[We argue that at minimum, the outputs of LLMs like ChatGPT are soft bullshit: bullshit–that is, speech or text produced without concern for its truth–that is produced without any intent to mislead the audience about the utterer’s attitude towards truth. We also suggest, more controversially, that ChatGPT may indeed produce hard bullshit: if we view it as having intentions (for example, in virtue of how it is designed), then the fact that it is designed to give the impression of concern for truth qualifies it as attempting to mislead the audience about its aims, goals, or agenda. So, with the caveat that the particular kind of bullshit ChatGPT outputs is dependent on particular views of mind or meaning, we conclude that it is appropriate to talk about ChatGPT-generated text as bullshit, and flag up why it matters that – rather than thinking of its untrue claims as lies or hallucinations – we call bullshit on ChatGPT.]

Submitter comment: One of my favourite recent papers on AI - the authors pull no punches, actually substantiate their argument, and it's also extremely readable and hilarious. Free to read: ChatGPT is Bullshit

i know "i asked chat gpt a question and it got it WRONG!!!" posts are extremely boring but i'm doing a report on waterway carbon stuff and wanted to see what it would say if i asked it to describe the effects of a flood dumping a whole bunch of leaf litter into a river all at once

An abundance of leaf litter, when suddenly integrated into the river's waters, fortifies the food web, offering sustenance to a variety of aquatic organisms. This infusion of external organic carbon becomes especially critical when the internal production of the river is compromised, potentially by factors like diminished water quality.

river perfect size for put organic carbon dump in to nap! inside very soft and comfort dissolved oxygen levels sleep soundly put huge amounts of organic carbon in river. no problems ever in river because good nutrients for ecosystem weak of too much oxygen. friend blackwater event.

#(the answer is that it kills everything)#what uses are there for a machine that can only safely be used if you already know the answer to what you're asking it…#funniest academic cheating machine possible. wrong answers constantly but it's verbose so everyone keeps trusting it

Pretty much what I'd expect from the people who always griped about having to write papers :T

To understand what's going on here, know these things:

It's absurd and horrifying at the same time.

#we are a joke species

Here's the link:

#we are a joke species

If you're on Windows 11 like I am for my "main" computer (in my case for school purposes and because I can't get Baldur's Gate 3 to play on Linux), then you might've seen this annoying piece of AI shit show up on your taskbar:

This is Windows Copilot, and it's fulled by the same shit ChatGPT is fuelled by. There is currently no way to uninstall it, but there is a way to deactivate it completely, which I've linked below. It's very easy, and it took me like, 2 minutes to do.

One of the common mistakes I see for people relying on "AI" (LLMs and image generators) is that they think the AI they're interacting with is capable of thought and reason. It's not. This is why using AI to write essays or answer questions is a really bad idea because it's not doing so in any meaningful or thoughtful way. All it's doing is producing the statistically most likely expected output to the input.

This is why you can ask ChatGPT "is mayonnaise a palindrome?" and it will respond "No it's not." but then you ask "Are you sure? I think it is" and it will respond "Actually it is! Mayonnaise is spelled the same backward as it is forward"

All it's doing is trying to sound like it's providing a correct answer. It doesn't actually know what a palindrome is even if it has a function capable of checking for palindromes (it doesn't). It's not "Artificial Intelligence" by any meaning of the term, it's just called AI because that's a discipline of programming. It doesn't inherently mean it has intelligence.

So if you use an AI and expect it to make something that's been made with careful thought or consideration, you're gonna get fucked over. It's not even a quality issue. It just can't consistently produce things of value because there's no understanding there. It doesn't "know" because it can't "know".

Where did the idea that ChatGPT says true things come from. Certainly people working in machine learning aren't claiming that; in fact at every chance they get they are reminding the public that it isn't the case. Did journalists start saying it? Did people just like, assume that Chat GPT would always tell the truth, or even know what the truth is, when that has never been the case for any other chatbot in the history of ever?

This phenomenon is totally baffling to me.

corporations started using it and talking about using it for purposes that would require it to have these capabilities! so people assumed it had them.

but i also think ‘AI’ has done a lot of work here. it’s ‘AI’, like the computer on Star Trek or whatever. everyone has this notion of computers as things that know facts and not context so are utterly unprepared for a computer that just vibes based on context and doesn’t know what facts are.

Intuitively, a calculator does not lie to you, and we “all know” that computers only do what they’re programmed to do, utterly honestly. If a computer is “lying” or bugging out the popular conception is that something’s wrong with it (but nothing’s wrong with ChatGPT, it’s presented as an impressive achievement). I don’t think we have a robust conception of computers as anything but fundamentally truthful things? PEOPLE lie to you, or code art pieces that might deceive, but we don’t have a cultural mistrust of data and data science (who is collecting SPECIFICALLY this data, in service of WHAT interests, with WHAT skew) like we prolly should. ChatGPT is a computer (honest, can only do what it’s told) trained on huge amounts of data (true things about the world)—Why Would There Be Any Problem With It?

like if you don’t think abt things too closely for fun and just kinda go to work and watch the news, why would you assume that ChatGPT is anything but a helpful little friend who Googles for you?

Have been waiting for the first of these to hapoen…

Source

ok I have a bit of a problem with one sentence in this article:

I am not an expert on this subject obvsl, but ChatGPT is NOT a "third party" using OpenAI's "platform"; ChatGPT is their PRODUCT which THEY ARE PROVIDING and which is producing misinformation when users request information from it on a subject. This is one of the MANY reasons why presenting these predictive language model chatbots as "Search Engines" was a really fucking stupid idea, and a website presenting itself as providing reliable technews really ought to be able to get this right.(also, just for clarity, this article is from june 9, 2023. And also also, as the article explains this case PROBABLY wont go anywhere, but it's for reasons other than this.)

So here's my beef with ChatGPT. Even aside from the issues with plagiarism, cheating, people using it to fake the work that they absolutely need to be actually doing, &etc.

With the advent of the internet we've been in a situation where all the knowledge available to humanity could, conceivably, be made available to everyone at all times. We've had enormous public works built towards that purpose -- libraries, Wikipedia, archives, everything. But an increasing problem as the years have gone by has been the problem of sorting out the signal from the noise. Sorting out real, helpful advice from scams and snake-oil. Paths that lead to dead-ends as sources of information go down and don't come back up. Trying to figure out who's a real expert, who's even a real person in a sea of fake generated avatars. Distinguishing wheat from chaff, usable material from trash.

And the makers of ChatGPT -- and every other AI programmer who's now trying to jump on the bandwagon -- is looking at this problem and saying "You know what this situation needs? More noise. More fakes. More trash. More dead-ends and empty shells. I think we have TOO MUCH useful content and real knowledge. I think we should shake things up by adding more utterly contentless garbage to the mix." And they created an automated noise generator.

Just imagine being on the bank of a pond and saying "ah, this is a lovely pond, the fish and plants are so beautiful, I'm just having trouble seeing them through the silt in the water" and the person next to you says "I'm going to build a factory on the bank of this pond that does nothing but pour more dirt into it. All day. Every day. Nonstop."

And that's ChatGPT.

I feel like the only person not tempted to use ChatGPT like it doesn't even occur to me as an option

Anyway shoutout to the person next to me who just got GPT to do their whole essay. I know you're in the trenches.

HELLO ??????

He asked ChatGPT if it was lying to him and it said no so he figured he was in the clear.

not to be pedantic but it annoys me so much when people talk abt how chatgpt is "lying" or "making things up". or esp when people say it "refuses to admit" to lying. like girl that is a toaster oven

"it REFUSED TO ADMIT that it LIED to me" it is a line of code generating letters in the most algorithmically probable order

Yeah: this is a really good example of how the ADVERTISING of calling it AI has confused allot of people(which 1)not your fault thats the POINT of 'advertising' to convince you and 2)humans brains instinctively anthropomorphize so don't be too hard on yourself if you did) and caused Prablems.

ALMOST as good an example as This. (ps: never let anyone tell you lawyers are smart again)

So it turns out that ChatGPT not only uses a ton shit of energy, but also a ton shit of water. This is according to a new study by a group of researchers from the University of Colorado Riverside and the University of Texas Arlington, Futurism reports.

Which sounds INSANE but also makes sense when you think of it. You know what happens to, for example, your computer when it’s doing a LOT of work and processing. You gotta cool those machines.

And what’s worrying about this is that water shortages are already an issue almost everywhere, and over this summer, and the next summers, will become more and more of a problem with the rising temperatures all over the world. So it’s important to have this in mind and share the info. Big part of how we ended up where we are with the climate crisis is that for a long time politicians KNEW about the science, but the large public didn’t have all the facts. We didn’t have access to it. KNOWING about things and sharing that info can be a real game-changer. Because then we know up to what point we, as individuals, can have effective actions in our daily lives and what we need to be asking our legislators for.

And with all the issues AI can pose, I think this is such an important argument to add to the conversation.

I often think issues like this are a result of “The Cloud,” and by that I mean the propagation of this notion that data and the internet exist out in the ether somewhere and not like...on someone else’s hard drives which are housed in hundreds and thousands of huge warehouses which require climate control.

Most humans already have a LOT of magical thinking about computers, and I really wish we spent more time teaching not just basic computing skills (how to navigate an interface), but basic INFRASTRUCTURE knowledge. When you think of it as chatting with Jeff Bezos’s huge garage full of nerd hardware, it’s easier to make the logical leap to say “hey i wonder what kind of resources it takes to keep all these hard drives from overheating...?”

What a frivolous waste. All of this just so capitalists can find a way to not pay artists. Fucking Christ.

Pretty clear proof that capitalist "efficiency" is a crock when they're dumping BILLIONS into a tech that costs multiple times what they'd pay a writer or visual designer for the same work, takes longer, needs more electricity and water, and STILL produces something laughably worse than what the person would. Makes it pretty obvious that what they care about isn't cost and isn't profit, but rather social dominance.

calling chatgpt “AI” feels exactly the same to me as calling those motorized skateboards “hoverboards”