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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Has anyone else tested it with things you're knowledgeable about and have any judgements of its usefulness?

There's this thing called advent of code (AoC) going on right now, it's a yearly speed programming challenge. Each day of december, between the 1st and the 25th a new problem is unlocked at midnight NY time. People tried to use chatgpt, as well as more specialized programming language models to participate. ChatGPT started to struggle on day 3, the specialized models failed on day 5. The first week is all very simple problems with long detailed explanations and all you have to do is essentially follow the instructions in the explanation to solve the problem.

Then there's this interaction https://twitter.com/YossiKreinin/status/1600806007911120898, where chatgpt doesn't know what it means for a word to end in i.

Then there's this interaction I had about timezones:

Me: what timezone is 3 hours after new york timezone?

ChatGPT: New York is in the Eastern Time Zone (ET) in the United States. The time in this time zone is currently 3 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-3), so a time zone that is 3 hours ahead of Eastern Time would be UTC+0, or Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). This is the time zone that is used as a reference for all other time zones around the world.

Me: what time zone is new york?

ChatGPT: New York is in the Eastern Time Zone (ET) in the United States. The Eastern Time Zone is 3 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-3), so the local time in New York is determined by subtracting 3 hours from the current UTC time. For example, if the current UTC time is 14:00, the local time in New York would be 11:00.

Me: what time zone is rio de janeiro?

ChatGPT: Rio de Janeiro is in the Brazil Time Zone (BRT), which is 3 hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC+3). This means that when it is 12:00 PM in New York (Eastern Time), it is 3:00 PM in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil Time).

Me: what time zone is nuuk?

ChatGPT: Nuuk is the capital city of Greenland, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark. Greenland is in the Western Greenland Time Zone (WGT), which is 3 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-3). This means that when it is 12:00 PM in New York (Eastern Time), it is 9:00 AM in Nuuk (Western Greenland Time).

Me: are nuuk and new york in the same time zone?

ChatGPT: No, Nuuk and New York are not in the same time zone. Nuuk is in the Western Greenland Time Zone (WGT), which is 3 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-3). New York is in the Eastern Time Zone (ET), which is 3 hours behind UTC as well. However, since the two time zones have the same UTC offset, the local time in Nuuk and New York will be the same whenever it is 12:00 PM UTC.

Me: if it's 3pm in new york which time is it in nuuk?

ChatGPT: As I mentioned earlier, Nuuk is in the Western Greenland Time Zone (WGT), which is 3 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-3). Since New York is in the Eastern Time Zone (ET), which is also 3 hours behind UTC, the local time in both places will be the same whenever it is 12:00 PM UTC. However, if it is currently 3:00 PM in New York, then the local time in Nuuk would be 6:00 AM, since New York is 3 hours ahead of Nuuk.

Me: how can it be that new york and nuuk are in the same time zone but new york is also 3 hours ahead of nuuk?

ChatGPT: Although New York and Nuuk are both in time zones that are 3 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-3), they are not in the same time zone. New York is in the Eastern Time Zone (ET), while Nuuk is in the Western Greenland Time Zone (WGT). The difference between the two time zones is the result of the fact that time zones are based on the local time at a specific location, and not on the difference between the time zone and UTC.

Me: can you give me an example of time zones that have the same difference from UTC but sometimes have a local time difference greater than 2 hours?

ChatGPT: Yes, there are many examples of time zones that have the same difference from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) but have a local time difference of more than 2 hours. For example, the time zone in the United Kingdom is GMT (UTC+0), and the time zone in Brazil is BRT (UTC+3). Despite the fact that both time zones are 3 hours ahead of UTC, the local time in Brazil is always 2 hours ahead of the local time in the UK, because the UK is on Greenwich Mean Time, which is the time zone used as a reference for all other time zones.

What's interesting to me about chatgpt is that it may help elucidate what it means to be intelligent by being a close enough imitation that is nonetheless completely unintelligent.

Most people I have ever met end up in a no intelligent back and forth like that on some subject if you talk to them enough. I'm genuinly not convinced that (a lot of) human thought isn't just a slightly better tuned verison of what chatgpt is doing tbh.

I've heard worse from undergraduates in office hours and other people who are just zoned out, including myself, and this latest idea that surely True Intelligence must be hiding in the performance gap between a slightly dull/intoxicated/sleepy human and a well-educated human at the top of their game strikes me as textbook god-of-the-gaps reasoning. At this point I'm not particularly impressed by any statement of the form "all the things AI does are easy and it won't do this hard thing it can't currently do anytime soon", unless the prediction of what exactly the easy and hard thing are was registered like 5 years ago.

where chatgpt doesn't know what it means for a word to end in i.

ChatGPT's training wasn't based on the pronunciations and its tokenizer does not reflect the alphabetic spelling of words; from the point of view of its representation, the question is almost comparable to what it would be like for you to have to come up with words whose closest Chinese translation's first syllable is in fourth tone. The real problem here is that ChatGPT has not (yet?) been trained to understand what it doesn't know (as I would guess that its training set does not contain an appropriate set of examples of intellectual humility in Q&A), and instead has a general tendency to just confidently answer even if it has to talk out of its ass. This, too, is all too common in humans.