But it doesn't know what the hell it's doing. Don't believe its lies.
General qualms and worries about our AI-filled future aside, I recognize the utility of ChatGPT. I go there periodically mostly to clarify something I don't feel like googling. However, recent changes have shown it to be very forward in offering to draw you a diagram of your current topic. With the whole internet out there, you'd think it'd be better to include some results from an image search, but it doesn't want to do that. I guess that's not impressive enough.
I'll take accuracy over potentially being impressed. The other day I somehow got onto the subject cat claw covers while checking out the allegedly new v5.0 release. After claiming that these covers/caps would not interfere with the natural growth and shedding of the outer "husk" of a claw, ChatGPT offered to draw me a diagram. It was terrible:
That's a "super clear" diagram according to ChatGPT. My response to it was genuine confusion ⸺ though, in Real Life™ there was at least one F-bomb. It had such confidence in what it was saying and doing. And there's such nice text where a year ago I swear AI image generation could hardly handle text all.
But in the end AI doesn't "know" anything. It's just (or "just") a bunch of extremely large matrices with nearly infinite dimensions. So, despite the text of what it was saying to me being (or at least seeming) correct, including the (text-only) clarification it offered after my response to its "super clear" diagram, ChatGPT's insistence on generating its own image content resulted in (yet another) useless hallucination. This is what a cat's claw actually looks like:
No "inner claw" or "outer keratin sheath" in this one; I assume ChatGPT meant the quick and the claw respectively. Either way, I shook my head and closed the tab, having learned not to let ChatGPT draw its own diagrams… Unless I'm doing it entirely for the entertainment of seeing how wrong it can be. Because it can be so very wrong.
My buddy and former boss showed me what ChatGPT suggested to him when he asked it how to tie good and useful knots to set up a tree swing in his backyard for his daughter. It was… less than helpful.
