this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
261 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37719 readers
16 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
ChatGPT has no concept of truth or sources. It will straight up lie to you.
It's nice for "creative" stuff but never, ever take its responses at face value.
It's generative so it will generate plausible answers with no consistency of truthfulness.
We have common(-enough) sense to be able to pick up on whether it's being sensible or not, after which we take to search engines. Search engines are now the fallback; a friend of mine and I have nearly totally replaced search engines with ChatGPT as the primary way of quickly, initially getting info now. If you stay aware of its limitations, it can be life-changing in a positive way.
Relying on common sense for critical information is a trap. You're "googling" because you don't know. The incorrect answer might be just plausible enough for you to believe it. This is why credible sources are important, to act as a sort of fallback to authority (I trust "source X" to provide correct information).
Don't worry, eventually Google's current project to replace all their own search results with their own "AI" sludge will make using them impossible to get credible information from too. :(
I would urge people.to reconsider this or atleast try out GPT4. I recognize that's a normal viewpoint but from my usage and with back checking it, it was gotten profoundly good. To the point where I take recipe recommendations that it creates because it tastes delicious.
Obviously you need to check everything it outputs if you're relying on that output for anything, but if you use web search it cites sources and you can look at those to check what it's saying. Makes the whole process much easier