Wow! Has anybody tried open AI Chat GPT yet? I have just gotten so many of my questions about conures answered by this AI! I am kind of blown away by its capacity.
@flyzipper? I’m sure we have members who are into AI but I just don’t know who they might be.
I would STRONGLY caution against trusting Chat GPT to provide correct answers to questions. Honestly, I think the term AI to describe it is aspirational and not at all accurate. There's no thought or intelligence in what it does.
In its current form, Chat GPT is basically a really, really fancy version of your phone's predictive text function. It produces "answers" with no concern as to their accuracy, because it literally can't gauge accuracy. If you ask about conures, it will spit out what it can find about conures, but if you ask it about unicorns, you will get equally "confident" answers with perfect grammar and no concern for truth.
As a good example there are a lot of anecdotes about people asking it for a work with citations, and often it will just invent plausible-sounding titles and authors. It doesn't have a way to respond "sorry - there's no good source supporting the idea that the earth is made out of candy." It's just a phrase generator. You ask for words and it gives you words, even if you're asking for nonsense.
Even when it doesn't invent content out of whole cloth, it has all the biases and inaccuracies of whatever content was scraped to "teach" it. There are a lot of interesting tests people have done giving it identical prompts but changing one word and getting vastly different answers (the one I particularly remember was someone asked it to provide story ideas about a male/female detective, and the type of cases they might solve. The male detective got more action and adventure criminal-law type suggestions and the female detective got family law and social justice type suggestions).
Since you can't see where each "fact" came from, you have no way to judge whether the source is valid. Was that idea from Pamela Clark? An advertisement on Petco? PETA? Some loony who has a blog where they advocate pinioning as a good way to save the trouble of clipping wings on a regular basis? Who knows?! It's fact roulette!
If you want some wording for an important letter and don't know how best to phrase it, Chat GPT is a fantastic tool. But If you want to learn actual facts? A Google search is currently a thousand times more likely to get you a good answer, and you can also see where the answer came from and judge its accuracy. (Google has issues of its own, of course, but that's a whole other discussion).
