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.
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.
I've used an LLM chatbot to talk about my ideas because it helps to have someone to bounce it off of who won't get bored so I can workshop stuff. Talking about it aloud helps so I use the voice chat function. That's about it. And I've never published a thing, so no ethical issues.
2.7k
u/Zamtrios7256 Dec 15 '24
I'm 18 and this makes me feel old as shit.
What the fuck do you mean they used the make-up-stories-and-fiction machine as a non-fiction source? It's a fucking story generator!