BoM/TWS Message Forum

Yeah, your horror story about the Google doc thing is very familiar. Something else that is VERY hard to get used to, until you've run into it so many times that suspicion becomes ingrained:

I said that chat is like a guy in India being paid $0.45 an hour to talk to you. Actually, it's more like an intelligent dog that's being paid in biscuits to talk to you.

Because, like a dog, Chat thinks that every suggestion you offer is THE GREATEST AND MOST BRILLIANT THOUGHT IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE.

And there's not even an "under personality" muttering, "Gotta agree with this asshole even though I know we're steering into disaster."

If you ask Chat "Can I do x?" there is a VERY high probability it will say that it will work, simply because it was your idea, and it is trained to be agreeable.

The best way I've found to get Chat to be honest is to be VERY careful about framing your questions. Do not volunteer your idea or your plan. Instead:

1. Define the goal/problem to Chat.
2. Tell it to SUGGEST a solution.
3. Ask it to EXPLAIN the solution if you do not understand what it said.

Alternately, if you do have an idea that you want Chat to give honest feedback on:

1. Frame your idea as a suggestion or proposal, and do so clearly with some kind tag, like 'SUGGESTED SOLUTION:' that removes you yourself as the offerer of the solution.
2. Tell Chat to EVALUATE the proposed solution.

Example:

I took imaj's basic situation and asked Chat this: "I want to be able to work with you on a single project but in multiple chat windows at the same time, with each chat focused on a different, specialized aspect of that project. Would it be possible for these different chats to access a single document that has been uploaded into only one of those chats?"

Chat replied: "No, that’s not currently possible. Each chat session is self-contained, meaning: Files uploaded to one chat are not accessible in another chat. If you want to use the same document across multiple chats, you'll need to re-upload it separately to each one."

It then went on to offer some suggestions for how to at least approximate the ability to talk about the same info across chats.

I then said: "Please evaluate this suggested workaround: I upload documents to Google Drive and the chats retrieve the information from that one location."

It then replied:

"That's a clever idea in theory—but unfortunately, it doesn't work in practice with current ChatGPT capabilities.

"Why It Won’t Work (Right Now)
* ChatGPT cannot access external cloud storage like Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, etc.
* You cannot share a URL to a Drive document and expect me to fetch or view it.
* I cannot “browse” the web unless you use the web browsing tool, and even then:
** It’s only available in specific modes (like the GPT-4 web tool).
**It requires publicly accessible links, and Drive docs are usually not raw-viewable HTML files.
**It’s not available across multiple chats simultaneously, nor does it persist between sessions."

Now, I have no idea if this actually right, or if imaj managed to hack around these issues. My point is that getting Chat to "not fuck with you" by being too agreeable requires that you frame the issue correctly when talking to Chat.

And before everyone groans that this is bad design, I will repeat what I keep banging on about. Chat is designed to emulate a very human-like interface instead of a classic "computer" interface. It is designed to be intuitively easy to work with. And "being humanlike" will bring very "humanlike" limitations.

For instance, managers frequently run into this same kind of issue with their human reports. ("That's a great idea, boss, I'll run with it right now!" followed by a disaster easily avoidable if everyone had stopped to do their due diligence first.)