Hand Caught In The Cookie Jar: How GPT4 Sold Me My Own Fake News

Author(s): John Loewen, PhD

Originally published on Towards AI.

How being naive, and lazy, came back to bite me in the ass

GPT-4 will “find” whatever you ask it to look for — this includes “research” on statistical information that you may want.

It will find it, and present it in whatever way you ask it to — in a paragraph, a chart, as a poem if you like.

But as a heavy user over the past 6 months, I have noticed an alarming glitch in how GPT-4 responds to specific statistical research queries.

It’s not accurate — it uses “placeholder” data — without telling you.

It’s like the kid with crumbs on his face who denies eating the last cookie.

How do I know this? First-hand experience.

GPT-4 sold me my own fake news as fact— from my own article that I published a few months earlier.

Let me tell you what happened.

A few months back (in May), before I noticed this pattern, I wrote an article about how GPT-4 was being heavily adopted by Python programmers to improve their coding workflow.

During the writing of the article, I prompted GPT-4 for some statistics, and it glowingly spits them out for me — A Stack Overflow Survey and a Github survey from the previous 2 months (March/April of 2023)

Holy shit, I thought, this GPT-4 is awesome.

Not really knowing any… Read the full blog for free on Medium.

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Published via Towards AI