Subject: I think I misspoke somewhere.
Author:
Posted on: 2023-03-27 06:51:31 UTC

I didn't mean to compare these AIs to search engines, or to say anything about the Internet being wrong, because the point is they're not search engines, and they don't care if the Internet is right or wrong.

Imagine an Internet which contained only three things:

"Who is in love? Ronnie and Katie are in love."

"Who is in love? Sarah and Germaine are in love."

And a list of four hundred names, including those four.

If you magically trained ChatGPT on just this (it's way too small a sample size, but this is magic", and then asked it "who is in love?", its goal would not be to act as a search engine and tell you about Ronnie and Katie, and Sarah and Germaine. Its goal - the only thing it "knows" how to do - would be to give you an answer shaped the same way as the Internet's answers: "(name from the list) and (name from the list) are in love. Mike and Jonny, Ateea and Katie (don't tell Ronnie), Callie and NameListv03. Job done, give the AI some cookies.

Internet facts can help. If something is consistent in its database, then it will probably stick with that - if there were several hundred declarations of Sarah and Germaine's relationship, that's what you'd get. But that's because it's trying to sound like the Internet, and the Internet mostly names Germaine with Sarah. Not because it knows it's a fact.

That's why it fails so hard on the PPC. It's only going to have a couple of actual sources for every statement, and when your characters are named "Jay" or "Dafydd" there's a lot of confounding factors online. It will - it did! - blend together everything it knows about Mary Sue, anti-Suefics, people called Dafydd, and relationship stories, and spout it at me without caring if they're right, or even knowing what "right" means. Its answers were shaped like the Internet, and that's what it was made to do.

hS kinda ships the Ronnie/Katie/Ateea triangle now

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