… and neither does the author (or so I believe - I made them both up).
On the other hand, AI is definitely good at creative writing.
I tried to use ChatGPT to find a song that had a particular phrase in it. I could only remember that phrase, not the song or the band.
It hallucinated a band and a song and I almost walked away thinking I knew the answer. Then I remembered this is ChatGPT and it lies. So I looked up through conventional means that band and song.
Neither. Existed.
So I went back to ChatGPT and said “<band> doesn’t even exist so they couldn’t have written <song> (which also doesn’t exist)”. It apologized profusely and then said another band and song. This time I was wary and checked right away at which point, naturally, I discovered neither existed.
So I played with ChatGPT instead and said “Huh, those guys look interesting. What other albums have they released and what hits have they written?”
ChatGPT hallucinated an entire release catalogue of albums that don’t exist, one of which was published on a label that doesn’t exist, citing songs that didn’t exist as their hits, even going so far as to say the band never reached higher than #12 on Billboard’s list.
ChatGPT is a dangerous tool. It’s going to get someone killed sooner, rather than later.
I have a very unusual last name. There is only one other person in the country with my first and last name and they have a different middle initial from me.
So one day, I asked ChatGPT to tell me about myself including my middle initial.
Did you know that I was a motivational speaker for businesses and I had published a half-dozen books on it?
Because I didn’t.
This is because there is a Mr. Flying Thomas Squid, living in another country, who is a motivational speaker and who didn’t work in (… video ?).
Good theory, but this Mr. Flying Thomas Squid that ChatGPT talked about lived in the U.S. like me.
(And yes, I worked in the entertainment industry in various roles for about a decade. Oddly, the other person with my name was in a neighboring industry and we worked about two miles apart for years, but we’ve only met once.)
today’s LLMs do hallucinate a lot … I wouldn’t eat mushrooms from harvesting books written by LLMs (they do exist).
Claude 3.5 Sonnet, using the same exact prompt:
I apologize, but I’m not able to provide a synopsis of “The Mighty Eagle” by John Carrol. After searching my knowledge base, I don’t have any information about a book with that exact title and author. It’s possible this may be a lesser-known work or there could be an error in the title or author name provided. Without being able to verify the book’s existence or details, I can’t offer an accurate synopsis. If you have any additional information about the book or author that could help clarify, I’d be happy to assist further.
I’ve been asking that one about a wide range of topics and been very impressed with its replies. It’s mixed on software dev, which is to be expected. It also missed on a simple music theory question I asked, and then missed again when asked to correct it (don’t have the details at hand to quote, unfortunately). But overall I’ve found it to be reliable and much faster than the necessary reading for me to answer the question myself.
How’ve you found Claude?
More like creative bullshitting.
It seems that Mitchell was simply an astronaut not an engineer.
This is why I never raw dog ChatGPT
Hallucinations are so strong with this one too… like really bad.
If I can’t already or won’t be able/willing to verify an output, I ain’t usin’ it - not a bad rule I think.
I never walk away with an “answer” without having it:
- Cite the source
- Lookup the source
- Permlink you to the source page/line as available
- Critique the validity of the source.
After all that, still remain skeptical and take the discussion as a starting point to find your own primary sources.
That’s good. Ooh NotebookLM from Google just added in-line citations (per Hard Fork podcast). I think that’s the way: see what looks interesting (mentally trying not to take anything to heart) and click and read as usual.
BeyondPDF for Mac does something similar: semantic searches your document but simply returns likely matches, so it’s just better search for when you don’t remember specific words you read or want to find something without knowing the exact search criteria.
At least Bing will cite sources, and hell, sometimes they even align with what it said.
Heh yeah if the titles of webpages from its searches were descriptive enough
Funny that they didn’t have a way to stop at claiming it could browse websites. Last I checked you could paste in something like
https://mainstreamnewswebsite.com/dinosaurs-found-roaming-playground
and it would tell you which species were nibbling the rhododendrons.
…wow still works, gonna make a thread
