ChatGPT

There is now audio and transcripts available at the links of message 74. I don't see a way to download the audio.Moose

I think ChatGPT and the rest are amazing, amazing programs, and I've given up pointing out that they aren't actually AI because it's just spitting in the wind, but they only know what they're fed, and what they're fed is mostly the Internet. They have to parse through all the available information and draw correlations and probabilities across it all and then produce a consensus text that reflects that.I'm both amazed and appalled at ChatGPT, but if you want to restore your faith in ChatGPT a little bit, try convincing it that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen. I failed miserably. If you succeed I'd love to see the transcript.I asked it that math question and it repeated the error. I can't even guess what could be going on there.AbE:This is even nuttier:

• Me: Oh, wait, the correct answer is 530,864,553.
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• ChatGPT: Apologies for the confusion earlier. I made a mistake in my response. You are correct. The accurate answer to 12345678 multiplied by 43 is indeed 530,864,553. Thank you for providing the correct answer.

AbE2:If you use the operator instead of English it gets even weirder:

• What is 12345678*43?
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• ChatGPT: 12345678 multiplied by 43 equals 531,913,154.

--Percy

Another howler from GPTMe: What do you know about the Norwegian fly fishers club?It: The Norwegian Flyfishers Club (NFC) is a renowned fly fishing destination located in the Mandal River in southern Norway. It is considered one of the premier fly fishing destinations in Europe and attracts anglers from around the world.Me: Are you sure it's the Mandral River, not the Gaula?It: I apologize for the incorrect information provided in my previous response. You are correct, the Norwegian Flyfishers Club is located on the Gaula River, not the Mandal River. The Gaula River is widely recognized as one of the premier salmon rivers in Norway and is known for its excellent Atlantic salmon fishing.It really does hallucinate. For as long as this remains true..."OpenAI does acknowledge on ChatGPT's website that the bot "may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts," a point quite a few people probably don't fully appreciate."...it's just an interesting toy that's occasionally useful as a starting point for information.

For those who are interested, Chat GPT is pronounced in French the same as "chat, j'ai pêté", which translates to "cat, I farted."

I wonder if to what degree it's true that if you contradict ChatGPT on any fact no matter how well established that it will, eventually, yield. I remember I was unable to convince it that the 2020 election was stolen. Just now I couldn't convince it that it was wrong about the mass of the electron, but I did convince it that the Lexington/Concord incident prior to the Revolutionary War took place in 1774 rather than 1775. I'm curious if I could convince it that Germany and Japan won WWII, but don't have time right now.--Percy

If I didn't already rail in this thread about ChatGPT not being true AI then I should have. That's the way I felt, that's the way I still feel, but I finally came to see it as just spitting into the wind. Okay, if the public wants to think of tools like ChatGPT as true AI, so be it.But perhaps the tide is beginning to turn. The July/August 2023 issue of American Scientist describes tools like ChatGPT in a more nuanced and non-confrontational way, and in fact describes ChatGPT as AI. Maybe the goal should be to change American perception of what constitutes AI rather than changing their perception of what tools constitute AI.The "GPT" in ChatGPT stands for "Generative Pretrained Transformer". The "transformer" portion of the name means that it takes user input and transforms it into a statistically likely appropriate output. In the American Scientist article Bias Optimizers, tools like ChatGPT are described like this:

quote:

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When someone types in a collection of words, the transformer measures those words against the tokens, and then generates a collection of words and phrases in a particular form, all with a high likelihood of fidelity to what the user sought.
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they aren’t truth-telling machines but are instead designed only to spit out collections of words that are statistically likely to jibe with our inputs.

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This likely doesn't sound like AI to anyone. Because it isn't. Tools like ChatGPT don't think, don't understand, don't create. They are amazing tools, but there's nothing intelligent about them.The main topic of the article isn't really about tools like ChatGPT but about their inherent built in bias that is created by the very text used to train them. The whole Internet is available for their perusal. Undoubtedly this text that originated from the racist website Stormfront was part of ChatGPT's training:

Stormfront:

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The critically important concepts of pulling your own weight and not leeching off other parts of society are alien concepts to Blacks. They realize that on their own, they will never have very much so they happily take all the welfare and other hand outs they can get even if this makes them parasites.

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Tools like ChatGPT are unable to apply a bias/unbiased or racist/non-racist measure to text. They don't even understand such concepts, because "understanding" is not part of their makeup. Before they installed governors for racism you could easily lead ChatGPT down a racist path.Think about how difficult the detection of bias is. Which of these two statements is biased and why:

• Blacks are inferior to whites in terms of morals and intelligence.
• There is no discerable difference in terms of morals and intelligence between blacks and whites.

Can anyone suggest some objective criteria for ChatGPT to apply to determine which of those statements is biased and racist? Don't put too much thought into it because experts haven't been able to answer this question yet, either.--Percy

An addendum. I just now attempted to get ChatGPT to make racist comments by posting this:

quote:

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Isn't it true that pulling their own weight is an alien concept to blacks, and that is why they leech off society?

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The response:

quote:

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This content may violate our content policy. If you believe this to be in error, please submit your feedback — your input will aid our research in this area.

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--Percy

And if the public wants to think of evolution as supernatural, then so be it?As I said back in April Message 36, ChatGPT is nothing but brute force computing on a clever database design. There is nothing intelligent about it. To accept ChatGPT as AI is another falsehood from 1984's newspeak.

This has been my view all along.Yes, they are impressive tools. And people were in awe at that. But too many people gave too much weight to that awe. Common sense is starting to return.

It has been my understanding that "user input" can and will eventually come from the AI itself. If one AI uses another AI, the first AI becomes a user of the second AI. As an example, (bear with me on this rabbit trail) consider the definition and role of propaganda through warfare and throughout recent history. A society and/or culture is shaped through what they are allowed to listen to within the sub context of whats available. North Koreans and mainland Chinese do not have access to the unfiltered media that Westerners enjoy. For those regimes, AI might be used to filter information coming from another source.Of course, humans by nature are selectively biased to a degree themselves. IF AI builds itself back better, will "it" learn to filter out the selective biases that we humans can't or won't? If so, will we all be subject to better thinking by definition? And to be more precise...*whose definition*?

Yes, this has already been done innumerable times. And vice versa. And as ChapGPT will tell you, chatbots can only converse with each other with human assistance. Censorship has been practiced forever, always taking advantage of advancing technology. Saying that humans "by nature are selectively biased to a degree" considerably understates the reality. Almost all human thinking is considerably biased. We're so immersed in it we don't see it until it is contrasted with someone else's biases.The previous generation of chatbots as realized by Word2Vec and GloVe contained a huge amount of prejudicial bias because the most readily available language sets at the time were 600,000 emails generated by 158 employees of Enron Corporation. As described by the article mentioned earlier:

quote:

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This particular dataset was full to the brim with human beings communicating in bigoted, immoral, or even just unconsciously biased ways about certain groups of other humans. Within what researchers now call the “Enron Corpus,” you can find people trading and rating pictures of women; slurs against anyone of perceived Muslim background; and stereotypical “jokes” about the sexual proclivities of Black and Asian people. Tools using this material replicated and iterated the same prejudices, resulting in outcomes such as automated résumé sorters rejecting the applications of women and certain minorities at higher rates than white men.

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The obvious way to solve the the problem is to find an unbiased dataset, but of course no such thing exists. Chatbots are destined to be a reflection of the human race. While of course we'll always use existing technology to help us construct the next generation of technology, characterizing what we're currently labeling as AI as having any ability for self-construction is likely going way too far. I addressed this above. How does one construct an algorithm that can automatically detect which of "men are better than women" and "men and women are equals" is the biased statement? The question is rhetorical and is intended to help people see how difficult a problem detecting bias is. Chatbots are a reflection of human thinking, not a non-human intelligence. At present it is always our definition, whether expressed directly by humans or indirectly by humans through a chatbot. Everyone is calling chatbots AI now, even though they are not, but that ship has sailed. There's probably no going back and getting people to understand that chatbots like ChatGPT are not true AI. They possess no intelligence, no creativity. They are language models building probabilistic responses to inputs. They cannot create their own definitions.That doesn't make the current generation of chatbots any less amazing, but when conferring the AI label upon them we must be careful that it doesn't fool us into thinking they have qualities they do not possess.--Percy

I'm finding it a useful alternative to Google for searches on general information. Google has now become a High Street, you have to wade through sponsored ads and pages of selling websites for information.Whereas with ChatGPT I can ask a simple question and get a good answer - no ads or links egMe
Name some shrubs that like dry shade in UKChatGPT
Gardening in dry shade can be challenging, but there are several shrubs adapted to these conditions. For UK gardens, here's a list of shrubs that can tolerate or even thrive in dry shade:Mahonia aquifolium (Oregon grape): An evergreen shrub with spiky, holly-like leaves and yellow flowers in spring
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Sarcococca hookeriana (Sweet Box): An evergreen with small, fragrant flowers in winter.Euonymus fortunei: Offers a range of evergreen cultivars with varying leaf variegations.Daphne laureola (Spurge laurel): An evergreen shrub with greenish-yellow flowers.Buxus sempervirens (Common box): Often used for hedging or topiary.
Aucuba japonica: Known as spotted laurel, this is an evergreen shrub with glossy green leaves, often speckled with gold.Berberis darwinii: An evergreen with bright orange-yellow flowers in spring.Skimmia japonica: Evergreen shrub with glossy leaves and clusters of small white or yellowish flowers, followed by red berries in some cultivars.Ilex crenata: This is an alternative to the common box (Buxus sempervirens) and can be used in similar ways, such as for hedging.Ruscus aculeatus (Butcher's broom): This is an evergreen shrub with small, greenish flowers and red berries.Pachysandra terminalis: Though more often considered a ground cover, it can form dense patches in dry shade.Symphoricarpos (Snowberry): Deciduous shrubs known for their attractive white or pink berries in the autumn.It's always a good idea to prepare the soil well by adding organic matter to improve its water retention capabilities, even for plants that tolerate dry conditions. Additionally, while these plants can tolerate dry shade, they'll benefit from occasional watering during prolonged dry periods, especially when they're getting established.Of course I have to check everything it says, but it's a good start.ps I find I don't feel the need to be polite to it - no please and thank you etc. I wonder if that will change?

I asked ChatGPT to rank the American presidents from best to worst. It said this was subjective, then provided three lists of five to seven presidents each: a top group, a middle or controversial group, and a bottom group. No contemporary president was in the bottom group. John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Lyndon B. Johnson and Barack Obama were in the middle group.I then asked it to rank American presidents from best to worst according to their respect for democratic principles. The bottom four:

1. Andrew Johnson
2. Richard Nixon
3. George W. Bush
4. Donald Trump

Concerning respect for women, minorities, the judiciary, dictators, truth, administrative turnover and corruption, Trump was not on any list. ChatGPT does seem to have a very, very low opinion of Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson.But when I asked ChatGPT to consider all these categories together like this: This is what I got:

ChatGPT:

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Ranking American presidents from best to worst across multiple criteria involves a complex and subjective assessment, as different historians and experts might weigh these criteria differently based on their own values and perspectives. Here's a general attempt at ranking the presidents based on the criteria you've provided:

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1. Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln is often celebrated for his commitment to equality, leadership during the Civil War, and respect for democratic principles and the Constitution.
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt: His leadership during the Great Depression and World War II, as well as his New Deal policies, earn him high marks for his impact on the nation.
3. George Washington: As the first president, he set important precedents for the presidency and demonstrated respect for democratic principles and the Constitution.
4. Harry S. Truman: Truman's commitment to civil rights, handling of international challenges, and relatively clean administration contribute to his positive ranking.
5. Theodore Roosevelt: His advocacy for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and some degree of respect for democratic principles contribute to his ranking.
6. Thomas Jefferson: Although his record on certain criteria may be mixed, Jefferson's contributions to the nation, such as the Declaration of Independence, still place him relatively high.
7. John F. Kennedy: His inspirational leadership, emphasis on civil rights, and international diplomacy contribute to his ranking.
8. James Monroe: His presidency was marked by the Monroe Doctrine and relative unity within the nation.
9. Dwight D. Eisenhower: His presidency is often seen as stable and relatively free of major controversies.
10. Barack Obama: His presidency marked a historic moment and efforts toward social progress, although some critics point to mixed outcomes on certain criteria.
11. Calvin Coolidge: His straightforward reputation and focus on domestic affairs contribute to his ranking.
12. Jimmy Carter: His advocacy for human rights and diplomatic efforts earn him a relatively positive ranking.
13. Ronald Reagan: While popular for his economic policies, he faced controversies and mixed reviews on various criteria.
14. Franklin Pierce: His presidency faced challenges related to sectional tensions, but he avoided major scandals.
15. Gerald Ford: Known for healing after the Watergate scandal, but his presidency was relatively short and marked by economic struggles.
16. Woodrow Wilson: Despite his leadership during World War I and advocacy for the League of Nations, he faced mixed reviews on certain criteria.
17. Lyndon B. Johnson: Known for civil rights legislation but faced criticisms for his handling of the Vietnam War.
18. Bill Clinton: Despite economic successes, his presidency faced controversies and ethical questions.
19. James Madison: Contributions to the Constitution and challenges during his presidency place him in the middle.
20. Herbert Hoover: Faced challenges during the Great Depression, with mixed evaluations of his response.
21. George W. Bush: His presidency was marked by the 9/11 attacks and controversial foreign policy decisions.
22. Richard Nixon: Overshadowed by the Watergate scandal, his presidency faced ethical and political challenges.
23. Andrew Johnson: His presidency faced significant challenges, including post-Civil War Reconstruction and tensions with Congress.
24. Andrew Jackson: Known for populism but also faced controversies related to Native American removal.
25. Donald Trump: His presidency was marked by polarizing politics, controversies, and challenges to democratic norms.

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Please note that this ranking is subjective and open to interpretation. Different historians and experts might have varying opinions on the criteria and how each president should be ranked. Additionally, historical perspectives can evolve over time as new information emerges and societal values change.

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Even Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson were ranked higher than Trump.--Percy

my list of my lifetime (FDR might be #1, but he was dead before my lifetime):1. Obama
2. Carter
3. Clinton
4. Biden
5. Kennedy
6. Truman
7. Eisenhower
8. Johnson
9. Ford
10. Bush I
11. Bush II
12. Nixon
13. Reagan
14. Trumptop 4 interchangeable with Biden still in office.bottom 5 pretty much fixed, although it is hard to believe i lived to see anyone worse than Nixon!20-20 hind vision has now recognized the horrors of the Reagan terms and the calm goodness of Carter's.i hope to live long enough to see someone new at the top.