messing with ChatGPT

[whswhs]

Every once in a while I come up with an idea to try out on it, just to see what will happen. So just now I asked for a conversation between Alissa Rosenbaum and Alice Sheldon. It immediately identified both of them by the names they (mainly) published under, and points for that. But then the whole conversation was their being friendly and

Comments

[history_monk]

Do we have any evidence that they knew each other's work? They don't seem to have had a major interest in each other's fields. While I'm sure that wasn't ChatGPT's "reasoning," I could believe that an initial meeting would be friendly until they discovered each other's beliefs.

[whswhs]

I'm confident that Rand had never heard of Tiptree; she didn't show any awareness of science fiction later than Verne and Wells-her preferred genre fiction was mysteries. I suppose that Tiptree may well have heard of Rand; by the time she started writing nearly everyone had. But the scene I got had them not only agreeing on ideas, but also complimenting each others' work in terms that implied familiarity with it. That assumption helps get them into dialogue, but it also implies that they must have already discovered each other's beliefs, don't you think?

[history_monk]

I might be more cautious about assuming Tiptree had heard of Rand: I'm a different generation and in a different country, but reading lots of SF through the seventies, and coming into SF fandom in 1979, I don't think I'd heard of Rand until the late 1990s.

ChatGTP may be writing things that imply it "thinks" they'd known of each other's work, but it's necessary to remember that it's only working with sentence structures and has no idea of meaning. Seeing thought in it seems to me more like pareidolia.

[whswhs]

It's precisely the lack of thought that I'm pointing to.

[history_monk]

Ah,, OK. I didn't think there was a need to point that out any more.

[whswhs]

It probably reflects a juvenile sense of humor, but I find it amusing from time to time to come up with a new type of question or task that ChatGPT falls short on. I hadn't tried it before on satire, which is where I think this one falls.