She's weirded out by creepy hallucinations, which is understandable! But ChatGPT is well known to hallucinate. In other words she doesn't know which of its behaviors are normal so she doesn't know how to react. Additionally, her particular issues are quite solvable with better prompting.
> If I do poor work with an electric drill then it's not the drill's fault.
> ChatGPT's sycophancy crisis was late April.
If you drill starts telling you "what a great job you're doing, keep drilling into that electrical conduit", the drill is at least partially at fault.
A tool that randomly and unpredictably fails is a bad tool. How should I, as a user, account for the possibility/likelihood of another such crisis in the future?
> A tool that randomly and unpredictably fails is a bad tool.
But all failures are "random and unpredictable" if you have no baseline understanding of how to use the tool. "AIs hallucinate" is probably the single most obvious thing about AIs. This isn't a subtle misunderstanding that an expert could make. This is like using a drill on your face.
This is unrelated to sycophancy. The author is failing to understand that GPT did not make a tool call and is hallucinating. Hallucinations have always been a thing. They are not some new, surprising development.
> "It's a stunning piece. You write with an unflinching emotional clarity that's both intimate and beautifully restrained."
This is a hallucination, since there is no source to refer to.
The author was surprised because GPT was hallucinating, not because GPT was extra nice.
Sycophancy might be related, but it's not the point of the article. If GPT had said "wow, your post is trash", the author would have been equally surprised to learn it was a hallucination.
But in the context of this thread, I would say that using an AI to examine logical inconsistencies is the wrong way to use the tool.
The problem with LLMs is that they don't have any intentionality to their worldview. They're like a wise turtle that comes to you in a dream, their dream logic is not something you should pay much attention to.
