ChatGPT has a style over substance trick that seems to dupe people into thinking it's smart, researchers found

Comments

• joe@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  A caveat: This user analysis involved just 12 programmers being asked to assess if they prefer the responses of ChatGPT or those written by humans on Stack Overflow to 2,000 randomly sampled questions.

  Nothing to see here.

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  • lemann@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    12 programmers? That ChatGPT sample size is way too small to be meaningful IMO

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• neptune@dmv.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  When you underpay a bunch of gig workers to rate the outputs? Obviously it’s going to write in a manner that best BS’s a layperson.

  Would be too expensive to hire experts in every field to train the AI to actually do good work. Imagine paying software engineers 100k plus benefits to vote on its code outputs, or getting Miss Manners to comment on its etiquette suggestions.

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• sj_zero ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Anyone who has actually needed a correct answer to a question realized this a long time ago.

  The problem is that most people don't bother checking the answers.

  • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    If you need a correct answer, you’re doing it wrong!

    I’m joking of course, but there’s a seed of truth: I’ve found ChatGPT’s wrong or incomplete answers to be incredibly helpful as a starting point. Sometimes it will suggest a Python module I didn’t even know about that does half my work for me. Or sometimes it has a lot of nonsense but the one line I actually need is correct (or close enough for me to understand).

    Nobody should be copying code off Stack Overflow without understanding it, either.

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    • sj_zero ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I won't pretend, it can be very useful as long as you know what it is and the fact that very often it will make stuff up out of whole cloth.

      I was trying to figure out how to make a change to a rest program that I use (lotide which I'm posting from, actually) but I don't know anything about rust. So it ended up leading me down the rabbit hole with a library that just didn't exist, and all kinds of routines that didn't exist, but ultimately I did get there. Ended up using regex instead.

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  • sumofchemicals@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    This hasn’t been my experience. Yes, chatgpt gets stuff wrong, and fairly regularly. But I can ask it my question directly, and can include sample code, and I get an answer immediately. Anyone going on stack overflow has to either google around and sift through answers for relevance, or has to post the question and wait for someone to respond.

    With either chatgpt or stack you have to check the answer to make sure it works - that’s how coding goes. But one I know if it works or not pretty much immediately with fairly low investment of time and effort. And if it doesn’t, I just rephrase the question, or literally say “that doesn’t seem to work, now I’m getting this error: $error”

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    • sj_zero ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      When it gets stuff wrong though, it doesn't just get stuff wrong, it gets stuff completely made up. I've seen it create entire apis, I've seen it generate legal citations out of whole cloth and entire laws that don't exist. I've seen it very confidently tell me to write a command that clearly doesn't work and if it did then I wouldn't be asking a question.

      But I don't think that the alternative to chat GPT would even be stackoverflow, it would be an expert. Given the choice between the two, you would definitely want an expert every time.

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• givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It’s like crypto, or really any other con job.

  It makes idiots feel smart.

  Make a mark feel like they’re smart, and they’ll become attached to the idea and defend it to their death. Because the alternative is they aren’t really smart and fell for a scam.

  When smart people try to explain that to the idiots, it just makes them defend the scam even harder.

  Try to tell people chatgpt isn’t great, and they just ramble on about some nonsensical stuff they don’t even understand themselves and then claim anyone that disagrees just isn’t smart enough to get it.

  It’s a great business plan if you have zero morals, which is why the method never really goes away, just moves to another product.

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  • FredericChopin_@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    “ChatGPT is great” depends on what context you’re talking about. Use it for generating mock data and I’d say it’s pretty great.

    Getting help with my code as a professional software developer is pretty decent and much better than Google or Stack.

    Getting it to tell me about Physics, not great in my situation as I don’t know enough about physics to know where it’s wrong.

    Point being, it can be a great TOOL to aid you in your specialist field of work.

    People think that it’ll do your job for you but it’s more a kin to a calculator. It’s a tool to help people.

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    • CherenkovBlue@iusearchlinux.fyi ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I find it to be an excellent tool to help me write. Staring at a blank page is one of the hardest hurdles to overcome. By asking questions to chatGPT, I start organizing my thoughts about what I want to write, and it gives me instant words on the page to start manipulating. I am a subject matter expert on these topics and therefore screen what it gives me for correctness. It’s surprisingly good, but it has hallucinated some things. But on the balance I find it very helpful.

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  • sumofchemicals@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I have seen someone type “tell me how make a million dollar business” into chatgpt. Of course that’s not going to work. But LLMs have immediate obvious value that crypto does not, and I think making the comparison reveals a lack of experience with those useful applications. I’m using chatgpt nearly every day as a tool to help with coding. It’s not a replacement for a person, but it is like giving a person a forklift.

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• BellaDonna@mujico.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It’s the same way that people are convinced I’m way smarter than I actually am, it’s the way I construct sentences and respond, the words I choose, not to much the substance and verity of.

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• lily33@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  BTW, how does the L4sBot decide which articles to post?

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  • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I don’t know, but I’m guessing it’s style over substance.

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