Half-time for ChatGPT’s 15 minutes of fame
I was drinking with an academic friend last week and the discussion topic moved to ChatGPT. Like many of us who have played with the software, we both marvelled at the rate with which the application can spew out coherent prose. The main problem is that much of it is bullshit.
Fabrication and embellishment is common in casual communications, however for industries that deal in verifiable facts anything that is asserted as a fact needs to be verified. My friend related the story how he asked ChatGPT for a reference list and summary of papers written about a particular topic. ChatGPT dutifully supplied 10 references, every one of which had been concocted by ChatGPT!!! The papers did not exist. The fact that ChatGPT elects to provide fairy stories to satisfy a user rather than say that it does not know anything truthful about a subject means it cannot be trusted. Humans can elect to embellish when it suits them or they can stick to the truth. ChatGPT seems to prefer to embellish as a preference.
This example alone means that I will not be using ChatGPT for anything other than correcting spelling errors. I am also prepared to call the end to the ChatGPT phenomenon and that it will go the way of Non-Fungible Tokens. Trust, it has been said, takes a lifetime to earn and a few minutes to squander. ChatGPT never earned our trust and will completely lose its followers as soon as they suffer from its lies. Chat GPT is halfway through its 15 minutes of fame.
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