Second heat wave in full swing. Can’t sit on the sunny balcony for fear of getting fried.
@futurebird recently said: „Just because chatGPT answers questions doesn’t mean that it knows anything.“
I started thinking back to what I had heard from my wife. In her office, a young assistant was sponsored for some classes and happily told my wife how everybody in the class had used ChatGPT to do the test and had been found out… and my wife and I talked about the problem that if the bot could pass their test then there was no point in passing since the bot was also going to get their job.
We need to grappling with the bots, I fear. When people around me are too enthusiastic, I try to use the phrase “mansplaining as a service” which I got from somebody on fedi, I think. That bot is always so confident, reassuring, polite – and mainstream, with the least surprising answers, the answers you really want to hear, true or not… like the worst advisors in a fantasy novel or in a bad movie about dictators.
I fear the tone is exactly what we want when we’re unsure. It really is a brain worm.
People also say that the bots can’t program but neither can StackExchange and I used that a lot when programming. Type a few words, look at questions and answers, write code, come back with more questions… all this is also a kind of dialogue, and all the networking and searching and all the question and answer writing is also a kind of exploitation and a waste of CO₂ … so what now?
When we need to choose between two evils in the climate debate it’s often best to chose neither. Gasoline cars or electrical vehicles? How about walking or bicycles? Chat bots or Stack Exchange? How about better man pages? It’s a big reason for me liking Perl.
#Bots #Artificial Intelligence