ChatGPT Whoppers

Over Christmas I thought I'd have a look at ChatGPT. Not to "break" it, or find more examples of its factual incorrectness, but to explore it sympathetically, for fun.

And it was fun. In particular, the natural language generation and understanding capabilities of the system are really impressive.

However, even without trying it's not hard to expose weaknesses in the tool. So much so that I doubt I would have bothered to blog about what I found, except that I enjoyed the accidental semantic connection between a handful of my observations.

I asked for ASCII art to celebrate my 600th blog post on software testing and got this whopper!

                               .
                              .:
                              ::
                              :;
                              ;:
                            .;;
                           .;;:
                           ::;:
                           :;;:
                           ;;;:
                         .;;;:
                        .;;;:
                        :;;;:
                        ;;;;:
                      .;;;';;
                     .;;' .;;
                     ;;;  .;;
                     ;;; .;;:
                     ;;;;.;;:
                     :;;;;;;:
                     ;;;;;;;:
                     ;;;;;;;:
                     :;;;;;;;
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Congratulations to me!

I wondered whether ChatGPT could play games, like WOPR, and discovered that it thinks it can but has a reaonably superficial grasp of the rules of everything I tried.

Here's how Hangman worked out, after it refused every letter, but accepted my guess at the whole word which, of course, included letters I'd already suggested:

  ______
 |      |
 |      O
 |      |\
 |      |
 |     / \
 |      |
 |     / \
 |      |
 |     /

I found that it will flat out contradict itself too. In a nicely self-referential twist, here's a whopper about whopper and WOPR!

Image: People

Comments

SimonG said…

That's no lie! ChatGPT pronounces the h in Whopper, that's all. https://youtu.be/9vWA_vIrqT4

January 16, 2023 at 1:56 PM

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