ChatGPT is a creative engine that knows how to Google

Finally got around to playing with ChatGPT more, by asking it about something I do know about. Myself. A little light getting around the shrug, don’t know anything about this person, reaction, and I’m starting to get a few more opinions about how it works.

First, chatGPT results are based on human data. A lot of human data. Whilst most people would expect this to mean chatGPT giving them really detailed information about a subject, what appears to happen with a human subject is a response that’s an amalgam of similar people, and/or things triggered by the exact words used in the prompt. “Tell me about x” isn’t the same as “write an article about x in the style of [NPR, New York Times, etc]”. What comes back looks like a junior writer whose funded themselves through college by writing the person summaries you see on websites and dust jackets has been handed a name and Google and told to get on with it. Granted, it’s fast. And granted, it could be a really useful dust jacket generator. But it’s not quite all the story that could be told.

And a lot of this is because of the nature of generative AI. It generates words, sentences, paragraphs, articles, based on all the things it’s triggered by. And if that’s something broad like ‘this is a person’, there’s going to be a lot of mixing of the specific (about that person) and the more general (about similar people to this one). There’s also a bunch of reinforcement learning being used in the background, which is basically a posh way of saying “we used a huge amount of data to figure out the best expert system we could throw at this problem”, but that’s a thought for another day.

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