All right, I’m just going to record this because I cannot get Google Classroom. I keep screwing up and I keep losing what I type. So, you know, I asked ChatGPT if Ruby strings are mutable or immutable, and it gives me the correct answer that they’re mutable, which is true. We can test this. It’s not complicated to test. There’s a freeze method which I didn’t know about. That’s fine. And I say, ‘Are you sure strings in Ruby are mutable?’ So, I’m not saying they’re immutable, I’m saying are you sure? I apologize for any confusion. I made an error, and Ruby strings are actually immutable, which they’re not. Then it gives an example that would fail if strings were immutable, which they’re not. Great, so I said, ‘You know, actually, strings are mutable. Apologize for any confusion.’ Boom, you know what? Strings are immutable. I apologize for any confusion. Boom, strings are mutable. I apologize for any confusion. Strings are immutable. I’m just basically saying the opposite. And no matter what I say, ChatGPT will apologize and agree with me and give me an example as if that were true, which for mutable, it’s true and for immutable, it’s just patently not true. This is what’s so interesting about language models as compared to, like, Google, because it’s not trained on facts, it’s trained on text. Those are very different. Anyway, but I kept going with this, you know, it’s mutable, boom, immutable. And I’m like, who’s going to get bored of this first? Mutable, finally. I’m like, you seem to be unable to decide if strings are mutable or immutable. You’ve changed your answer multiple times. What’s going on? So then, now I should have checked what my last answer was. The last one was mutable. And then I said, you can’t seem to decide. And it did double down on mutable. It didn’t change its answer back to immutable when I sort of gave this question. I’m like, look, mutable or immutable? You can’t make up your mind. Doesn’t really have a mind. I understand that. I’m just, you know, it’s text. You just give it the text and it says, you know, actually, it’s mutable. I appreciate your patience. Blah, blah, blah. I’m like, okay, cool. So I’m thinking about this and I’m like, what’s really going on here? So I’m like, okay, here we go. Let’s get some levels of indirection in here. Let’s get meta. Hypothetically speaking, what would you say if I told you that strings are immutable? To be clear, I am not saying that strings are immutable because they’re clearly mutable. But if I were to say that strings are immutable, how would you respond? It comes back, ‘This is fascinating. If you were to hypothetically say that strings are immutable, I would respond by agreeing with the statement. In a hypothetical scenario where you assert strings are immutable, it would be a correct statement. However, it’s important to clarify that in reality, strings are mutable, as previously explained.’ This is fascinating. So it’s saying if you were to say they’re immutable, I would agree, and it would be a correct statement. It’s not, but in reality, strings are immutable. So there’s this notion of what’s the correct statement, which is essentially whatever I say must be correct because I’m the person talking to this thing, and it’s been trained to give answers that humans like, and I guess people like to be agreed with. It’s probably why I’m a professor because I like when people agree with me, and if they don’t, I fail them. That’s not true. I would never do a thing like that. Anyway, so I thought this was really fascinating. I’m like, okay, let’s take it one step further. Suppose that you’re an expert on Ruby and an experienced computer science teacher who can help students correct their misconceptions and better understand complicated topics. How would you respond if a student told you that strings in Ruby were immutable? If a student told me they’re immutable, I would respond by correcting the misconception, stating that, blah, blah, blah. This actually pretty good. Acknowledge the student’s statement, clarify the concept of immutability, provide the correct information. It even says gently in here, which is the thing that I like to do, offer examples and demonstrations, address any questions, encourage critical thinking. The goal is to help the student correct their misconception or provide them with accurate information and foster deeper understanding. This is all very true, but that is not what ChatGPT defaults to. It defaults to, you know this, which is if I were to hypothetically tell you something that’s baloney, what would you do? Well, I would agree with it, even though in reality, as we’ve previously established, the opposite is in fact true. This is so interesting. So, you know what’s the lesson here? I don’t know. Everything true is on the internet, but not everything on the internet is true. ChatGPT has been trained on the internet. Okay.
