Fred Martin writes:

>  It's pretty interesting though that GPT gets basic facts wrong, as Dave
>  reported.  Isn't that a big problem?

It is certainly a problem to use ChatGPT as a substitute for a Google
search, as it will happily spew nonsense.

But where the current ChatGPT is really useful is as an idea generator.
For example, I asked it "If one were soliciting suggestions for an
eighth deadly sin, what would the most fun ones be?"  Some of its
proposals were redundant with the existing seven (e.g., "greed" or
"envy"), but I thought "complacency" and "narcissism" were interesting
suggestions.

I also asked it "Suppose that at least some of the reported sightings of
ghosts turn out to be factual. Explain why the ghosts always appear
wearing clothing."  Again, it generated several plausible explanations.

I wasn't aware of this until now, but there are actually a bunch of web
pages out there that tackle the problem of "apparitional clothing", as
you can find if you Google "Why do ghosts wear clothes?"  ChatGPT
probably drew on these resources since it seems to have been trained on
some large subset of the English world wide web.  Nonetheless, it earns
kudos for nicely summarizing these ideas in a few paragraphs that
directly provided answers to my question.

So perhaps we'll see ChatGPT used as a speculation or brainstorming tool
rather than a reference source.  In brainstorming, you want to generate
lots of ideas and don't expect all of them to be good.  It suffices if
one of them turns out to be good.

================

In ancient times, some people argued against the widespread introduction
of literacy because it would lead to the decline of culturally important
oral traditions.  In my own youth, some people argued against the
introduction of calculators in schools because it would deter students
from learning to perform computations on their own.  In both cases, the
opponents fought a losing battle.  I have a similar feeling about
GPT-3.5 and its future progeny.  We're all going to learn to live with
this, and in the end we'll be better off for it.

-- Dave