ChatGPT has had more than its fair share of controversies, from stealing the work of actual human writers to being used to muddy the legal system (and so much in between!). But could the AI model arguably, under certain circumstances, potentially be OK? A Reddit user is making a convincing case for one extremely useful application.
A Redditor going by Steelizard shared a screenshot of a conversation they’d had with the AI model after their mother was trying and failing to remember the name of a movie, giving only a “vague description” of the film to work with—a classic and extremely relatable case of parent memory fog.
They’d told the bot, “Help me a remember a movie. It was about a city of aliens on earth with one guy in charge of the city but suddenly got attacked and started to transform into an alien”.
ChatGPT responded by saying, “The movie you’re referring to might be ‘District 9’ directed by Neill Blomkamp. In the film, extraterrestrial beings, derogatorily referred to as ‘prawns,’ are living in a segregated community in Johannesburg, South Africa.
“The main character, Wikus van de Merwe, works for a private military corporation assigned with evicting the aliens from their homes. However, after an incident, Wikus becomes exposed to an alien substance and begins to undergo a transformation into one of the aliens. The movie explores themes of discrimination, identity, and humanity.”
This post incited a thread of people discussing AI’s ability to find movies that are being described to it.
One user wrote, “Googling ‘movie city of alience [sic] on earth’ gives me district 9 as the 3rd recommendation and the IMDb page for it is the 2nd search result. The 1st result was a cnet listicle where district 9 is ranked 9 on a list of 50 ‘greatest alien encounter movies ever.'”
“I think Search engines and generative AI have different strengths,” that user added. “They happen to overlap here, but imo the benefit to users isn’t about one being better than the other in a shared task, but having 2 different tools for different sorts of tasks.”
Someone else said, “One big advantage in a more broad view is that you can describe yourself to AI in as much detail and ambiguity as you want. However, to be good at Google searching, you need to know usually some keywords and build concise queries. With GPT I can just mumble what I think and it will do that part for me. At the least, I will get the keywords I need to do a good Google search”.
Another noted, “You had to deconstruct the statement to make it easier to understand for Google, which is a learned skill. Ai makes it so that she does not need to learn how to prompt engineers for Google. She just needs to talk like she is talking to another person, which she has been doing her entire life.
“Saying that they overlap is irrelevant because she would have never come to that prompt for Google in the first place. If you put her prompt into Google you get ‘Mars Attacks’, ‘evolution’ and a whole bunch of listings for ‘top 50 alien movies’. Chat GPT is plain better at understanding a user’s request.”
Some, however, weren’t convinced by its abilities.
One user said that GTP was simply “Google for dummies,” while others noted the dangers and pitfalls of resting on technology that seems more knowledgeable than it actually is.
“The problem arises when the result doesn’t gets checked. Chatgpt gives the wrong vibe of “knowing everything” and sometimes, even without prompt, bullshits along. Therefore I would state, that ChatGTP isn’t the better, but the more comfortable option” argued one user.
Another said, “This only works for questions where you know a right answer when you hear one” while someone else said that when they did it, four of the five movies suggested were fake—an extremely common issue when people try to use AI models to create fact-based text.
There have been concerns about the use of ChatGPT, and they will probably increase more—it might even end up being a damn moral panic. But for now, if your mom says she can’t remember that film, song, or book, it might be worth saving yourself a headache and throwing her request to Chat GPT.
(featured image: PeopleImages/Getty Images)
