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One of my favorite things to cover and write about concerning the Orioles, many fans know, is the farm. I love to tell behind the scenes stories of the young kids and prospects on the way up. Get to know them in places like Aberdeen and Bowie before they get to Baltimore. A young pitcher I have interviewed a couple of times now and reall…
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Thirty years on this earth today. Ten years a Catholic yesterday. Lots of little milestones happening. God is good.
Can I give a shout-out here to LLMs like ChatGPT, because that entire field seems to be a massive multi-billion dollar case of Gell-Mann amnesia? And by "shout-out" I mean "rant", obviously.
People keep telling me how amazing the results they get from ChatGPT are; and invariably on objective inspection the results are, in fact, at best shallow, generic, and non-useful*; at worst contradictory, incomplete or downright wrong. (And that's without even getting into the hallucination problem).
I have tried asking people to pose ChatGPT a request in there own area of expertise and then read it critically, i.e. not interpolating the things they themselves know between the things ChatGPT actually said. And to no surprise they say "huh, that is shallow, generic, non-useful, and in places downright wrong."** And then they go right back to being impressed by everything ChatGPT does outside their area of expertise.
In other words, people are treating ChatGPT with the exact same credulity that they would treat a newspaper or another person, and a big reason for that is that it sounds so fluent. As the late Cliff Nass demonstrated, we subconsciously and compulsively treat computer interfaces that use language as people because our entire experience up to now of "things that use language" is people. (The Media Equation is a great read.) Even techies who know better fall for this. And LLMs are crap at absolutely everything _except using language fluently_, which they are really good at.
Anyway, it's good to have a name for why people are so easily impressed by ChatGPT***. Gell-Mann amnesia.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
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*For example, "how to build a boat". "Step 1: Obtain suitable wood. It should be strong and waterproof." Step 2: Calculate how much wood you will need."
**ChatGPT operates at the level of a high school junior with a deadline tomorrow, a cavalier disregard for references, and no more ambition than a passing grade. And those are its good points.
***Being impressed by ChatGPT is like believing that a stage magician is doing real magic, _even after they have shown you how the trick is done_.
