MudMan ,
@MudMan@fedia.io avatar

I am endlessly frustrated by people "testing" chatbots and posting the results like they're some revelation.

We know what's happening here. It's not a mystery. This weird antropomorphization is prevalent on both advocates and critics of the tech. Both seem to be convinced that they're dealing with a person.

This is the equivalent of asking a Google search to write a critical essay on A Confederacy of Dunces and being surprised when it spits search results.

Chatbots aren't useless, they are actually pretty good at proposing likely responses on fuzzy prompts. They're decent at telling you what an old movie may be based on some details of the plot, sometimes they can identify why a joke you lack cultural context to understand is supposed to be funny... that type of thing. They can take a piece of text and provide another piece of text that is likely to have a relationship with it.

It is not a thinking machine. It is not a person. It's not a search engine, for that matter, or a calculator. It's infuriating to see everybody arguing about how good it is at being what it's not. Both parties are buying into a premise we already know to be incorrect.

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