@codewiz

That's a actually a great example how clear prompting can help for discourse with #GenerativeAI in particular. This sentence appears to be notoriously difficult, due to the semantic ambiguity _in_the_same_sentence, and apparently such ambiguity is hard for it to deal with (same structure read variably as verb phrase or noun phrase). But if you tell it to take it slow ("step by step" is a good phrase in a prompt), then things often clear up quite readily.

Example:
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Human:
There is a famous sentence " Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana." Can you explain why it is interesting and break down step by step what it would probably mean to the average speaker of English?

ChatGPT:
The sentence "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana" is an example of a humorous play on words, known as a pun. It is interesting because it uses the same words with different meanings in two different parts of the sentence.

Breaking down the sentence, the first part "Time flies like an arrow" is a common metaphor used to describe how quickly time passes. It means that time moves quickly and relentlessly, much like an arrow that flies through the air at great speed.

The second part "fruit flies like a banana" is also a metaphor but uses a different meaning of the word "flies". In this case, "flies" refers to a type of small insect rather than the action of moving quickly through the air. "Fruit flies" are a specific type of insect that are commonly found around overripe fruit. The phrase "like a banana" is a humorous comparison, implying that fruit flies are attracted to bananas in particular.

So when the two parts of the sentence are combined, the meaning becomes a playful joke. The sentence is essentially saying that although both "flies" are named the same, they behave differently. The sentence also implies that the way time moves is more predictable and constant, like the arrow's path, while the behavior of fruit flies is more erratic and difficult to predict, much like their attraction to bananas.

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I would rate this as essentially correct, with only nuances of misunderstanding remaining (e.g. "both flies").

But ... !

What's actually quite fascinating here is that some higher order parsing kicks in, that wants to read both parts as a metaphor (while the second part is really just a statement of fact, not a metaphor). But from that premise – two metaphors – you get a surprising contrast between constant and erratic behaviour, which is actually creative, albeit not even intended by the original.

I find such responses quite remarkable, where #ChatGPT "makes sense" at some level that I would not have considered myself.

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PS: FWIW I gave #Bing the same prompt and got some errors I have not seen with ChatGPT so far (It's not a "garden path sentence", and the proposed alternative reading of "fruit" as a verb is barely grammatical and definitely nonsensical.)

#SentientSyllabus #AIprompts