ChatGPT Makes Shit Up
An academic asks ChatGPT about New Zealand’s Miocene Manuherikia Group
Your narrator dips his toes into this ChatGPT thing
With a nod to Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians — ‘I know what I know, if you know what I mean’. One subject where I’m comfortable that I do know what I’m talking about, is the ‘Manuherikia Group’. It’s a geological term covering rocks occurring in southern New Zealand. As an academic, I’ve been working on those rocks and their fossils since 1983.
One thing I don’t know about is Artificial Intelligence (AI). It bothers me, because it feels like AI is out there, growing like a wave, just before it becomes a full on tsunami. Call it FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), but I don’t want to be the last person to be aware of this thing.
One particular offshoot of AI, is something called ‘ChatGPT’. It’s finally come onto my radar with enough presence to make me want to find out what all the fuss is about. As I understand it, ChatGPT is a ‘chatbot’ that, after scanning pretty much the entire internet of knowledge, can come up with a natural language response to a natural language question. That’s nice, but if there is an idea that this will somehow surpass search engines, like Google, then we need to talk.
