ChatGPT
Have you run across this “artificial intelligence” interactive program that will ask follow-up questions and do specific research? I have not had a chance to use it yet, however, I’m sure we all will be using a form of this in the very near future.
Reading about the ChatGPT program, I stumbled across some of its limitations. From the website:
ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Fixing this issue is challenging, as: (1) during RL training, there’s currently no source of truth; (2) training the model to be more cautious causes it to decline questions that it can answer correctly; and (3) supervised training misleads the model because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows.
From <https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/>
This struct me as particularly funny: I routinely talk with people who have the same issues. “Plausible-sounding incorrect or nonsensical answers; no source of truth, declining to answer questions correctly.” Maybe I’m being intransigent, but I don’t need an obtuse AI interaction when I can talk to people.
ChatGPT is sensitive to tweaks to the input phrasing or attempting the same prompt multiple times. For example, given one phrasing of a question, the model can claim to not know the answer, but given a slight rephrase, can answer correctly.
From <https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/>
Again, just slightly changing how one asks a question will elicit a different response. Is it like interacting with a twelve year old? I have heard that students are using ChatGPT to write research papers. The software is doing all the research and writing, without the student even reading the paper, let alone editing it. It seems that a ChatGPT paper will pass anti-plagiarism software tests.
So far, so what? The point that struct me was “source of truth.” We as Christians have the source of truth.
The Word became flesh and dwelled among us. We have seen his glory, the glory he has as the only-begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.
John [the Baptist] testified about him. He cried out, “This was the one I spoke about when I said, ‘The one coming after me outranks me because he existed before me.’” For out of his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. The only-begotten Son, who is close to the Father’s side, has made him known.
From <https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%201&version=EHV>
I am sure that ChatGPT would ask, much like Pontius Pilate, “What is truth?” (John 18:38) How would you respond? How would you respond if asked by a non-artificial intelligence, that is a person?
Trust the Promises
Steve Skiver