Comment by elbasti
2 years ago
This is exactly the failure mode of GPTs that make me worry about the future idiotization of the world.
"Rubber ducks float because they are made of a material less dense than water" both is wrong but sounds reasonable. Call it a "bad grade school teacher" kind of mistake.
Pre-gpt, however, it's not the kind of mistake that would make it to print: people writing about rubber ducks were probably rubber duck experts (or had high school level science knowledge).
Print Is cite-able. Print perpetuates and reinforces itself. Some day someone will write a grade school textbook built with GPTs, that will have this incorrect knowledge, and so on.
But what will become of us when most gateways to knowledge are riddled with bullshit like this?
I think the exact opposite will happen. When I was in school, we were taught never to trust online sources, and students always rolled their eyes at teachers for being behind the times. Meanwhile, the internet slowly filled up with junk and bad information and horrible clickbait and “alternative facts”. GPT hallucinations are just the latest version of unreliable “user generated content”. And it’s going to be everywhere, and indistinguishable from any other content.
People will gladly tell you there’s so much content online and it’s so great that you don’t need college anymore (somewhat true). The internet has more facts, more knowledge, updated more often, than any written source in time. It’s just being lost in a sea of junk. Google won’t be able to keep up at indexing all the meaningless content. They won’t be able to provide meaningful search and filtering against an infinite sea of half truths and trash. And then they’ll realize they shouldn’t try, and the index will become a lot more selective.
Today, no one should trust online information. You should only trust information that genuinely would have editors and proof teams and publishers. I think this will finally swing the pendulum back to the value of publishers and gatekeepers of information.
Yup! With search results being so bad these days, I've actually "regressed" to reading man pages, books and keeping personal notes. I found that I learn more and rely less on magic tools in the process.
Have you heard of Wikipedia? It’s actually rather good.
> will become of us when most gateways to knowledge are riddled with bullshit like this?
I think we're already here. I asked Google Bard about the rubber ducks, then about empty plastic bottles. Bard apparently has a "fact check" mode that uses Google search.
It rated "The empty water bottle is made of plastic, which has a density lower than water" as accurate, using a Quora response which stated the same thing as a citation. We already have unknowlagable people writing on the internet; if anything these I hope these new AI things and the increased amount of bullshit will teach people to be more skeptical.
(and for what it's worth, ChatGPT 4 accurately answers the same question)
Some rubber is less dense than water, and certainly the type in a rubbery ducky would be
FWIW those bathtub ducks are made of vinyl, not rubber, but more to the point given that it's hollow it's not the density of the material that determines whether it floats. A steel aircraft carrier floats too.
Perhaps today they’re vinyl, mostly, but the AI wasn’t wrong in saying that if the duck was made of rubber it’d be less dense than water
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Modern 'rubber ducks' similar to the one in the picture aren't even made out of rubber but plastic. They get called rubber ducks because they were make of rubber when invented in the late 1800s. Amazing what you can learn on Wikipedia.