Re: ChatGPT does COBOL and RPG...

Thank you Patrik! I was trying to think how to say it, but you did better!

Will Smith's police captain was the one who was right in the movie I, Robot. It's just clockwork!

Keep in mind the Turing machine example. None of the <sarcasm> stellar </sarcasm> conversations that have been posted on the Internet, like the one where the AI expressed a  "desire" to destroy all mankind, indicate an independent thinking machine!

Keep this slogan in your mind: Garbage in, garbage out! Remember when Google tried to automatically classify photos, the program labeled a picture of a black man as an ape or some stupid such thing?

It gets really dangerous when the Turing machine seems to many to be a real intelligence, or even a human. It is still computer programming! How many complex programs have you come across that were written perfectly the first time?

DO NOT trust computers, people! Even the really good technical ones that use the best operating system in the world (you know which one) can come up wrong.

When they tell you it is evil to question a computer result, hold on to your wallet, like Michael Crichton said about the outrageous claims for "Drake's equation." I don't trust computers at all to tally the votes for somebody who has a hand in the till that has tax extortion loot!

--alan


On 4/29/2023 7:18 AM, Patrik Schindler wrote:

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