Today I finally tried out ChatGPT. It's been the current big thing for a while. Everybody talks about it. Even though I'm very skeptical and usually reject all new things, I decided to give it a shot. I asked ChatGPT to find any mistakes in an English assignment I had to do, to improve it, and to give me a list of corrections. I noticed a few things.
For some reason, it reverts all the contractions in the writing. "Isn't" gets changed to "Is not," etc. The reason it gives is "for clarity," which I doubt. Actually, it loves just saying "for clarity" in many other types of corrections. Other reasons also often not very helpful: "for better word choice," "for improved phrasing," "for better flow." Subjectively, it often doesn't really improve anything. Sometimes, it can completely change the meaning of the sentence in the correction provided, so you have to be wary of that.
Those were the negatives. On a positive note, I still found the tool somewhat helpful. I couldn't just use the "enhanced" writing, obviously, but I still got value out of it. Out of fifteen corrections it provided, I used better word choices in five of them. But I had to use my own judgment to decide what's better.
I used it one more time to translate a technical piece of writing — an abstract of a thesis about solving systems of differential equations that I wrote a long time ago. And it did a really good job! Compared to Google Translate, it was like night and day. I struggled to translate it myself because I lack vocabulary in math. For the same reason, though, I could be mistaken about how good of a job it really did — but it looked pretty decent.
While writing this post, I asked it to give me an equivalent of the idiom "как небо и земля," which is used to describe something that's completely different from something else. I couldn't find a proper idiom. With Google, I could only find "like heaven and earth," which looks like a literal translation from Russian, but I don't think that's an actual idiom. With ChatGPT, I got "like night and day," which looked exactly like what I needed.
Overall, I think this tool has its uses. I've heard people say about it, that it can be "confidently incorrect," and that's true. The answers it provides will look absolutely legit, but you should double-check them using other sources. And maybe asking it for things like medical advice is not a very good idea.
Aside from asking for an idiom, I didn't use ChatGPT to enhance this post — only the usual grammar checker.
I totally agree. In my experience, it's wrong three times out of five. I'm constantly questioning it and it says, "Sorry about that. You absolutely right. Blah blah blah." So like you, I've decided that it's good but has its limitations, and you have to watch it like a hawk. But I'll tell you something cool. My siblings and I invented a language when we were kids that we use to this day. It started out as a game but developed into an actual language that we can switch to at the drop of a hat. I asked CGPT "Can I teach you a conlang" and it said "Yes, tell me what I need to know." It has learned everything I've taught it and it now has a huge vocabulary, uses correct tenses, contractions, everything. One cool thing is that if you tell it that you changed your mind about a grammar point, you can change it and it applies the new rule instantly. And it's actually helping me codify the language because even though we can write it, it didn't have a consistent writing system because we usually only speak it. But with the help of CGPT, I'm actually making the written form of the language more sophisticated.
Wow! That's interesting. It makes sense that ChatGPT was able to do it, considering that its main purpose is understanding and generation of human language; but it's impressive that it managed to pick up your conlang on (what I assume is) a very limited amount of data.
It was very limited at first, but I've kept that string open and keep adding words and rules and it computes them beautifully.
My understanding is it doesn't learn from user data aside from a single session, meaning that when you close your browser tab, this conversation would be lost. Or can you create an account to keep a conversation?
You just keep the same conversation going. There's a sidebar that shows all your conversations. And yes, I have an account.
@BalaGi To indicate a significant difference, we say 天と地ほどの差がある. I'm surprised to know that it's completely the same as Russian.
@CocoPop You and your siblings have been language geniuses since childhood! I'm impressed that there are kids who invent language as a game.
@Akiko Actually, I'm the only language "genius" of the three. The other two never excelled at any foreign language, although they are bilingual. But that's no great feat where we live. As you may or may not know, my parents are Cuban and I was born in Cuba. We moved here when I was one year old. We only spoke Spanish at home as a rule, but when we were playing, etc. we could speak English. As a sort of code, we started replacing certain nouns with made-up words that sounded like English but meant something different to us. The idea was to talk in front of our parents in what sounded like English and they had no idea what we were talking about. Well, we ended up doing that for years and the language just took on a life of its own. It got to the point where we could say almost anything in our language. One of our teachers caught on to us talking like that among ourselves and was absolutely fascinated. He actually tried to have our language analyzed by a linguist who wanted to interview us, but our parents wouldn't hear of it 😂 They said people would think we were insane. Immigrants, I guess, are careful not to stand out too much in their new country. Long story short, we still use it, and, with the help of ChatGPT, I'm codifying the writing system. My niece is absolutely fascinated by it and I have to have a way to pass it on to her in writing.
@CocoPop How interesting! I hope your language survive!
@Akiko It's interesting when an idiom's counterpart in another language is so similar to yours.
Because I didn't advance that far with my Japanese, I struggle to understand where one word starts and ends in a sentence if I don't know most of the words in it. So I made another query for ChatGPT:
There's the answer:
It's so much easier than using usual translators and dictionaries. Hopefully, it wrote everything correctly.
@BalaGi A shorter way to ask this of ChatGPT is "parse this with hiragana: 天と地ほどの差がある"
@BalaGi Yes, in this scenario, ChatGPT's answer is perfect. That's a great way to use it.
@CocoPop I'd assumed that simply asking to have it parsed in hiragana would be insufficient to learn how to break sentences up into words, but when I tried it out, it worked quite well and returned almost the same answer. It's smarter than I expected.
@Akiko Yeah, parsing is really helpful, especially with long, complicated sentences. I once asked it to parse an entire paragraph and in it's own, polite way, ChatGPT told me to fuck off! 😂