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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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What I'm wondering about is this; we've seen with ChatGPT that if it doesn't have the answer, it will make something up: a fake book, a fake quote, and so on.

So what happens when you're using Edge+AI (a thing I am never going to do, because I loathe Bing) and you ask a question and the AI merrily does the "make shit up" thing? People are expecting that the search engine will return an even better, more accurate answer because shiny new AI powered searching. And now the AI is doing the "Watson in love" bit:

I trust that he may not remember any of the answers which I gave him that night. Holmes declares that he overheard me caution him against the great danger of taking more than two drops of castor oil, while I recommended strychnine in large doses as a sedative.

What's wrong with Bing? I find I like it better than Google nowadays, even if Bing doean't tell me to kill myself anymore.

GPTs are prone to hallucinate but it's not an insurmountable limitation; Anthropic's Claude is trained in a similar manner yet it can say "I don't know, sorry", and there's half a dozen of other promising techniques to improve fact knowledge, e.g. using explicit retrieval (which is really a must when you're building a search assistant). With all the effort devoted to making ChatGPT unable to speak of truths it positively knows, one can reasonably suspect there's some work on the front of discouraging novel falsehoods as well, and indeed Altman tries to conflate those two objectives. They've had two months to get better since then.

Many answers you find on search engines are wrong too.

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