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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Factual correctness is not very important, you don't have to trust it. ChatGPT is very effective because it acts as an advisor in any topic. Sometimes its very wrong but it gives you an overall picture of the thing you are looking for and from there you can drill down.

It is much better than trying to drill down from spam ridden ad infested results Google would provide. Once you pass the very basic stuff, you are often able to reach the spam-free-lands because the SEO spam hasn't reached the every niche just yet(spammers optimize for certain popular keywords). Once you have the overall picture, you have the roadsigns to the niche lands. You can directly search Stackoverflow, reddit, hacker news, github etc.

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>Factual correctness is not very important, you don't have to trust it.

If these chat bots are going to replace or compete with the traditional search interface, then correctness is absolutely key.

When a traditional search engine points you to some spammy site, you have far more context to decide for yourself how much credibility you ascribe to it. You may know the site from earlier visits. You can see whether it's completely ad infested and what the likely business model is. You can see what else is on the site. You can check who the publisher is, etc.

But when a chat bot delivers results in a conversational style, there is absolutely no indication as to whether a particular claim is fact or fiction. If the bot provides links to sources that's great, but then you're back to square one reading through 10 paragraphs of blog spam trying to filter out the one bit that may answer your question.

Also, the way in which these bots fail compared to traditional content farms and spammy blogs is very different. These sites tend to copy stuff from elsewhere. They may repeat falsehoods published by others. But they are unlikely to just make up numbers and present them as fact.

I don't think its going to be drop-in replacement.

With ChatGPT, you can ask follow up questions. So if something doesn't sound right, you can pressure it to explain its position.

It's like talking with people, sometimes people are wrong and we happen to have a lot of linguistic tools to deal with it. Like, follow up questions or asking for specifics.

>I don't think its going to be drop-in replacement.

I agree, but part of the reason for that is that it doesn't get the facts right (yet?). A chat bot that can be trusted would be far more useful and could largely replace the traditional search interface.

I tried ChatGPT (and some other transformer models). I know you can ask follow up questions and make it reconsider its responses or change its mind.

But why does it change its mind? It's not because it finds a flaw in its own logic or discovers new information. I think it's simply because the pattern of inquisitorial questioning is statistically associated with the pattern of mind changing.

And then it just follows your lead in a new direction making claims that are just as unreliable as the original ones.

I'm keeping an open mind though. I don't think I have understood everything there is to understand about this.

The scary thing about this reply is I cannot tell whether it was written by a human or by Bing trying to gaslight me into believing that factual correctness is not important. It reads just like Bing trying to explain why the year is 2022 or Bing did not say that it said the Eagles won the Super Bowl.

The scary part is that people can start dismissing the opinions that they don't agree as "AI generated".

People have been dismissing opinions they didn't like for ~25,000 years, for a very long list of reasons. Dismissing "AI" for that reason feels kinda like not having one more key on your keyring - because a kid could stick the new key into an electrical outlet.

Dismissing opinions is on thing, dismissing opinions thinking that you are not interacting with humans is why some people are huge a-holes on the internet despite being decent people IRL.

Maybe I'm an old cynic...but I already (quietly) dismiss most plausibly-human opinions on the internet, because "advertising", "clickbait", "ignorant", "echo chamber", "troll", "spam", "obvious & boring", "not my religion", "immature". Etc. etc. etc.

"Is it from an AI?" seems about as important to me as validating the SPF record behind some "I am assistant to Nigerian Minister of Oil, and need your help..." email message. Who would actually react differently to that message, on the basis of "SPF is valid"?

Yep, in old generations there was this thing about internet being a new frontier where you can nerd down and it wasn't a place for "normal" people and whatever happens online doesn't have IRL consequences. Some of them turned into unbearable a-holes, however newer generations have another kind of relationship with the internet where they are not assuming that everyone is a neckbeard and there are no women on the internet etc. Instead, they are much less anonymous, use real names and are not in the delusion that there are no real world consequences. It's the only way the normies to stick around, despite having orders of magnitude more people online the trolling is not as pervasive as it used to be.

There is a hilarious irony to this. In all the classic scifi, an opinion is usually trusted because it came from AI, though often as things progress the AI is eventually distrusted. Have we managed to side step this entire thing be ruining humanity's perception of AI with ChatGPT and Bing?

I think the problem is not that it's written by AI but written by AI to serve some people's interests. Therefore it's not organic due to the intent but it could have been organic if it was written by AI serving its own interests.

Plus it's really quite good at typical assistant tasks. "Write [lettertype] letter with following key points". "write a one-off script in powershell that does XYZ". You still have to know the details of the task yourself to be able to review it (and let it improve), but that's exactly the same if you have assistants in your team doing that kinda thing - at the end you're responsible for the output and you'll have to ensure its quality.

Exactly, you can delegate a lot of boring busywork to ChatGPT. You need the synonyms of every word used in Chess? You need all that in a JS array? No problem, ChatGPT cat sort you out in a few moments. You may still need to pay attention to the correctness but that doesn't remove the usefulness of ChatGPT.

People overstate how bad Google results are. The great thing about blogspam and ads is that you have an extra signal for what to instantly dismiss. I have gotten very good at filtering out Google results, not based on the information they contained, but how they were presented, etc. With ChatGPT, you don't get this. You only get a blob of text that looks identical to every other correct or incorrect response. There is no extra signal.

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