Another elephant in the room
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From r/ChatGPT:
Follow-up:
Cue George Lakoff?
There are surprisingly many standard elephant metaphors: the elephant in the room, the blind men and the elephant, and the hypothetical results of telling someone not to think of an elephant, which was around before George used it as the way to frame framing.
AntC said,
March 1, 2025 @ 4:45 am
On ChatGPT's inability to 'translate' words into images, there's a (over-long) Youtube from a few days ago "Why Can’t ChatGPT Draw a Full Glass of Wine?". If it's correctly reporting ChatGPT's words, I'm quite impressed at how fulsomely it can apologise.
Today from ChatGPT (I was asking for a solution to a letter-puzzle)
> The letters "CEHILRTWY" can be rearranged to form the word "WHEELCITY."
(This is no more fun than shooting fish in a barrel.)
Richard Hershberger said,
March 1, 2025 @ 7:18 am
I can imagine using Chat GPT or the like as a first-run research tool. I have two tests. The first is to ask it Bobby Mathews's ERA in 1884. The Individual and year are arbitrary. The point is that this information is a discrete fact, and is readily available on the web. I have been using this test for some years now. The AIs with voice-based interface are completely flustered. The older AIs with text interfaces couldn't tell me the answer, but would give me a link to the right baseball-reference page. The newer AIs are far worse, confidently bullshitting.
The second test is based on the biography of Tom Miller. Miller played professional baseball briefly in the 1870s, but is justifiably obscure today. I got interested in him some years back and wrote a biography for the SABR bioproject. This is the only source on the net for anything more than the statistical record. The test is to ask the AI to give me a three paragraph summary of his biography. Fair is fair: I specify that I am asking about the 1870s professional baseball player. What comes back is pure blather and bullshit. I next try directing the AI to the SABR bioproject page, either descriptively orby providing the URL. This helps only a little.
If I paste in the text from the SABR page I get a reasonable summary. This is, from my perspective, AI's one useful capability. But for going out an finding something, even with hand-holding, it is worse than useless.