Paleonet: Mucking about with ChatGPT

Mon Oct 9 10:16:01 UTC 2023

Jere,
I cannot remember what version it was, but it was a freebie, and given that
it was in April, it was quite early in the game. I am working on a report
for the Wiso Basin and I wanted to try to get an introduction to it, which
could act as a starting structure for me to flesh out with real data.

John

On Mon, 9 Oct 2023 at 20:57, Jere LIPPS <jlipps at berkeley.edu> wrote:

> Was it ChatGPT 4.0 or the earlier 3.5 that you used?   I understand the
> paid 4.0 is much better but at $20/month may not be worth the annual cost
> of $240.  3.5 is not very good at writing and lots of errors appear in it
> by finding associations in docs that are restated as answers .  For
> example, in a test, it erroneously wrote that I got my BA at Berkeley while
> the association was my faculty position where I advised BA students.  But
> it’s pretty good at doing helpful outlines of papers or books, like “write
> an outline for a book (or paper) on Ice Age mammals”.  I think it’s going
> to get a lot better but like so many things in our world, it will have both
> good and bad aspects.  We need to be careful and figure out how to control
> it.  Can it ever be an author on a paper.  Yes, I’m sure, and as a seeker
> of scientific information I would not care much, but as an author myself or
> one in need of rewards for writing papers, I would have problems with it.
> Should be real interesting as more uses come up for it.  It’s already
> doing a lot, like in medicine, manufacturing, recycling, and others.
>
> Control it,
>
> Jere
> Jere Lipps
> jlipps at berkeley.edu
>
> On Oct 8, 2023, at 10:37, N. MacLeod <n.macleod9 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 
> I dunno. In a lot of the things I read these days the style and the
> substance are pretty lousy. If Chat GPT and its ilk can get halfway there
> it's still doing better than a lot of real people.
>
> But I agree, there is much misunderstanding regarding what Large Language
> Models and associated software like ChatGPT were developed to do. Still,
> it's early days. Who knows what this technology will develop into in 10, 20
> or 50 years? The interesting thing is that very few expected us to have
> electronic systems that perform as well as ChatGPT even 5 years ago.
> Nevertheless, ChatGPT puts me in mind of the old quip about the
> bicycle-riding bear. The bear's act was impressive not because it rode the
> bicycle well, but because it was able to ride it at all. It's long been
> established that bears can be trained to ride bicycles and that's an
> accomplishment of note. But I have yet to see a bear who can ride one well
> and I don't expect to see such a bear anytime soon.
>
> Norm MacLeod
>
>
> Thomas Richard Holtz <tholtz at umd.edu>
> 8 October 2023 at 14:38
> Many people have a HUGE misunderstanding of what ChatGPT is. It is not a
> replacement for a Google (or similar) search engines.
>
> It is a human language emulator, and does that pretty well. I can
> duplicate many different styles of human writing (conversation, essay,
> poetry, recipes, scientific papers, etc.) quite accurately. Note that it is
> the STYLE of these things, not the substance! It just makes up "facts" to
> populate the content of these texts that are in the style of (and often
> created by the combination of real elements of) comparable components of
> the thing it is trying to emulate. So it will create out of whole cloth
> (well, out of "0"s and "1"s)  references and bibliographic information,
> 'data', and so on. Accuracy is not the function; style is.
>
> Furthermore, its corpus of material to draw upon is not up-to-date. I'm
> not sure about the current version, but the one available earlier this year
> only used a database up to 2020 upon which to create its simulations.
>
> I was astonished over the last year by people thinking that some of its
> features were new, or significant. I heard reporters saying "You can ask it
> to write you a recipe" or "you can look up medical symptoms to figure out
> your likely condition." Had these people never Googled a recipe or medical
> symptoms (note: not advocating "Dr. Google" here...) before??
>
>
>
> --
>
> Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
> Email: tholtz at umd.edu         Phone: 301-405-4084
> Principal Lecturer, Vertebrate Paleontology
>
> Office: Geology 4106, 8000 Regents Dr., College Park MD 20742
>
> Dept. of Geology, University of Maryland
> http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/
>
> Phone: 301-405-6965
> Fax: 301-314-9661
>
> Faculty Director, Science & Global Change Program, College Park Scholars
>
> Office: Centreville 1216, 4243 Valley Dr., College Park MD 20742
> http://www.geol.umd.edu/sgc
> Fax: 301-314-9843
>
> Mailing Address:        Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
>                         Department of Geology
>                         Building 237, Room 1117
>
>                         8000 Regents Drive
>                         University of Maryland
>                         College Park, MD 20742-4211 USA
>
>
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>
> Dr. Norman MacLeod
> Professor
> School of Earth Sciences & Engineering,
> Nanjing University, 163 Xianlin Avenue, Nanjing
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