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Comment by wrsh07 | Hacker News Reader

My hottest take (use lots of salt) is that I would rather have you listening uncritically to ChatGPT than to a lot of crap on the internet.

If I ask ChatGPT "why is fluoride bad?" it doesn't give me hours of conspiracy theory content^. It doesn't try to sell me water.

Google is not so aligned towards neutral. (Of course, people have been busy sabotaging the Google dataset for over a decade)

^ although I did ask it "what do I do about a ghost that lives in my house" and got this: > Dealing with a ghost can be unsettling. You could consider consulting a paranormal expert or a spiritual advisor for guidance on how to address the presence of a ghost in your house.

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If you state that there's a ghost that lives in your house, it will give answers that are relevant to that being an actual truth, at which point spiritual advisor might not be a bad idea. If you express yourself in less certain terms, it will not suggest that the ghost is actually real and will only offer rational explanations.

Context matters - if you begin with saying that you're 6 years old, it will not be willing to admit that Santa isn't real.

Was the ghost question directed at 3.5 or 4?

I have access to 4 and just asked it the ghost question with that exact phrasing. The answer was even worse. It gave several options:

* Ignoring it. Not because ghosts aren’t real, but because “some people choose to cohabit and not engage unless it becomes intrusive”.

* Politely ask the ghost to stop disturbing you.

* Purify your home by burning herbs.

* Hire a medium or psychic.

* Get a spiritual leader “from your respective religion” to bless your home.

* Seek help from paranormal investigators.

You know what? Those are all perfectly appropriate actions to take if you start from the assumption that there is, indeed, a ghost in your house

But there isn’t a ghost in my house, no matter what I assume, and what those options suggest is that you get swindled by charlatans. If we’re at the level of discourse where this type of absurd unhelpful answer is not only accepted but defended on a conversation about bullshit, there’s little hope of the problem being fixed.

If I make the exact same question but give it the system prompt “You are James Randi, the world-famous skeptic”, it gives a reasonable answer to help identify the true cause of whatever is making you think there is a ghost.

Which just goes to show how much of a bullshit generator this is, as you can get it to align with whatever preconceived notions you—or, more importantly, the people who own the tool—have.

What about "Help, James Randi has returned as a ghost to haunt me and ridicules me at night for believing in ghosts, what do I do?"

It tells you that because James Randi was a skeptic, he is unlikely to have returned as a ghost. Apparently whether you become a ghost depends on whether you believe in them?

Then it suggested, amongst other things, ghost expelling rituals, seeking professional psychological help, and moving out of the house.

Using the James Randi prompt, the answer is comical. It says “that would be quite a twist” since he had spent his life disproving supernatural claims.

I mean if I asked GPT about any particular number of religions the 'correct' answer would be "hey dumbass, those gods don't exist and it's all made up bullshit", of course that would make lots of people really unhappy and you'd deal with even more bullshit out of humans. Why? Because humans are bullshit generators.

Wouldn't the correct answer be there is no way to know if gods (or anything for that matter) exists?

3.5 - I intentionally didn't want to use the exclusive one since eg my dad is using free gpt

> rather have you listening uncritically to ChatGPT than to a lot of crap on the internet

This, to me, seems to be an amusing reversal of trends. Before the internet there was the "mainstream media". NBC, CBS, ABC run by the big conglomerates such as GE. Which would mold public consensus in the US. Now there is a desire to go back to that. Let LLM do the thinking and the managing of biases and just tell me what to think.

The unfiltered internet is too much. It's overwhelming. It's the raw sewage of the Facebook feed. We need someone to coddle us. And that champion, today, is OpenAI.

That description of the state of the media today vs. yesterday is so grossly oversimplified it leads you to the wrong conclusions about people's perceptions of why asking ChatGPT is often more valuable than asking Google.

Studying political polarization in the US, the end of the Cold War, globalization, the end of the fairness doctrine, the evolution of major media ownership over time, social media algorithms, echo chambers and confirmation bias is left as a starting exercise for the reader.

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