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My job uses a data science platform that has a special ai assistant trained on its own docs.

The first time I tried using it, it used the wrong language. The second time I used it, it was hallucinating its own functions, but after looking up the docs I told it what function to use and it gave me code that worked

I have not used it a third time. I don’t think i will.

What are you talking about? We mention this on a daily basis. That's the #1 complaint about ChatGPT when used for factual purposes

Reminder that all these Chat-formatted LLMs are just text-completion engines trained on text formatted like a chat. You're not having a conversation with it, it's "completing" the chat history you're providing it. By randomly(!) choosing the next text tokens that seems like they best fit the text provided.

If you don't directly provide, in the chat history and/or the text completion prompt, the information you're trying to retrieve, you're essentially fishing for text in a sea of random text tokens that seems like it fits the question.

It will always complete the text, even if the tokens it chooses minimally fit the context, it chooses the best text it can but it will always complete the text.

This is how they work, and anything else is usually the company putting in a bunch of guide bumpers to reformat prompts into coaxing the models to respond in a "smarter" way (see GPT-4o and "chain of reasoning")

I beg someone to help me. There is this new guy at my workplace, officially as a developer who can't write code at all. He has pasted an entire project I did into ChatGPT with "optimize this" and pull requested it. I swear.

It depends upon what you use ChatGPT for and if you know how to use it productively. For example if I ask ChatGPT coding questions it is often very helpful. If I ask it history questions it constantly makes things up. You also again need to know how to use it, like people who claim ChatGPT is not helpful for coding you ask them how they use it and they basically just ask ChatGPT to do their whole project for them and when it fails they claim it is useless. But that's not the productive way to use it, the productive way to use it is like a replacement for StackOverflow or to provide you examples of how to use some library, or things like that, not doing your whole project for you. Of course, people often use it incorrectly so it's probably not a good idea to allow its use in the workplace, but for individual use it can be very helpful.

Treat it like a janitor rather than an answer machine and you'll have a better time. I call it my bitch bot.

All tools get misused.

The only reason i use ChatGPT for some quick stuff is just that search engines suck so bad.

Because of I haven't found anyone asking the same question on a search index, ChatGPT won't tell me to just use Google or close my question as a duplicate when it's not a duplicate.

bold of u to assume there are docs

I just tried out Gemini.

I asked it several questions in the form of 'are there any things of category x which also are in category y?' type questions.

It would often confidently reply 'No, here's a summary of things that meet all your conditions to fall into category x, but sadly none also fall into category y'.

Then I would reply, 'wait, you don't know about thing gamma, which does fall into both x and y?'

To which it would reply 'Wow, you're right! It turns out gamma does fall into x and y' and then give a bit of a description of how/why that is the case.

After that, I would say '... so you... lied to me. ok. well anyway, please further describe thing gamma that you previously said you did not know about, but now say that you do know about.'

And that is where it gets ... fun?

It always starts with an apology template.

Then, if its some kind of topic that has almost certainly been manually dissuaded from talking about, it then lies again and says 'actually, I do not know about thing gamma, even though I just told you I did'.

If it is not a topic that it has been manually dissuaded from talking about, it does the apology template and then also further summarizes thing gamma.

...

I asked it 'do you write code?' and it gave a moderately lengthy explanation of how it is comprised of code, but does not write its own code.

Cool, not really what I asked. Then command 'write an implementation of bogo sort in python 3.'

... and then it does that.

...

Awesome. Hooray. Billions and billions of dollars for a shitty way to reform web search results into a coversational form, which is very often confidently wrong and misleading.

chatgpt has been really good for teaching me code. As long as I write the code myself and just ask for clarity or best practices i haven't had any bad hallucinations.

For example I wanted to change a character in an array with another one but it would give some error about data types that were way out of my league. Anyways apparently I needed to run list(string) first even though string[5] will return the character.

However that's in python which I assume is well understood due to the ton of stackoverflow questions and alternative docs. I did ask it to do something in Google docs scripting something once and it had no idea what was going on and just hoped it worked. Fair enough, I also had no idea what was going on.

Depending on the task, it’s quicker to verify the AI response than work through the blank page phase.

Eh I just let it write my bash scripts. A bit of trial and error with ChatGPT beats having to read the ffmpeg or imagemagick docs.

They don't give you the answer, they give you a rough idea of where to look for the answer.

I've used them to generate chunks of boilerplate code that was 80% of what I needed, because I knew what I needed and wanted to save time.

sigh people do talk about this, they complain about it non-stop. These same people probably aren't using it as intended, or are deliberately trying to farm a "gotcha" response. AI is a very neat tool which can do a lot of things well, but it's important to recognize its limitations. I don't use it for things I don't understand because I won't recognize if it's spitting out nonsense, but for topics I do understand it's hard to overstate how efficient and time saving it is.

I’m convinced people who can’t tell when a chat bot is hallucinating are also bad at telling whether something else they’re reading is true or not. What online are you reading that you’re not fact checking anyway? If you’re writing a report you don’t pull the first fact you find and call it good, you need to find a couple citations for it. If you’re writing code, you don’t just write the program and assume it’s correct, you test it. It’s just a tool and I think most people are coping because they’re bad at using it