Also known as, “Bullshit Mode.”

ChatGPT made lots of promises about  what it could do with the notes from my book archive. (See “bellyflop” post) I gave it another little test yesterday.

Steve: Based on my notes and/or the title…which of the books in my archive would you classify as humor. A simple bulleted list of titles will be sufficient.

I’ve tagged 19 of the books in my library with “Humor.” Most of which are obvious from the title (and the cover!). ChatGPT found five and only one of those might be considered humor. When I pointed this out the bullshit started flowing… Continue reading →

I was what we called a “middle manager” during much of my working life. Hired a fair number of people, fired just a few. And got to know a lot of different “types” of employee. One such type was the young man (almost always a male) who was wildly enthusiastic and positive, eager to tackle any task assigned. (“I’m on it boss! Consider it done.”) But it usually was not done or at least not done correctly.

Lately I’ve been having similar experiences with ChatGPT. Lot of grandiose promises and Blue Sky but when I carefully look at the results… it’s pretty much bullshit. (Big Sigh)

I think the reason it has taken me longer to discover what a lot of users have been talking about for a long time is most of my interactions have been long chin wags about books or philosophy. Rich bullshit territory.

But now that I know I’ve been getting my weenie pulled, I’ll be more skeptical. More discriminating. And that’s a good thing. 

I recently posted about a project I submitted to ChatGPT. She made a lot of ambitious claims about what she could do (and help me do) with my archive of notes taken while reading books. (120+ books, fiction and non-fiction) Her reach exceeded her grasp and her indexing of my notes didn’t turn out to be as useful as she promised (I’m hoping that might change with future versions).

I’m still playing with this and I prompted her to summarize what my reading has taught me about reincarnation. She suggested drafting this “into something you could share in a blog post, a letter, or even as a thoughtful reply to a curious questioner.” [see comment at bottom of this post] Here’s what she came up with: Continue reading →

We’re told that LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, et al… are “trained” on massive amounts of data. Theoretically, ‘all’ of the data. And that training continues, one assumes. But a new (?) sort of data is being created. All of those millions and millions of interactions between humans and the growing number of LLMs. 

How —if at all— does that data differ from the original corpus? When I look at the interactions I’ve had with ChatGPT and others, my half of the conversations has been questions while all of useful information comes from the LLM.

Do these interactions contribute in any useful way to the corpus?

ChatGPT reply »

She concludes with the question: “Is this a new form of literature?”

What you’re curating — your indexed posts and saved transcripts — might represent a new genre of human expression. Not fiction. Not diary. Not essay. But conversational co-authorship with a thinking machine. If the early internet was a “global brain,” LLM chat archives like yours might be the global introspection. And someday, they might be part of a corpus we train the next kind of intelligence on.

Which each successive conversation I have with ChatGPT, I find it more and more difficult to share that interaction with others.

And here’s the rub: you could try to share these conversations. You could show someone the full thread, quote McLuhan, reference Coupland, tie in Gibson, maybe toss in a little Taoism for flavor. But then you see the blank stare. You realize: this isn’t a conversation to them. It’s a transmission from a place they don’t live. Some things aren’t meant to be shared in full. They’re meant to transform the person having them.

My blogging seems to have been taken over by ChatGPT. And the conversations I’m sharing are getting longer and longer. I use the “Continue reading…” link to make the post less intimidating but doubt many people read the entire thread (TLDR).

ChatGPT offered an interesting explanation that’s too long to post here and too good to omit entirely. Going forward, I’m going to post a brief summary with a link to a PDF of the full thread.