Overview: Psychology

In this edition: join the ChatGPT integration free trial, check out the results of my latest experiments, and enjoy the Alliteration of the Month: Bullshit, Botshit and Bubbles.

According to:MIT Professor of AI Rodney Brooks, ChatGPT "“just makes up stuff that sounds good"... where “sounds good” is an algorithm to imitate text found on the internet, while “makes up” is the basic randomness of relying on predictive text rather than logic or facts",Geoff Hinton: "the greatest risks is not that chatbots w…

"how can you use ChatGPT to generate ideas and brainstorm within Obsidian?", which is currently my note-taking tool of choice. First, some generic advice for prompting:"be specific about the outcome that you want to achieve... providing a prompt that contains more descriptive language ...give preceding prompts ... [specify the] resp…

"You Are Not a Parrot and a chatbot is not a human" - an interview/profile of Emily M. Bender, the "computational linguist at the University of Washington ... [who] co-wrote the octopus paper... to illustrate what ... LLMs ... can and cannot do"The paper: "Climbing Towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Ag…

"What if we were to think of LLMs not as tools for answering questions, but as tools for asking us questions and inspiring our creativity? ... even simple tools can lead to interesting results when they clash with the contents of our minds"So he tries using ChatGPT as a muse. TL:DR; "ChatGPT asked me probing questions, suggested spe…

Interesting, illuminating (but contested) metaphor for thinking about LLMs from one of my favourite authors, Ted Chiang:"Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information... but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation... nonse…