Seeing value in LLM answers is apophenia. It's an understandable human condition but still.
There can be value in SO answers, there can not be in LLM as it's just automated plagiarism without understanding anything.
There can be value in SO answers, there can not be in LLM as it's just automated plagiarism without understanding anything.
I'm old enough to remember the memes campaigning to rename "software engineering" to "googling StackOverflow", so plagiarism isn't a point against the value of an LLM, and given the case of an LLM made by StackOverflow using StackOverflow data it's also not a legal issue.
I’m not sure understanding is an inherent issue either. When I Google ”weather lisbon,” Google spits out a number. The app doesn’t ”understand” anything, but it still helps me plan my day.
Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: a) "ChatGPT is stupid! Also, plagiarism! No value!" b) " I wrote a carelessly bad prompt and it responded with a seemingly bad answer!" c) " This confirms my biases!"
I find that when I provide it with enough context and a set of requirements (as I would with a non-AI engineer), it's very good at problem solving.
Conjecture. We lack a mechanistic understanding of "understanding", so you can't make this claim. Human answers are also fallible, so how do you know that human cognition isn't also statistical pattern matching similar to what's used in LLMs? If it is, then they are understanding, their understanding just has flaws.