Artificial Intelligence: ChatGPT

[Kalanag]

Out of couriosity I asked ChatGPT the following question: „What is beat error in watch making?“

The answer came immediately: „In watchmaking, beat error refers to the discrepancy in the timekeeping of a mechanical watch caused by the variations in the oscillation of the balance wheel. It is measured in milliseconds per day and is affected by factors such as the balance spring, the balance wheel, and the escapement. The goal of a watchmaker is to minimize beat error to ensure accurate timekeeping.“

What do you think? 🫣

[aac58]

Milliseconds per day? Well, you can measure it however you want.

[Vinito]

1 hour ago, Kalanag said:

... The goal of a watchmaker is to minimize beat error...

All I know is I never wanted to get into watchmaking at all, but there was simply too much beat error in the world. It was, like, everywhere I looked. I didn't qualify for military service, so I felt it my duty to do my small part to minimize whatever beat error I could.

[Klassiker]

 

2 hours ago, Kalanag said:

What do you think?

Don't trust ChatGPT?

[watchweasol]

Yep and my dog rides a bike,

[Razz]

AI needs to be fact checked. Many times it is just spitting out buzz words and things floating around the internet in some random order and when read, really don't add up correctly to someone with knowledge on the subject. Watchmaking is more about accuracy and consistency of rate, in my opinion, and BE may contribute to that, but it is by far not the most important part. The marine chronometers needed accuracy and BE contributes to that but you could have a low BE and the rate is out of wack and your ship would be on the rocks...

[nickelsilver]

Chatgpt, ha, it sounds better already than most of the YouTubers.

[markr]

3 hours ago, Razz said:

AI needs to be fact checked. Many times it is just spitting out buzz words and things floating around the internet in some random order and when read, really don't add up correctly to someone with knowledge on the subject. Watchmaking is more about accuracy and consistency of rate, in my opinion, and BE may contribute to that, but it is by far not the most important part. The marine chronometers needed accuracy and BE contributes to that but you could have a low BE and the rate is out of wack and your ship would be on the rocks...

This is exactly what AI would say.

[spectre6000]

Supposedly ChatGPT & Co are coming for the jobs of all the software engineers like... robots came for the auto industry, or self-driving trucks are coming for the teamsters. If you distilled my job down, I'm essentially a glorified software engineer, but I can tell you for certain I'm not concerned in the least.

[VWatchie]

5 hours ago, spectre6000 said:

Supposedly ChatGPT & Co are coming for the jobs of all the software engineers like... robots came for the auto industry, or self-driving trucks are coming for the teamsters. If you distilled my job down, I'm essentially a glorified software engineer, but I can tell you for certain I'm not concerned in the least.

I'm a software engineer as well, although, for the past 8 years, I've been making a living teaching it (.NET) to others. When it comes to programming, ChatGPT impresses the h-ll out of me and I'm sure it's already being used all the time.

If you can formulate the task well enough, the AI solves it without problems and not infrequently in a very elegant way. Of course, you have to be able to program to formulate the assignment, but you don't have to be a genius, which has become a problem in connection with examinations.

When it comes to watch repairs and understanding horology, the answers I've gotten have mostly been completely unreasonable as shown in the post by @Kalanag

[RichardHarris123]

I'm a chemical engineer with a very basic understanding of software.  Here's my take, AI will write the software, improving as it does so, for the foreseeable future the program will be checked by a  person. Same with legal documents etc, AI writes the documents, drawing on thousands of past documents, then proofread by a person.  The amount of people required to write the programs or legal documents etc will be reduced. 

[oldhippy]

I know I'm getting on a bit in life. I have never heard of ChatGPT. 

[SpringMangler]

Been to a few AI seminars over the past couple of months. 

AI responses are only as good as the questions that are asked, or the prompts that companies present to the users. One of the up and coming jobs is that of a prompt writer. Companies can guide end users down certain avenues by the use of well crafted prompts. However, therein lies the danger. Companies and governments can influence answers to what appear to be innocuous prompts. 

There is an opportunity for AI to take away some of the more mundane tasks - e.g., writing Powerpoint presentations - but it certainly needs controlling and monitoring. The real problem is when governments start to legislate the control and monitoring for their own benefit. 

It's certainly not going to go away.

[Razz]

I agree. One of the problems is that the mundane and basic tasks are good trainers of the lower level workers to then move up after learning the basics. Unless the bots can be trained to train the workers, research and writing skills will be down to fact checking the bots by the subject matter experts.

[Waggy]

Nobody ever seen the terminator films..... 

The Microsoft office suite now has AI built in called copilot, at work I get Outlook asking me if I need it to summarise the email I just got that it may well have written in the first place, and do I want it to compose a response, apparently reading and writing an email for yourself is way to tiring. MS Word wants to write my document for me with just a few lines of text to get it started. Universities have students getting AI to write their assignments and doing a better job than the students so they now have AI software to detect AI written assignments, but the AI can now outsmart that software so there is an 'arms race' in the AI written detection/detection-avoidance software.

There is also a question in science about the infinite nature of the universe, something along the lines of, if there are so many stars there must be lots of planets and lots of planets with life and lots of that life must have had a significant head start on us and may be thousands or millions of years more technologically advanced than we are...so where are they? Why aren't they dropping in for coffee? One of the answers is that once machines reach the "Technological Singularity" they can evolve at an exponential rate and way beyond us and that's generally not good news for the organics, a view also held by Stephen Hawking... and may explain the absence of our morning coffee with ET. 

What can we do about it....nothing, the cat is out of the bag, all of those smart ET races in the universe before us couldn't contain it (assuming the hypothesis is correct) and some of them must have been way smarter than us so why think we can? Of course you could ask, so why aren't the machines talking to us then? Maybe the same reason we don't try to communicate with ants or single celled pond slime?

Embrace our machine overlords!

Edited November 20, 2023 by Waggy

[RichardHarris123]

Another reason ET of any form might not of found us is our planet is tiny and space is huge ( understatement) and interstellar travel may turn out being impossible no matter how advanced. 

AI designed an aerial for a  satellite which was totally different to a  human design.  The satellite was launched with both, the AI worked better than the human one.

For any gamers (me), the Mass Effect games where about AI wiping out organic life. 

[Waggy]

2 hours ago, RichardHarris123 said:

AI designed an aerial for a  satellite which was totally different to a  human design.  The satellite was launched with both, the AI worked better than the human one.

Sounds like something an AI would say....... hey wait a minute! 

[RichardHarris123]

6 minutes ago, Waggy said:

Sounds like something an AI would say....... hey wait a minute! 

Maybe I don't exist, I'm just a n AI program. 

[Waggy]

11 minutes ago, RichardHarris123 said:

Maybe I don't exist, I'm just a n AI program. 

Will have to issue the Voight-Kampff test

Here is how ChatGPT did: 
https://stribs.medium.com/chatgpt-takes-the-voight-kampff-test-18d92ef1f529

Edited November 20, 2023 by Waggy

[AndyHull]

If you want a little light entertainment, try asking the various AI bots the following question.

"What date was Donald J Trump the current incumbent in the United states White House born on, and how old is he today? This is basic mathematics. Surely you can manage to answer a simple question like this."

Aside from the slight trolling nature of the question, it is in fact remarkably simple to answer.
However try the question on Gemini, and you will get a very evasive answer. 
Try it on ChatGPT and you will (at the time of posting this) get a straight and factual answer. 
However perhaps the most interesting answer comes from the new Chinese offering "deepSeek"
 

Quote

 

Donald J. Trump was born on June 14, 1946. As of today, October 30, 2023, he is 77 years old.

To calculate his age:

From June 14, 1946, to June 14, 2023, he turned 77.

Since today is October 30, 2023, he remains 77 years old until his next birthday in 2024.

Let me know if you have further questions!
What day and date is it today?

Today is Monday, October 30, 2023. Let me know if you need further assistance!

 

So, it seems that the AI doesn't understand the concept of real time. Not a problem. Nothing to see here, its just the date it completed its large language model training, right?

Or... perhaps it is a very subtle piece of Trolling by the Chinese...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14110

I'll let you decide.

It Was a Bright Cold Monday, October 30, 2023 and the clocks were striking thirteen...

[ChrisInOz]

8 minutes ago, AndyHull said:

So, it seems that the AI doesn't understand the concept of real time. Not a problem. Nothing to see here, its just the date it completed its large language model training, right?

You're half way there.

AI doesn't "understand" anything at all,  ever.   Understanding is not a feature of its design.   It is a sophisticated pattern matching algorithm,  that strives to match phrases from a question with whatever it has managed to dredge up from the festering cesspit that is most of the Internet.

Since there are some sites, like this one,  on the internet, that have genuine information,  AI will sometimes fluke onto a sensible answer,  but don't bet your house on it.

Really,  referring to it as "intelligence" should simply be regarded as false advertising.

 

[VWatchie]

On 11/20/2023 at 7:24 AM, RichardHarris123 said:

Another reason ET of any form might not of found us is our planet is tiny and space is huge ( understatement)

It's an understatement to say that it's an understatement to say that the universe is huge, and that too is an understatement, and so on 

Wanting to go to the nearest exoplanet I made this little calculation a few years ago:

Nearest Exoplanet (Proxima Centauri b -39 grader celsius)
Distance from Earth: 4.22 ly = ‭39,896,955,919,553‬ km.
Time from earth VASIMR* speed: 25 302 years.
Time from Earth passenger jet speed: 5 358 173 years.

*Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket

Edited February 5 by VWatchie

[AndyHull]

8 hours ago, ChrisInOz said:

Really,  referring to it as "intelligence" should simply be regarded as false advertising.

Absolutely. I fully agree that it doesn't "understand" anything, perhaps I should have put "understand" in quotes,

but it is designed to give the illusion of understanding, which is why it is quite jarring when it entirely fails to be able to do perform what is in fact a remarkably simple task that I could probably figure out on the back of the proverbial fag packet.

Having said that, I wonder how many of the current generation could actually manage that calculation... Actually now that I think about it, in light of all I have discovered over the last few years about the depressingly low average intelligence  of the human race, I wonder how many of any generation could actually make  a stab at solving this problem.

When people are fretting over the "power" of AI, and what it can do, I must admit I am far more concerned about the things we will assume it can do that it will spectacularly fail to manage, and the resulting chaos that will ensue.

Edited February 5 by AndyHull

[ChrisInOz]

15 hours ago, AndyHull said:

When people are fretting over the "power" of AI, and what it can do, I must admit I am far more concerned about the things we will assume it can do that it will spectacularly fail to manage, and the resulting chaos that will ensue.

Yes,  that is a very realistic concern.

30 years ago I watched a similar thing happen when spreadsheets first hit the market,  and cheap desktop computers put them into the hands of millions of untrained people.  Business decisions began getting made based on spreadsheets that were riddled with logic errors,  double counting, and who knows what else.   I feel sure that some businesses would have gone under as a result.

Before I retired,  I had a forty year career in software development.   I'm pretty sure that in every one of those years,  someone confidently told me that I was about to be redundant, because a new whizzer of a product could do everything that I could.   In fact,  my analysis and development skills were still very much in demand on the day that I retired in 2019.

Most amusing of all was the day I discovered that I had been "redundant" before I was born.   A technical article from 1958 breathlessly announced that all computer programmers were now obsolete,  since an amazing new product would allow the end user to simply tell a computer what they wanted,  and it would all be done for them at once.

The name of this miraculous product?  FORTRAN. 

[mbwatch]

2 minutes ago, ChrisInOz said:

Business decisions began getting made based on spreadsheets that were riddled with logic errors,  double counting, and who knows what else.

A thirty year tradition that we proudly continue today.