The philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined bullshit as speech intended to persuade without regard for the truth. By this measure, OpenAI’s new chatbot ChatGPT is the greatest bullshitter ever. Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained to produce plausible text, not true statements. So using ChatGPT in its current form would be a bad idea for applications like education or answering health questions.
Despite this, there are three areas where LLMs can be extremely useful: https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/chatgpt-is-a-bullshit-generator-but
Here are three kinds of tasks where @sayashk and I think ChatGPT can shine, despite its inability to discern truth in general:
1. Tasks where it’s easy for the user to check if the bot’s answer is correct, such as debugging help.
2. Tasks where truth is irrelevant, such as writing fiction.
3. Tasks for which there does in fact exist a subset of the training data that acts as a source of truth, such as language translation.
https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/chatgpt-is-a-bullshit-generator-but
@randomwalker @sayashk And what about the 5 first results of a Google Search? Which is the level of bullshit on that case?
