this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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Asking ChatGPT for advice about anything is generally a bad idea, even though it might feel like a good idea at the time. ChatGPT responds with what it thinks you want to hear, just phrased in a way that sounds like actual advice. And especially since ChatGPT only knows as much information as you are willing to tell it, its input data is often biased. It's like an r/relationshipadvice or r/AITA thread, but on steroids.
You think it's good advice because it's what you wanted to do to begin with, and it's phrased in a way that makes your decision seem like the wise choice. Really, though, sometimes you just need to hear the ugly truth that you're making a bad choice, and that's not something that ChatGPT is able to do.
Anyways, I'm not saying that bosses are good at giving advice, but I think ChatGPT is definitely not better at giving advice than bosses are.
I'm not touting the merits of "prompt engineering" but this is a classical case.
Don't ask "how can I be a more attractive employee" ask "I am a manager at a company. Describe features and actions of a better candidate/ employee."
You will get very different answers
Well, yes, but lets get real here... Asking your boss about career advice is very often worse.
You are better with useless random information collected on the internet than what has been finely tailored against you.
Don't forget well-meaning advice from someone incompetent who failed upwards but still lacks the self-awareness to see it. I've had a few of those.
For these kind of generic questions, ChatGPT is great at giving you the common fluff you'd find in a random "10 ways to improve your career" youtube video.
Which may still be useful advice, but you can probably already guess what it's going to say before hitting enter.
Yeah for questions like that, take the top 10 results on google, throw them into a blender, and that will be ChatGPT’s answer
How would ChatGPT know what I want to hear?
Because of the way you phrase it.
You only tell chatGPT your side of the story. And chatGPT is just a word predictor. If you offer it 2 options, and for one of them you use words that are on average 20.69% more positive to describe the option than the other one, chatGPT just fills the blanks and will see that that option is more positive, therefore it will probably recommend that.
ChatGPT has no intelligence or reason, it's just a word predictor. It doesn't use logic. It won't do an analysis of the impact of each alternative, it just has some inputs and is asked to predict what the next word will be.
This is why it drives me insane that people call it AI
We're just word predictors too.
Yeah noticed this when I started to make chatgpt write more sentences in essay's I was doing. When you make chatgpt write the next sentence in a paragraph 9/10 times it just rewrites what you wrote in a different way.
Ask like an engineer, it will answer like an engineer. Ask like a moron, it will answer like a moron -- all that is inherent in the training data, in the question/answer pairs the thing was trained on. Ask it to impersonate a Vulkan, it will get better at maths: My armchair analysis of that is that Vulkans talk quite formally and thus you're getting more from the engineer and less from the moron training set.
I actually saw an article on researchers that found it answers better if you ask it to answer like it was in star Trek
Which definitely can't be the case because Star Trek technobabble makes sense is what I'm saying, but the language mirrors that of what you see on an engineer forum so the increased accuracy smears over.
Somewhat relatedly if you want to talk about real-world warp engines (there's some physicists with some ideas or maybe better put speculations) it's probably going to start talking in StarTrek technobabble. Less "turn it off and on again", more "reinitialise the primary power coupling".
It's great for brainstorming and getting started on a problem, but you need to keep what you said in mind the whole time and verify its output. I've found it really good for troubleshooting. It's wrong a lot of the time but it does lead you in the right direction which is very helpful for problems where it's hard to know where to even start.
Haha chat gpt is really just the memory parasites from Rick and Morty.
Nonsense. Not "about anything". ChatGPT gives correct advice in many fields, some of which are directly verifiable - for example programming.
I mean google search kinda famously sucks these days bc it's been SEO'd and ad-promoted to death