https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/28/column/
'A year ago, AI was big news… if you were a data science geek or deeply
concerned with protein folding. Otherwise? Not so much. But, then along came
generative AI, you know it as ChatGPT, and now everybody is psyched about AI.
It's going to transform the world! It's going to destroy all "creative" jobs.
Don't get so excited yet sparky! Let me re-introduce you to an ancient tech
phrase: Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO).
Some out there think AI chatbots "think," can learn, or at least they
fact-check their answers. Nope. They don't. Today's AI programs are just very
advanced, auto-complete, fill-in-the-blank engines. You've been using their
more primitive ancestors in your email clients and texting programs to help
clean up your spelling for years.
True, what ChatGPT does, thanks to its large language model (LLM), is much more
impressive. If I want it to write a short story about what Leia Skywalker, aka
Princess Leia, was doing after
Star Wars: A New Hope, it can do that. Did you
know Chewie was teaching her how to use a blaster? Well, that's what ChatGPT
tells me, anyway.
That's fine, but when I asked to tell me about Red Hat laying off 4 percent of
its workforce, even after I fed it the layoff memo, ChatGPT confidently told me
that Red Hat's CEO Paul Cormier had said… Wait. Cormier hadn't been the CEO
since July 2022.
Why did ChatGPT get that wrong? Well, I'll let it tell you: "As an AI language
model, my knowledge is based on the data I was trained on, which goes up to
September 2021. I do not have any real-time updates or information on events or
data beyond that date."
Duh.'
Via Steven Vaughan-Nichols, who wrote "Yes, generative AI programs, like
ChatGPT, sound like they know what they’re talking about, but the closer you
look, the worse they appear. Here’s why."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
