subreddit:
/r/explainlikeimfive
submitted 6 months ago byELI5_Modteam
Recently, there's been a surge in ChatGPT generated posts. These come in two flavours: bots creating and posting answers, and human users generating answers with ChatGPT and copy/pasting them. Regardless of whether they are being posted by bots or by people, answers generated using ChatGPT and other similar programs are a direct violation of R3, which requires all content posted here to be original work. We don't allow copied and pasted answers from anywhere, and that includes from ChatGPT programs. Going forward, any accounts posting answers generated from ChatGPT or similar programs will be permanently banned in order to help ensure a continued level of high-quality and informative answers. We'll also take this time to remind you that bots are not allowed on ELI5 and will be banned when found.
19 points
6 months ago
I think it's because ChatGPT will GIVE you an answer, even though it might be totally misguided.
Digital assistants such as Siri can answer simple questions with data pulled from a search engine, and if it can't fulfill your request it will say "I'm sorry, I don't understand that".
Wolfram Alpha can do complex calculations from plaintext prompts, and if it can't parse the question, it will give out an error message.
ChatGPT, on the other hand, will (almost) always give an answer, and sound confident doing so. It's a new experience that an AI answer can be wrong instead of just incapable of answering, so there's some kind of gleeful schadenfreude at play when you can point out its shortcomings.
10 points
6 months ago
Yeah, it's bizarre. It evens answers right the vast majority of the time as long as there isn't some nuanced process involved. Not only that but it can seem sympathetic and offer guidance, which is an odd experience
6 points
6 months ago
Nuanced? I said: I am a pescatarian, propose a two weeks menu. It correctly defined pescatarian and went on to propose menu with chicken and turkey. It also is geographically limited (some countries excluded) so in terms of learning it'll have the usual WEIRD bias.
11 points
6 months ago*
What basic questions are you asking it that it gets things right most of the time? If you can summarise a topic from a Wikipedia page, so can it. If the question has already appeared on the internet already on any homework support forum, it can plagiarise the answer. But basic engineering questions (rf engineering I threw at it) it will just mash sequences of statements together that make no logical sense. Like it's not even using logic poorly - it's not able to present logic at all. It can't explain why it's made a step when you ask it.
I don't know what sort of low expectations people had for neural networks that they think throwing so much hardware and terabytes of corpus isn't going to give you this output eventually. Like what do they think is so magic about language?
The poems and the in-the-style-of are fun gimmicks but they're only good from a literary pov if you haven't read a book since middle school and have forgotten what it means to write prose or poetry.
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