A month ago, File 770 carried an item in which an author said that he had asked ChatGPT for a blurb for his book. He seemed to be delighted that ChatGPT had not only read his book, but loved it; ChatGPT called it a “captivating narrative.” The author continued:
Could [ChatGPT] have reached into my computer and read my novel and then compared it to the thousands of other novels and their reviews that have been uploaded to its massive database? And now makes a value judgement like that?
It could do so in a nanosecond.
The author claimed to “know a bit about AI,” but unfortunately appeared to misunderstand what ChatGPT does.
A few commenters provided corrections/clarifications, but anyone who didn’t read the comments may have been left with the impression that ChatGPT “know[s] more than humans do” and that it read this book and thought it was great.
I’m posting all this not to pick on the specific author, nor on File 770’s editor/owner, but rather because it’s just one instance of what I suspect is a very widespread misunderstanding.
So, just in case anyone who sees this post of mine is uncertain:
ChatGPT is more like a game of Mad Libs than like a person. It’s not sentient. It doesn’t “read” a book, and it doesn’t “make a value judgement” about a book. The way it works (very roughly) is that, given some input words, it chooses a sequence of words based on which word is the most likely next word in the sequence. (Where it determines what’s “most likely” by having been trained on an enormous number of examples of text written by humans.)
Its training included a vast number of book blurbs (I would guess millions of them), so when it‘s asked to write a book blurb, it creates a sequence of words that looks a lot like all of the other blurbs out there.
So ChatGPT didn’t evaluate this book and find it “captivating.” Instead, ChatGPT created a sequence of words that was similar to the sequences of words used in other blurbs, and the phrase “captivating narrative” is a very common phrase, so it used that phrase.
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