Let's Chat About It
Don't believe a word ChatGPT says
Last week, The Kid discovered ChatGPT. Rather, she got angry about ChatGPT because some of her classmates were using the AI platform to write their papers. The penalty of getting caught is being kicked out of school.* How would a teacher even know? I imagine that the chatbot would spew out some sort of nonsensical data or link to a journal article that didn’t exist. Or, the school could use the existing ChatGPT to ask it if it was a ChatGPT paper.
What would happen if this article made it to ChatGPT’s archive? Would it continuously loop false information? I have images in my head of Rosie running in circles around the kitchen in a malfunction.
* This begs the question, though, about what would happen if a student did not use AI to write a paper …
Are we going to have a proliferation of services to detect whether a paper is written by AI? Kind of like those services that force you to upload your paper to verify whether it was stolen? Are those services even around any longer?
We decided that using ChatGPT to write your papers was a bad idea, in a conversation that went something like so:
The Kid: You don’t learn anything.
Me: Except sharpening your skills to become a prompt engineer.
The Kid: Yeah, right. ChatGPT will learn how to be its own prompt engineer.
Me. Touché.
The Kid: I wonder if it gets things wrong.
Me: Will it be like the Terminator and learn from its errors?
The Kid: The Terminator is old.
Me: I bet it will learn why humans cry.
ChatGPT: Overall, crying is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that serves a variety of functions in human behavior and emotion.
In this conversation, I learned that I am old … and all sentient lifeforms do not understand human crying. Touché.
The Book Promos
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If you like coffee and mysteries, perhaps you might like Ventis & Victims: Red Line Coffee Shop Mysteries. This is the first book by D.B. McNicol. Right now, you can read it on the Kindle Unlimited.
From the Amazon page:
A dead body is found on Shallow Lake in the town of Jumpers Hole. A retired fire investigator, George "Weezy" Nikolaus, had a few secrets. But who would want to kill him and why?
Garrett Phillips is the co-owner of the Red Line Coffee Shop with two of his firefighter friends, Brett "Smokey" Davis and Stevie "Grizz" Williams. When he becomes the primary suspect in the murder, his friends and fellow co-workers band together to find the real killer.
Happenings
I am now on Substack Notes, although the jury is out on whether I like it. So I may or may not drop it in the future. Lots of peeps are saying it’s the new Twitter (even Twitter), but I don’t think anything can replace Twitter. Tbh, I would love it if Substack integrates its Notes feature and its commenting feature into one smorgasbord of feedback.
This week, I am reading Girl, Forgotten by Karin Slaughter. I did not enjoy this novel because of the back-and-forth time line. Chapter 1 was in the POV of the victim, Chapter 2 in the POV of the agent investigating her murder, etc. What ended up happening is that all the chapters in the victim’s POV were expositional backstory. And boring. I give it 2 out of 5 stars.
I wanted to tackle mifepristone … I really, really hope I got the right drug there, ha! … but that topic is a larger topic of Roe, Dobbs, the leaked SCOTUS draft, etc. I will report on that next week!