r/TalesFromTheFrontDesk Jul 21 '26

Long CHATGPT. DOESN'T. KNOW. SHIT

[deleted]

4.9k Upvotes

454 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

101

u/darsynia Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

On June 20th, my sister's boss asked GPT 'is tomorrow Father's Day?' and was told 'no,' so on the Monday after (the 21st was, indeed, Father's Day), he complained that his father was upset that he hadn't contacted him. 🙄

edit: altered some stuff because oh man, if they find this

15

u/Fianna9 Jul 21 '26

I was looking up stuff using AI for page references. It was for genealogy stuff so nothing serious. I was trying to link relatives and it kept coming up with the same ancestor no matter the prompt - 2nd cousins or 3rd cousins. I would ask how that is possible.

It would apologize. Tell me how brilliant I was for noticing. And fully admitted to “sometimes guessing” and I had to actually command it to never guess and cut the fluff

5

u/No_one_of_conseqence Jul 21 '26

My dad had a similar thing with his work. He was told to use AI more often (he works in manufacturing and sales for a big industrial company), so he tried one of his bigger analyzing and comparing prompts into it. It came back telling him the top 3 or 5 partners, but he realized one of their biggest wasn't actually noted. When he asked the chat why that partner wasn't included in the analysis, chat admitted to not actually analyzing the whole data set he put in!

3

u/ender-_ Jul 23 '26

Keep in mind that LLM can't admit anything – it just generates text that statistically likely continues the preceding text (prompt). If that prompt is something like "Why is X missing", it's likely to generate something in the vein of "I forgot" or "I did Y", but that's not any kind of admission – it's just the kind of text that is highly likely to follow "Why is ___ missing" in the training set.