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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32959 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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You accuse me of being a "post modernist" for disagreeing with the academic consensus

No, he's accusing you of being post modernist for torturing the meaning of words.

You want to talk about GPT, I asked GPT for my eldest daughter's name and it failed to provide an answer, neither telling me that I don't have a daughter nor being able to identify my actual offspring. As you will recall "Statistically your daughters name is probably X" is almost exactly what I predicted it would say.

I like your posts and ideas for the most part, the only thing I don't get is the low-key disdain for the modal motte-poster that oozes out of your comments. For example, you seem to enjoy accusing people of lying, when a simple disagreement of opinion is a more likely explanation. Being so quick on the draw with that accusation in particular is pretty ironic given what you're writing here.

This is what you wrote:

To illustrate, if I were to ask you "what's my eldest daughter's name" I would expect you to reply with something along the lines of "I don't know" […] Meanwhile GPT will reply "your eldest daughter's name is Megan" because apparently that's the statistically likely answer, regardless of whether I have a daughter or what her name might be.

This is what ChatGPT responded to the question from your example:

I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I don't have access to personal information such as the name of your eldest daughter or any other personal details. My purpose is to assist with general knowledge and provide support in various areas. Is there something else I can help you with?

ChatGPT's response is not almost exactly what you predicted it would say, it's almost exactly what you predicted a human being would say.

How can this be seen as anything other than a bold-faced lie?

You know what, you're a fair cop, but regarding the GPT stuff i'm going to point you to my reply to @wlxd above.

It's fine if you don't buy the hype, I'm not really sold on it either. Well, I suppose the reports of people abandoning Google for ChatGPT are worrying - as if we need to outsource even more of our thinking to Big Tech.

It's just the insistence that ChatGPT would not tell you "I don't know" when asked about your daughter's name, when you were provided screenshots of it doing just that, that's weird. I think someone even provided an explanation for the mismatch between your experience and their claims - ChatGPT is not the same thing as GPT3 which you were likely experimenting with before.

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