Paleonet: Mucking about with ChatGPT
Dee Ann Cooper
deeanncooper at yahoo.com
Mon Oct 9 12:45:53 UTC 2023
For what it’s worth, I don’t like it … just another way to “dumb down” … especially students.
Dee Ann Cooper, BS, MS, PG
State of Texas Licensed Professional Geologist No. 3328
Research Fellow, Non-vertebrate Paleontology
Jackson School of Geosciences
The University of Texas at Austin
(409) 651-7619Address: 17890 Nonie Lane
Lumberton, TX 77657
On Monday, October 9, 2023, 4:58 AM, 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,
JereJere Lippsjlipps 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 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
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Fax: 301-314-9843
Mailing Address: Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
Department of Geology
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University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742-4211 USA
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