> just surrender to it all, believe in all the machine tells you unquestionably, forget the fact checking, it feels good to be ignorant... it will be fine...

It's the same issue with Google Search, any web page, or, heck, any book. Fact checking gets you only so far. You need critical thinking. It's okay to "learn" wrong facts from time to time as long as you are willing to be critical and throw the ideas away if they turn out to be wrong. I think this Popperian view is much more useful than living with the idea that you can only accept information that is provably true. Life is too short to verify every fact. Most things outside programming are not even verifiable anyway. By the time that Steve Jobs would have "verified" that the iPhone was certainly a good idea to pursue, Apple might have been bankrupt. Or in the old days, by the time you have verified that there is a tiger in the bush, it has already eaten you.

There's a lot of truth in this comment and a lot that I wholeheartedly agree with.

When I spend time on something that turns out to be incorrect, I would prefer it to be because of choice I made instead of some random choice made by an LLM. Maybe the author is someone I'm interested in, maybe there's value in understanding other sides of the issue, etc. When I learn something erroneous from an LLM, all I know is that the LLM told me.

The issue is far more serious with ChatGPT/similar models because things that are laughably untrue are delivered exactly the same as something that's solidly true. When doing a normal search I can make some assessment on the quality of the source and the likelihood the source is wrong.

People should be able "throw the ideas away if they turn out to be wrong" but the problem is these ideas unconsciously or not help build your model of the world. Once you find out something isn't true it's hard to unpick your mental model of the world.

> Once you find out something isn't true it's hard to unpick your mental model of the world.

Intuitively, I would think the same, but a book about education research that I read and my own experience taught me that new information is surprisingly easy to unlearn. It’s probably because new information sits at the edges of your neural networks and do not yet provide a foundation for other knowledge. This will only happen if the knowledge stands the test of time (which is exactly how it should be according to Popper). If a counterexample is found, then the information can easily be discarded since it’s not foundational anyway and the brain learns the counterexample too (the brain is very good in remembering surprising things).

That presumes the wrong information is corrected quickly. What about the cases when that doesn't happen? Aren't you often finding out things you thought were true from years ago are wrong?

You weigh new information by how confident you are in it. You try to check different sources, you maintain an open-mind, etc. In that, ChatGPT is just an additional low-reliability source of information.

I just verify the information I need. I find it useful as a sort of search engine for solutions. Like, how could I use generators as hierarchical state machines? Are there other approaches that would work? What are some issues with these solutions? Etc. By the end I have enough information to begin searching the web for comparisons, other solutions, and so on.

The benefit is that I got a quick look at various solutions and quickly satisfied a curiosity, and decided if I’m interested in the concept or not. Without AI, I might just leave the idea alone or spend too much time figuring it out. Or perhaps never quite figure out the terms of what I’m trying to discover, as it’s good at connecting dots when you have an idea with some missing pieces.

I wouldn’t use it for a conversation about things as others are describing. I need a way to verify its output at any time. I find that idea bizarre. Just chatting with a hallucinating machine. Yet I still find it useful as a sort of “idea machine”.

I think this is a fine use case though because you're doing your due diligence. The problems arise when you don't do this.

I think even if an AGI was created, and humans survived this event. I'd still have trouble trusting it.

The quote "trust but verify" is everything to me.

The smart people I've seen using ChatGPT always double check the facts it gives. However, the truth is that RLHF works well to extinguish these lies over time. As more people use the platform and give feedback, the thing gets better. And now, I find it to be pretty darn accurate.

> The smart people I've seen using ChatGPT always double check the facts it gives.

I don't like being told lies in the first place and having to unlearn it.

It doesn't help that I might as well have just gone straight to the "verification" instead.

I don't know. The other day I was asking about a biology topic and it straight up gave me a self-contradicting chemical reaction process description. It kept doing that after I pointed out the contradiction. Eventually I got out of this hallucination loop by resetting the conversation and asking again.

It's smart but can also be very dumb.

I see this conversation pretty frequently and I think the root of it lies in the fact that we have mental heuristics for determining whether we need to fact check another human because they are a bullshitter, an idiot, a charlatan etc, but most people haven’t really developed this sense for AIs.

I think the current state of AI trustworthiness (“very impressive and often accurate but occasionally extremely wrong”) triggers similar mental pathways to interacting with a true sociopath or pathological liar for the first time in real life, which can be intensely disorienting and cause one to question their trust in everyone else, as they try to comprehend this type of person.

Ignorance is Strength