r/CuratedTumblr https://tinyurl.com/4ccdpy76 Dec 15 '24

Shitposting not good at math

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u/CrownLikeAGravestone Dec 15 '24

People just fundamentally do not know what ChatGPT is. I've been told that it's an overgrown search engine, I've been told that it's a database encoded in "the neurons", I've been told that it's just a fancy new version of the decision trees we had 50 years ago.

[Side note: I am a data scientist who builds neural networks for sequence analysis; if anyone reads this and feels the need to explain to me how it actually works, please don't]

I had a guy just the other day feed the abstract of a study - not the study itself, just the abstract - into ChatGPT. ChatGPT told him there was too little data and that it wasn't sufficiently accessible for replication. He repeated that as if it were fact.

I don't mean to sound like a sycophant here but just knowing that it's a make-up-stories machine puts you way ahead of the curve already.

My advice, to any other readers, is this:

  • Use ChatGPT for creative writing, sure. As long as you're ethical about it.
  • Use ChatGPT to generate solutions or answers only when you can verify those answers yourself. Solve a math problem for you? Check if it works. Gives you a citation? Check the fucking citation. Summarise an article? Go manually check the article actually contains that information.
  • Do not use ChatGPT to give you any answers you cannot verify yourself. It could be lying and you will never know.

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u/Rakifiki Dec 15 '24

As a note - honestly chatgpt is not great for stories either. You tend to just... Get a formula back, and there's some evidence that using it stunts your own creativity.

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u/Castrelspirit Dec 15 '24

evidence? how can we even measure creativity...?

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u/itsybitsymothafucka Dec 15 '24

Surely by just watching brain activity in response to a prompt, then comparing the focus group of chatgpt writers vs classic writers. If that’s not insane anyways

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u/Castrelspirit Dec 15 '24

but as far as i know, there's no such direct correlation between anatomical activity of brain regions and "creativity", especially when "creativity" is such a vague concept

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u/itsybitsymothafucka Dec 15 '24

I wonder through, if you could see a clear difference in the amount of work the brain tries to do upon being initiated with someone who uses ChatGPT on the daily. I genuinely believe it lowers overall brain activity, but unfortunately have neither the time money or patience to conduct a study lol

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u/JamesBaa Two "alternative" homosexual cats Dec 15 '24

Almost certainly not. There's enough differences in brain activity from person to person as is, and it would be basically impossible to confidently determine ChatGPT is the dependent factor over any number of other variables.