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devi83 t1_jdfc0yd wrote

Reply to comment by theglandcanyon in Did Isaac Asimov predict GPT-4? by theglandcanyon

... Are you sure? In your original post you said:

> There's a certain word in a certain sentence from a certain play (all of which were identified in the story) that he thinks should be different. So he programs a computer to predict the next word from a block of text, then he feeds it all of Shakespeare's work up to the questionable word, and it predicts the word Shakespeare used, not the word the professor thinks he should have used.

And the plot of "The Immortal Bard" literally has that as a plot point:

>After attending the class, Shakespeare admits that he might have made a mistake, but also points out that the professor's interpretation of his work might be wrong. The professor then feeds Shakespeare's entire body of work into a computer and asks it to predict the word in question. The computer agrees with Shakespeare's original choice of words, thus challenging the professor's assumptions about the supposed mistake.

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theglandcanyon OP t1_jdhbj6p wrote

I also posted this question on r/asimov, and one of the comments indicated that it had been generated by ChatGPT. That answer included a plot description of a different short story by Asimov that had been embelleshed to include the stuff about predicting Shakespeare's next word.

Is that where you got the plot description you posted?

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devi83 t1_jdhy23e wrote

Yeah, that interesting, I wonder why GPT gave such false answers about it, I asked it two different times and got two different answers. It makes me worry about how much more misinformation is being spread because of GPTs confidentially wrong answers.

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theglandcanyon OP t1_jdiat55 wrote

That might not be as serious a concern as it seems. One of the findings of the Microsoft team who just posted their paper about GPT-4 having "sparks" of AGI was that you could ask GPT-4 what the probability was of the correctness of each of its answers, and it gave very accurate answers. In other words, it knows when it doesn't know something and it will tell you that if you ask it.

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theglandcanyon OP t1_jdfl0w3 wrote

I wonder if there is more than one version of this story? Or more than one story with the same name? The version I'm looking at now bears some resemblance to your summary (Shakespeare is brought to the present and takes a class on himself) but does not have anything about a computer.

Edit: I've now found this story on several websites, and they are all the version I know about, with Shakespeare being brought to the future to take a class on himself, failing it, and being sent back. The end, nothing about a computer of any kind anywhere in it.

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