Technology

The thing that really annoys me is the people who are most enamoured with Chat GPT also seem to be the ones least capable of judging its accuracy and actual output quality.

I write for a living; a newspaper. So naturally, some of the people in our company - sales people - wanted to test it. And they were delighted with the stuff it wrote. Which was terrible to read, factually incorrect, repetitive and just not something we’d put in the paper. But they loved it. Because they weren’t writers and don’t know how to write an engaging article with proper sources.

I tested it as well. Wanted to form my own opinion and read up on the limitations, how to write good prompts, etc. So I could give it a fair chance.

I had it write a basic 500 word article about things to see in our city, with information about the tourist info office. That’s something a first year intern can do in his second week with us.

Basically, it ended up ‘inventing’ two museums that don’t exist, it listed info for a museum on the other side of the country, it listed an ‘Olympic stadium’ (we never hosted the Olympics) and it gave a completely wrong address for the tourist info, even though it should have it.

It was factually incorrect in just about every sentence. But it all sounded plausible enough and was written with such confidence that anyone not from this city might assume it to be true.

I don’t want that fucking thing anywhere NEAR my newspaper. The sales people are pretty much monkeys with Chat GPT-typewriters, churning out drivel instead of Shakespeare.