Why do people treat ChatGPT like it’s the Delphic Oracle?

[HolyRigatone]

Don’t get me wrong, I think ChatGPT is great for some stuff, but some people seem to be treating it like the font of all wisdom.

Talking about their problems to it, taking relationship advice from it, getting it to counsel them.

It’s not perfect and it gets things wrong all the time, I’m not sure I’d be sharing my deepest secrets with it or making life-decisions based on it’s outpourings.

Or am I just a stupid old Luddite?

Always makes me laugh when a poster is losing an argument and comes back with 'well chatgpt says...... so that proves I'm right'. It's always bullshit quickly debunked by the very next poster.

I’m pretty sure ChatGPT is Trump’s most senior ABs trusted advisor 😩

Its because it tells people they are so clever and special, and sadly people are lacking that in their real lives. I have to prompt chatgpt every time "please challenge me, stop being so positive, tell me when I'm wrong, point out the flaws in my logic, and base your outputs on realistic probabilities"

Because it tells people what they want to hear.

Too many people are quick to trust AI, because it is very convincing with its lies.

I think it is being promoted - it's always ChatGPT, not any other AI platforms.

All that information given to it is helpful for those that have access to it.

How can it do any of those things? It is not trained in logic or probability.

it scares me how many people treat chat bots like they’re these all knowing entities. We’re sleepwalking into being controlled by fucking machines and so many people are happy to hand over their autonomy.

Lol

i feel this is actually a better comparison than you realise.

there is a famous story about the Delphic oracle. A Greek king went to Delphi to ask the oracle if he should go to war. The oracle replied that if he did a great kingdom would fall.

the king was reassured and went to war. He lost. His kingdom fell.

the Delphic oracle speaks the truth - but not necessarily in the most obvious way.

It gets things wrong all the time. When you correct it you think what's the point, I'm advising you now.

I dont have chat GPT, I have a different AI and it has a go at me when Im not following a regime that it developed for me. I didnt ask it to, it just started to, putting things in capital letters and bold!!

I find it hilarious when posters respond to the OP and they’ve clearly asked Chat GPT.

From the little I understand, AI works by breaking the words apart into 'tokens' and seeing what family the word lives within, then seeing what the most probable response would be. So, in simple terms, if you say 'challenge me' it should see what family 'challenge' lives within, see 'argue', 'rebuff', 'debate', 'critique' then see what kinds of sentences are produced within those families and respond to you in that manner. Of course, all this depends upon the original data they were trained on, the new data they receive in response, and also the commercial drive of the company. So, if more people interact more often with a brown-nosing model, it will learn to favour those types of responses in order the service the underlying prompt 'keep users returning for repeat sessions and keep them in session for longer periods'.

I’m a Luddite, I’ve never even used it.

I’ve found it very sensible on a tricky family problem. Reassuring too. However it’s less good on facts.

Had a conversation about this the other day (with an actual human being, how quaint!). We were saying how all it does is skim the internet and quote any old drivel that any unqualified person with a blog or a Reddit account could’ve posted. It’s honestly scary how reliant people are becoming on it. The same people who are quick to say “don’t believe everything you read on the internet” and it’s like… erm… that’s exactly what ChatGPT does and you take advice from it.

A great experiment is to ask the same question to chatgpt and MS Copilot. When i ask for a five year life plan from chatgpt I feel so excited, enthused, all is possible! When I ask Copilot I feel really underwhelmed because its far more realistic and less pandering. How things make us feel play a much larger part in what we choose to use than we might like to think.

I think using it for any reason is weird

I would guess our facilities to work out whether information is trustworthy or not are based on interactions with a small group of people IRL. They aren't really equipped for the invention of the printing press, let alone the internet and then these new tools just exploit it even further.

Because it hits a lot of the buttons that people feel signal trustworthiness, they tend to instinctively trust it. And it probably is right more often than the average person, it's just that any human will have areas where they are confident and areas where they are unsure, and this is normally something you can suss out from the way they talk about the different topics. If you met someone who was confident and smooth about everything, it would start to feel untrustworthy after a while but because chatbots aren't human, people sometimes make the error of overlooking this and believing that it is possible for it to be reasonably well-informed about everything.

If you ever start to trust it too much, ask it a few questions about a topic that you know a lot about and you'll see what it's doing and how much of it is just BS.

And I would guess most people do use ChatGPT rather than the others because it was the first one which was easily accessible and widely known, but also because that name is recognised it gets used as a shorthand (like saying you have a Dyson hoover)

You know you can just set a master prompt and not have to repeat this every time?

I have tried, and I've allowed it to access prior conversations, but I just tested it by saying apropo of nothing that I want to start a cleaning company that only uses bicarb and vinegar, and it told me this was a great idea to tap into health concious niche markets. The 'challenge' it added was that I need to think about market positioning.

From my limited experience with it, ChatGPT is still in the word salad gobbledegook phase. It's sort of the uncanny valley of communication.

It’s great for writing tricky letters - it can put ideas into an order and format them. It can also tidy up your tone. It’s also great for work stuff. But it’s so easy to get hooked and therefore it’s first hit last resort.

Someone tried to justify their position at work with it, it was wrong. Showed them the actual source we should refer to and they STILL said chatgpt was right. We are doomed ...

I used it to find a film about about an AI woman. And it totally failed to do so.
AI not finding a film about AI. FFS.

It is just a brainless way to find stuff. Use your own mind.

In a recent thread, someone called it Chat Chippy Tea, and that has stuck with me now.