As the year comes to an end, most people are longing for the Christmas holidays. And maybe we’ll take it a bit easier at work. But does this also apply to apps that function with artificial intelligence? Some users of the popular language robot ChatGPT think so. Experts are now investigating and parent company OpenAI is also taking the complaints seriously.
RL 13-12-23, 19:38 Source: Ars Techica, The Verge, The Independent, Own reporting
More and more users of the latest (paid) version of ChatGPT (model GPT4) complain that the chatbot gives shorter answers, refuses to do what people ask, or even puts work back on the users. The tone that ChatGPT sometimes adopts is also experienced as rude or lazy by some users. Other people even wonder whether the chatbot might be suffering from winter depression. This is reported by technology sites ‘Ars Technica’ and ‘The Verge’, among others.
A programmer put the sum to the test and gave ChatGPT 477 commands, changing only the month in terms of input. He found that the language robot gave a longer answer (4,298 characters on average) when it was told it was May than when it was December. In that case, ChatGPT responded with an average of 4,086 characters. Various researchers have since tried to imitate that study, but have not yet discovered any significant differences. This could be due to the research design, so another way to investigate the alleged phenomenon is being worked on.
Some users think that parent company OpenAI simply made the chatbot lazy on purpose to reduce the burden on the company’s systems. According to OpenAI, this is not the case, and they say they take user feedback very seriously: “We have already seen your reactions about GPT4 becoming increasingly lazy! We haven’t updated the model since November 11, and this is certainly not intentional. The behavior of the model can be unpredictable and we are investigating whether we can solve this,” the chatbot’s official account wrote about a week ago on X (formerly Twitter).
ChatGPT
@ChatGPTapp
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Although the people behind ChatGPT don’t think the model has changed itself since the September 11 update, they don’t rule out that there may be subtle differences in some commands or questions. According to the company, it may take a while before these small differences are even noticed as patterns by customers, which means it may also take some time before employees can make adjustments to the model.
Winter depression
Various programmers and AI experts are currently conducting extensive research into the ‘laziness hypothesis’. The fact that even a winter depression of the chatbot by users cannot be ruled out is because the input from people is also used by the ChatGPT for learning. If users suffer from winter depression, they could unintentionally transfer it to the chatbot through their input, some users believe.
It could also have to do with the way we give commands to the chatbot. How much effort do we still put into clearly instructing software that runs on artificial intelligence? Giving concrete instructions (“Explain step by step…”) can yield better results than “Tell me how…” Again other users use tricks to encourage their favorite chatbot to provide better answers. Sometimes by simply lying that they have no fingers, in other cases by promising the chatbot a tip. A more human approach, with encouragement such as “take a deep breath,” would also yield better results, other users say.
Finally, our imagination could also play a role. Now that reports about a lazy language robot are popping up here and there, we may have started to look more critically at ChatGPT’s answers.
But what if we ask the application itself? He completely denies that he works less hard during this period of the year: “As a machine learning model, I am not subject to fatigue, laziness or seasonal influences.”
ChatGPT itself denies any form of laziness. © ChatGPT
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2023-12-13 18:38:15
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