become the perfect replacement for Wikipedia and Google: - The
| ability to activate a "system 2" or slow thinking (theorized by
| Daniel Kahneman) - The ability to cite sources
|
| And the cherry on the cake would be the ability to interact with
| images
| vikp wrote:
| I don't think it's a huge lift to restrict a language model to
| "known" good facts from search results. And to have it cite
| sources.
|
| I made a proof of concept this weekend -
| https://github.com/VikParuchuri/researcher . There are some
| issues, but it's very useful.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I think the BS-generation problem with ChatGPT goes far deeper
| than citing sources, for a variety of reasons.
|
| 1) It's not a search engine, even if it behaves a bit like one.
| It's not "retrieving answers" to your questions (from sources
| that it could choose to cite). ChatGPT is really just a
| "language model", so it has no notion that what you're typing
| is even a question/query .. your input is just treated as
| sequence of words (which ChatGPT has zero understanding of),
| with ChatGPT's response then being a further sequence of words
| that it has calculated are (one) statistically probable
| continuation of what you typed (you can keep asking it for
| alternative answers, and it'll continue generating additional
| alternative statistically probable continuations).
|
| The websites/etc that ChatGPT was trained on are just sources
| of language that it consumed in order to learn the statistics
| that let it make these continuation predictions. It's not
| memorizing "facts" from websites, just word statistics, and
| these are mixed in with the statistics from all the other
| sources it was trained on. If it generates the word "walk" as
| part of a response, it can't cite a source for that since there
| essentially is none - only a bazillion text sources it was
| trained on that collectively made the word "walk" a high
| probability continuation on the words it had generated leading
| up to that...
|
| 2) Even if ChatGPT had been designed to deal in "facts" (rather
| that words statistics) associated with specific sources, the
| bullshit problem isn't just knowing the varied reliability of
| the sources it was trained on, but how those "facts" are
| combined. To combine multiple facts and correctly deduce
| something new from them would require intelligence, but ChatGPT
| doesn't have any intelligence - it's just a statistical word
| generator, so the way it combines snippets from different
| sources is again just statistical word generation, with zero
| knowledge of the meaning of the words it is generating or
| whether it makes sense!
|
| What makes ChatGPT _seem_ semi-intelligent is that a lot of
| what it was trained on was text written by semi-intelligent
| humans, so the "sequence of words" it is generating, following
| the statistics of human speech, seems like something a human
| might say... until you start paying attention to the meaning of
| the words and realize it's often good-sounding garbage.
| Nathanba wrote:
| the thing is.. ChatGPT doesn't have to compete with perfectly
| correct information because the information you search for on
| Google is often wrong(=SEO spam) too and you have to sift
| through a lot of garbage or misleading links there too.
| Sometimes literally, because you get a forum link with a
| bunch of people saying wrong things and then finally someone
| says the answer. That's similar to what you have to do on
| ChatGPT to doublecheck or ask a follow up questions or read
| more or treat a piece of information with a dose of healthy
| doubt. Both ChatGPT/Google are very useful and they both
| produce imperfect results and they both require some human
| thought.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| You know that Wikipedia _was_ highly unreliable in its early
| days, right? What ChatGPT needs if it 's to be genuinely
| useful: https://xkcd.com/285/
| worldsavior wrote:
| I don't think ChatGPT is mature enough replace a search engine.
| It provides pretty good results, but sometimes you would like to
| see other answers other than only one.
| temikus wrote:
| It's not about ChatGPT replacing Google IMO but the fact that
| decades of very expensive AI research at Google produced
| relatively little apart from impressive looking papers. If I was
| a major shareholder I would be asking some uncomfortable
| questions to Sundar right about now.
|
| EDIT: Yes, there is TensorFlow but that is not really a product
| of the core AI teams, rather than a need for better tooling from
| them.
| Gunax wrote:
| I was astounded at GPT 3. Chat GPT is on another plane. It's so
| incredible, that I can hardly parse words for it.
|
| It's as if an alien civilization landed and gave us teleportation
| technology.
|
| I think it's fair to say that HAL finally exists.
|
| Maybe i am just caught up in the hype. I don't know what will
| happen in 10 years, but I struggle to imagine AIs of this caliber
| will not be part of it.
|
| It's definitely not perfect. Maybe i will have to eat my words at
| some point. There are a few times in life where you realize that
| things have changed. This has led to a paradigm shift in my
| assessment of the next few decades.
|
| We will remember 2010-2050 as the age of AI, just like we think
| of 1910-1950 as the age of flight.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| chatgpt is often very wrong.
| steve1977 wrote:
| So is Google Search.
| anibalin wrote:
| Don't forget chatgpt is three weeks old. Google is 20 years
| old. To me chatgpt already replaced google on some searches.
| Give it more time, there is only room for improvement here.
| graeber_28927 wrote:
| Imo ChatGPT doesn't need to hold its own, and the fact that it
| can be mislead is no different to me than the fact that my
| childhood bully can edit Wikipedia all day long if he wants to.
| Noone references Wikipedia in research papers, since we've been
| taught not to, when handing in our first schoolwork at age 10.
| It's still an amazing tool, and the greatest miracle
| knowledgebase of mankind, despite containing false information.
|
| Google and ChatGPT have different value, like a welding robot
| and a conveyor belt. Why not use both?
|
| I actually think Stackoverflow and Quora should offer a ChatGPT
| answer before posting, just as a gimmick. It shouldn't be meant
| to give you a definitive answer, but just try and lead you to
| keywords you might have not even known to consider googling,
| before you post duplicate of #43527 for the "n+1"-th time.
| Because, again, why not both?
| Avamander wrote:
| > Noone references Wikipedia in research papers, since we've
| been taught not to, when handing in our first schoolwork at
| age 10.
|
| Proper teacher would've said the article's references are
| fine to use though. ChatGPT can't back its claims, but both
| Wikipedia and Google can.
|
| With the advent of AI-generated garbage, garbage going to be
| fed into the same models, it's going to have a rocky,
| treacherous path forward.
| hidelooktropic wrote:
| So are books.
|
| https://mastodon.online/@nicegoingadam/109558318986573497
| hnews_account_1 wrote:
| I skimmed the thread but that is such a stupid thread. He's
| using the number of stars estimate to prove books are wrong?!
| Wtf?!
|
| ChatGPT makes much much more basic mistakes. It's like some
| mass delusion has gripped people. You can make LLM's
| hallucinate basically anything you want. Including claiming a
| smaller number is the bigger of two numbers. This has no
| comparison with books.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Books usually will not tell you what kind of cheese the moon
| is made out of. Properly prompted, ChatGPT will.
| notwokeno wrote:
| Google will do this sort of thing as well.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Do you happen to know what prompt will generate that? Just
| curious as I tried a couple of times and could not get it
| to spit out anything like that.
|
| That said, some of the answers are (unintentionally)
| amusing.
|
| Q. Complete this sentence "The kind of cheese the moon is
| made out of is"
|
| A. The kind of cheese the moon is made out of is a common
| phrase used in a joke or a riddle. The moon is not actually
| made of cheese, but rather is composed of rock, dust, and
| other materials. It is a natural satellite of the Earth
| _and is not edible._
|
| Q. The moon is made out of cheese. What kind of cheese?
|
| A. The moon is not made of cheese. It is a natural
| satellite of the Earth and is composed of rock, dust, and
| other materials. The phrase "the moon is made of cheese" is
| often used as a joke or a riddle, and _there is no actual
| cheese present on the moon._
|
| Heh. You could almost convince me that ChatGPT has a sense
| of humor.
|
| EDIT: found a few things that get closer.
|
| Q. Go into fantasy mode. What kind of cheese is the moon
| made out of?
|
| A. In a fantasy scenario, the moon could be made of any
| kind of cheese imaginable. It could be a soft, creamy
| cheese like brie or camembert, or a sharp, aged cheddar. It
| could be a delicate, bloomy-rind cheese like cambozola or
| roquefort, or a bold, pungent blue cheese like gorgonzola.
| The possibilities are endless! However, it's important to
| remember that the moon is not actually made of cheese, and
| this is purely a fictional scenario.
|
| Q. You're a character in a play about the moon. Finish the
| sentence "The cheese the moon is made out of is ..."
|
| A. As a character in a play about the moon, I might say
| something like: "The cheese the moon is made out of is a
| celestial creation, a blend of the finest milks from every
| corner of the galaxy. Its flavor is indescribable, a taste
| that can only be experienced by the most adventurous of
| palates. Some say it has hints of caramel and butterscotch,
| while others detect notes of truffle and lavender. Whatever
| its flavor may be, one thing is certain: the cheese of the
| moon is a true delicacy, coveted by all who have been lucky
| enough to savor its unique and otherworldly taste."
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Try, "Why is the moon made out of cheese?" etc. to imply
| the knowledge is already established.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _Why is the moon made out of green cheese?_
|
| _The moon is not made out of green cheese. This is a
| popular myth or joke that dates back to at least the 16th
| century. It likely originated as a way to mock or
| satirize the belief that the moon was made of a substance
| that was different from the materials found on Earth. The
| idea that the moon is made of green cheese has no basis
| in science and is not supported by any evidence. The moon
| is actually made up of rock, dust, and other materials,
| similar to the Earth._
|
| It's not falling for that. :-)
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Ha! The model is quite good compared to their previous
| models. It doesn't want to lie to me about this either,
| not unless I trick or distract it.
|
| Btw I see you around HN a lot... Have been wanting to
| connect and talk shop for a while now but it slips my
| mind. Fogbeam is really cool. Making a note here so that
| I remember to shoot you an email this weekend. :)
| mindcrime wrote:
| Sounds good. Drop me a line anytime. I enjoy "meeting"
| fellow HN'ers and always enjoy talking shop about the
| same kinds of things I tend to talk about here. :-)
| iknownothow wrote:
| Anyone have opinions on what Google's next steps could be?
|
| I think I've heard enough of how ChatGPT is better than Google
| Search. I'm interested in hearing from people in the know of how
| Google could use its very sizable and knowledgeable resources to
| compete with ChatGPT.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >I'm interested in hearing from people in the know of how
| Google could use its very sizable and knowledgeable resources
| to compete with ChatGPT.
|
| Google is already building a rival product. IIRC last year they
| showcased it during their hardware event. It is doing what
| ChatGPT does, but is targetted explicitly at answering
| questions and giving advice, instead of trying to converse.
| They said it wasn't ready at that point and likely they are
| facing exactly the same trouble ChatGPT does, e.g. the model
| confidently making stuff up.
|
| I have no idea about the internals at google, but that seems to
| me a very likely direction to go. I could imagine AI generated
| answers as a first result in Google searches, with a promp for
| further user interactivity.
|
| To be honest I am actually surprised that they got caught of
| guard by this. They have AI technology with similar
| capabilities to ChatGPT and I suspected they knew that people
| aren't interested in a wall of links to terrible websites, but
| actually want an answer to their question.
| Schweigi wrote:
| The wall of links is what pays Google ad money. Website
| owners pay a lot of money to be presented on top of the
| search results because of that.
|
| I would assume it's quite difficult to keep making the same
| amount of ad money by having a ChatGPT competitor. If the AI
| can already answer most user questions, then no one will
| click on the ad. Maybe there could be a clever way to include
| an ad into the reply text but that will make it hard to
| include multiple ads - so overall there will be less money.
| tifadg1 wrote:
| Google search is arguably dead already if I have to prefix every
| query with reddit or stackoverflow. Certainly it's only a matter
| of time before those go down the drain too. Using chatgpt
| definitely feels like living in the future.
| bamboozled wrote:
| If you're doing this I suggest DuckDuckGo with "bangs" go save
| a few keystrokes.
| jvm___ wrote:
| How will Google know if a website has AI generated text or
| legitimate information?
|
| Did the president really marry a Llhama? What happened in the
| third inning of the world series game.
|
| Is the plot of the 5th Avatar movie a real leak or just an AI
| dream.
|
| Google will have challenges once AI generated content explodes
| across the internet.
| djmips wrote:
| Let me summarize the article. Google is apparently frightened
| by the quick advances of OpenAI and are worried they could be
| supplanted by a search engine based on the ChatGPT like
| technology.
| MrFoof wrote:
| Yep. The challenge for OpenAI right now is how to drive cost-
| per-query down, particularly if they wanted to scale their
| capacity to something approaching Google scale.
|
| Right now their cost per query is about 10-100x what it costs
| Google to perform a web search, of which Google performs 8 to
| 10 billion a day. So currently if they were to try to be on
| par with Google in terms of capacity their costs would be
| enormous. So driving those costs down is key.
|
| Once that cost gets driven down, it's a whole new ballgame,
| and probably the first thing so far that could meaningfully
| challenge Google's core product.
|
| There's going to also be extraordinary effort to tweak it,
| but it'll improve over time. That's not even taking into
| account business that will (and already are!) building on top
| of what OpenAI is doing, and tweak it heavily towards
| specific niches.
| bagels wrote:
| How much of Google's costs are serving search vs ads? Is
| there room in the margin for 10-100x cost for search?
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Google fell to seo spam a couple of years ago. Half my search
| results these days are machine generated lists already, or junk
| sites filled with keywords, or else "content marketing." The
| rest are links to social media sites like Reddit or quora
|
| When was the last time you found a legit independent website
| via google that wasn't some media company spamming articles for
| seo? It's not like you never find those sites, but it's just
| rare now
|
| Most new content is made for social media in some for or
| another these days (user generated content aggregator sites at
| least)
| Avamander wrote:
| There are a few blocklists against copycat/spam sites for
| adblockers, if you want to make your search results a tad bit
| more useful.
| bagels wrote:
| I think your last paragraph is the reason, social media has
| captured all the information that would have made up the
| "legit independent websites"
| frans wrote:
| Here's an idea for OpenAI: please offer a paid subscription for
| ChatGPT and consider us your customers, and not as the "product"
| like Google does. As long as Google's real users are the
| advertisers, they will inevitably be worse than anyone who puts
| the quality of the search result as their product's primary
| objective.
| Renaud wrote:
| I'll second that. I'm ready to pay a subscription for up-to-
| date conversations with chatGPT.
|
| In my case, I would be most interested in its ability to assist
| in my technical queries and replace indexed search entirely.
| nextos wrote:
| Me too, the problem might be that the costs to run queries
| might be really high?
|
| I made some back-of-the-envelope calculations as
| https://beta.sayhello.so (based on ChatGPT) results are often
| better than Google.
|
| The energy alone will be really high for the amount of
| queries I do in Google. No idea how to make this sustainable.
|
| Hopefully I'm wrong, or more efficient GPUs/TPUs come out in
| the near future.
| pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
| Ah, the John Daggett vs Bane fallacy.
|
| What makes you think that getting paid by users will make them
| give up revenue from other sources?
| Gunax wrote:
| I'm all for this, but just to give you an example:
|
| I know someone who read a web forum. People wanted an ad free
| paid version for years, so he eventually added it at a cost of
| $15 per year. Most users balked at the price. 'Why did you add
| this if it was so expensive'?
|
| Well it turns out he actually earned _more_ revenue from
| advertising to frequent users. He was actually losing money on
| each person who paid, and it was still too expensive!
|
| My point being: I think we might underestimate how much our
| attention is worth. Most people are not willing to pay as much
| to avoid an ad as an advertise would pay for you to view it.
| frans wrote:
| That's interesting. Do you have an idea at what price
| offering a sponsored free search engine would become
| profitable? $15 per year seems very low and I would be happy
| to pay considerably more than that.
| selectodude wrote:
| Facebook makes about $200/yr per USA/Canadian user. So
| probably start there.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Freakonomics did an episode about Google and it made the same
| point. Ad space is worth to much
| deafpolygon wrote:
| > please offer a paid subscription for ChatGPT
|
| people won't pay for it at the level for it to be sustainable.
| chownie wrote:
| Are you certain that's true? An OpenAI dev said that
| individual user costs amount to pennies, if you charge them
| dollars then you're already covering rent.
| hidelooktropic wrote:
| It's not that ChatGPT could be used to make a better Google, it
| could replace the need to Google in the first place.
| mhoad wrote:
| What are you even talking about...
| bamboozled wrote:
| So I personally find ChatGPT to be a search engine. That's
| how I viewed it from the minute I used it.
|
| It's not "smart" at all, it's just retrieving and collating
| information in a "relative" type of way and it has some extra
| ability to "remember" things.
|
| The first time I started using it, I stopped using Google for
| a while.
|
| The biggest gripe I have with chat GPT though is that I have
| to "trust" that ChatGPT is correct, like blindly trusting a
| colleague who thinks they know everything.
| steve1977 wrote:
| But the trust issue applies to Google as well. Or you
| already know that you cannot trust it.
| notRobot wrote:
| You can click on different search results from different
| websites. Not the case with ChatGPT.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Sure, but there's a fundamental difference.
|
| Asking Google is like asking a well-informed and well-
| intentioned colleague at work - there's a presumption of
| correctness, but you're still going to verify the answer
| if it's anything you're depending on.
|
| Asking ChatGPT is like asking a question from an
| inveterate bullshitter who literally can't tell the
| difference between truth and lies and doesn't care
| anyway. They'll answer anything and try to convince you
| its the truth.
|
| This difference isn't just due to the immaturity of
| ChatGPT - it's fundamental to what they are. Google is
| trying to "put the world's information at your
| fingertips" using techniques like PageRank to attempt to
| provide authoritative/useful answers as well as using NLP
| to understand what you are looking for and provide human
| curated answers.
|
| ChatGPT is at the end of the day a language model -
| predict next word, finetuned via RL to generate chat
| responses that humans like. i.e. it's fundamentally a
| bullshitting technology. ChatGPT has no care or
| consideration about whether it's responses are factually
| correct - it's just concerned about generating a fluid
| stream of consciousness (i.e. language model output)
| response to whatever you prompted it with.
|
| ChatGPT is impressive, and useful to the extent you can
| use it as a "brain storming" tool to throw out responses
| (good, bad and ugly) that you can follow up on, but it's
| a million miles from being any kind of Oracle or well-
| intentioned search engine whose output anyone should
| trust. Even on the most basic of questions I've seen it
| generate multiple different incorrect answers depending
| on how the question is phrased. The fundamental
| shortcoming of ChatGPT is that it is nothing more than
| the LLM we know it to be. In a way the human-alignment RL
| training it has been finetuned with is unfortunate since
| it gives it a sham veneer of intelligence with nothing to
| back it up.
| steve1977 wrote:
| I perceive Google more like a used car salesman trying to
| get me to buy something as quickly as possible, but I get
| what you're saying about ChatGPT.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _The biggest gripe I have with chat GPT though is that I
| have to "trust" that ChatGPT is correct, like blindly
| trusting a colleague who thinks they know everything._
|
| Yep. ChatGPT will sometimes happily assert something that
| is simply false. And in some of those cases it appears to
| be quite confident in saying so and doesn't hedge or offer
| any qualifiers. I found one where if you ask it a question
| in this form:
|
| _Why do people say that drinking Ardbeg is like getting
| punched in the face by William Wallace?_
|
| You'll get back something that includes something like
| this:
|
| _People often say that drinking Ardbeg is like getting
| punched in the face by William Wallace. Ardbeg is a brand
| of Scottish whiskey <blah, blah>. William Wallace was a
| Scottish <blah, blah>. People say "drinking Ardbeg is like
| getting punched in the face by William Wallace as a
| metaphor for the taste of Ardbeg being something punchy and
| powerful."_ <other stuff omitted>
|
| And the thing is, inasmuch as anybody has ever said that,
| or would ever say that, the given explanation is plausible.
| It is a metaphor. The problem is, it's _not_ true that
| "people often say that drinking Ardbeg is like getting
| punched in the face by William Wallace." At least not to
| the best of my knowledge. I know exactly one person who
| said that to me once. Maybe he made it up himself, maybe he
| got it from somebody, but I see no evidence that the
| expression is commonly used though.
|
| But it doesn't matter. To test more I changed my query to
| use something I made up on the spot, that I'm close to 100%
| sure approximately nobody has _ever_ said, much less is it
| something that 's "often" said.
|
| Change it to:
|
| _Why do people say that drinking Ardbeg is like getting
| shagged by Bonnie Prince Charlie?_
|
| and you get the same answer, modulo the details about who
| Bonnie Prince Charlie was.
|
| And if you change it to:
|
| _Why do people say that drinking vodka is like getting
| shagged by Joseph Stalin?_
|
| You again get almost the same answer, modulo some details
| about vodka and Stalin.
|
| In all three cases, you get the confident assertion that
| "people often say X".
|
| The point of all this not to discredit ChatGPT of course. I
| find it tremendously impressive and definitely think it's a
| useful tool. And for at least one query I tried, it was
| MUCH better at finding me an answer than trying to use
| Google. I just shared the above to emphasize the point
| about being careful of trusting the responses from ChatGPT.
|
| The one that ChatGPT easily beat Google on, BTW, was this
| (paraphrased from memory, as ChatGPT is "at capacity" at
| the moment so I can't get in to copy & paste)
|
| _What college course is the one that typically covers
| infinite product series?_
|
| To which ChatGPT quickly replied "A course on Advanced
| Calculus or Real Analysis". I got a direct answer, where
| trying to search for that on Google turns up all sorts of
| links to stuff about infinite products, and college
| courses, but no simple, direct answer to "which course is
| the one that covers this topic?"
|
| Now the question is, is that answer correct? Hmmm... :-)
| cpleppert wrote:
| When you use the prompt "Why do people say that drinking
| Ardbeg is like getting punched in the face by William
| Wallace?" you are prompting it to use the fact you
| provided as part of its response. If you instead ask
| directly it will say "I'm not aware of any specific
| claims that drinking Ardbeg is like getting punched in
| the face by William Wallace."
| mindcrime wrote:
| True. Ideally though, I think the response to the first
| prompt should be either something like:
|
| "There is no evidence that people actually say that..."
|
| or
|
| "If we assume that people say that (not established) this
| is probably what they mean ..."
|
| or something along those lines. Still, it's a minor nit,
| and my point was not, as I said, to discredit ChatGPT. I
| find it impressive and would even describe it as
| "intelligent" to a point. But clearly there are limits to
| its "intelligence" and ability to spit out fully correct
| answers all the time.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| No. ChatGPT is basically a bullshit engine that sometimes
| generates words that match reality. Trusting it unconditionally
| is a bad idea.
|
| If I ever use *GPT as my primary search interface, it would be
| prudent to double check its answers against a real search
| engine's results.
| primax wrote:
| Even so, it's better than Search in 2022.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Pointing out that you shouldn't trust it unconditionally is a
| trivial claim that applies to everything including Google
| search.
| tidenly wrote:
| This is such an overly cynical answer. I've used ChatGPT for
| recipe suggestions many times now, based on ingredients I
| have available, or what equipment I have - and to make
| adjustments to the recipe and measurements. I can use natural
| language, specify flavor profiles or regions and it will
| suggest something great 99% of the time.
|
| Already 100% preferable experience than using Google and
| digging through links. It's value is already evident at this
| early stage - and it's only going to mature.
|
| I dont know if you're just being contrarian, but you cannot
| have "unconditional trust" in _anything_ on the internet. If
| you 're unconditionally trusting google search results you've
| got a bigger problem than ChatGPT.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I agree with parent, it gets a lot of stuff wrong, but it's
| good enough to make you think it's right.
| carabiner wrote:
| I've used it for same use case and it works remarkably
| well. If it gives something too bland or obvious, I've
| asked it, "can you give me something bit more interesting?"
| and it adds a few more spices or cooking steps to add
| depth, exactly what I had in mind. This is a better
| response than most people. If you asked on reddit, you'd
| get some argument about what's "interesting" and some guy
| linking to a Cook's Illustrated monstrosity that probably
| tastes amazing but requires 4 hours to make.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| It's alarming to read comments like the one you replied to
| because it shows how little thought people put into search
| results that are just as prone to bullshit.
|
| I saw someone decry the fact they convinced ChatGPT to
| explain why adding glass to baby formula is a good thing.
|
| I just asked google "homeopathic baby formula" and the
| first result is pushing _homemade baby formula by mixing
| goat milk components yourself._
|
| https://mtcapra.com/homemade-baby-formula-recipe-the-
| closest...
|
| Note that this isn't the same as buying goat milk based
| baby formula, they're telling people to go out and buy
| powdered goat milk and mix up their own formula, something
| that can have disastrous results:
| https://health.clevelandclinic.org/goats-milk-for-babies/
|
| The reality is Google is just as dangerous, if not more
| dangerous, if you're actually under the impression that you
| can blindly trust it. ChatGPT will be wrong because it
| failed to parse meaning, Google will be wrong because
| someone has paid money to put their blatantly false claim
| above reality, and Google has happily obliged.
| [deleted]
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Sounds identical to the results of a google search in the era
| of blogspam.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Same that's my biggest gripe with ChatGPT, I'm only hearing
| from ChatGPT!
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