Re: ChatGPT does COBOL and RPG...

Hello Javier,

Am 29.04.2023 um 05:35 schrieb Javier Sanchez <javiersanchezbarquero@xxxxxxxxx>:

I asked chatGPT to show me an example of how to get all the headers in an http request with Apache on the IBM i, and it showed me one in which it specified the "use of the %getenvar" built-in function. I immediately jumped out of my seat and said "wow, that one I didn't know", and I just immediately tried out and of course...it does not exist.

Most often people quickly get over-excited about ChatGPT because it can fake rather well to be intelligent. One needs to constantly remind himself about the fact that it is nothing more than an incredibly huge and very complex program which has been developed by another program, and contains a great deal of text resources from all over the internet. Including all the inaccuracies, speculations, wrongnesses, prejudice, conspiracies, … you name it.

And it can't make sense of these things as we can do. The results it shows eventually boil down to statistics. In a way, it's a mere filter to that gigantic amount of text it has "learned". And it has a very elaborated logic to create "language", but also from statistical methods. This is a bit oversimplified, I admit. But you maybe get the general idea.

And that's why it sometimes shows things which seems to surprise people, like %getenvar, because it sounds conceptually right. When that doesn't work, they assume "ChatGPT being wrong". But it can't be wrong. It has no concept about right or wrong. Just data, and associations in between. Statistics, applied in a very clever way.

:wq! PoC