While I agree, I have found ChatGPT to be REALLY awful at symbolism because so many people are as well. It gives popular responses rather than most correct responses. As we have seen from politics, popular often times isn't correct.
An example of this is music:
ChatGPT responds to "What is the meaning of The Postal Service's The District Sleeps Alone Tonight?"
With:
"The meaning of "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" by The Postal Service is open to interpretation, as the lyrics are somewhat vague and abstract. However, the song appears to be about the feeling of isolation and disconnection that can come from living in a big city. The lyrics reference the city as a "church" that "wraps [the narrator] in its twilight," and speaks of the planes flying overhead and their passengers "waving goodbye/ To all of their yesterdays." This could be seen as a metaphor for the transitory and fleeting nature of city life, with people constantly coming and going and not forming deep connections. The song may also be about the narrator's own sense of loneliness and longing for connection in the midst of the bustle and noise of the city."
There's two issues with this response:
1. The song is about the weird feeling of how places change with context, in this case it is about the context of a breakup and feeling out of place where you used to feel at home.
But there is a bit of a bigger issue....
2. Those lines ARE NOT IN THE SONG. lol.
What this shows is clean readable responses that are oftentimes extrapolation of a thread or idea to levels not reasonably verifiable. Like how Facebook is/was tuned for giving more and more isolated extreme content, ChatGPT is tuned to follow threads and bits of information to extreme levels and confidence.
I think the "confident but inaccurate" problem is one of the biggest hurdles for most of the powerful usecases of these models. We don't seem too far from being able to automate filler text or stock images, which is certainly useful but only so valuable, but a long way off from more technical usecases like law or medicine. Being right 90% of the time but completely wrong 10%, without any way to distinguish the two, isn't going to get very far in many fields of work.
I had it give me book recommendations on a particular topic. It straight up made up a fake book with a fake author and attributed it to a publisher. It did this with confidence. I even emailed the publisher to see if they had ever carried that book. Never heard of it.
The problem seems to be whether or not the content was generated via language modeling or via direct references. When it crosses into language modeling it is just making stuff up on the fly. This sometimes works for programming, but for specific things that connect to the real world it can be phenomenally wrong.
The thing is, accuracy doesn't matter that much for some applications, and for other applications it matters a lot. This means we should evaluate ChatGPT on the former use cases where it actually has utility, instead of criticizing it on the latter which would be like saying a hammer isn't helping me cook my dinner.
Example of the former: using it as a conversation partner to learn another language. You don't need perfect accuracy for this to be a gamechanging tool.
An example of this is music:
ChatGPT responds to "What is the meaning of The Postal Service's The District Sleeps Alone Tonight?" With: "The meaning of "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" by The Postal Service is open to interpretation, as the lyrics are somewhat vague and abstract. However, the song appears to be about the feeling of isolation and disconnection that can come from living in a big city. The lyrics reference the city as a "church" that "wraps [the narrator] in its twilight," and speaks of the planes flying overhead and their passengers "waving goodbye/ To all of their yesterdays." This could be seen as a metaphor for the transitory and fleeting nature of city life, with people constantly coming and going and not forming deep connections. The song may also be about the narrator's own sense of loneliness and longing for connection in the midst of the bustle and noise of the city."
There's two issues with this response: 1. The song is about the weird feeling of how places change with context, in this case it is about the context of a breakup and feeling out of place where you used to feel at home.
But there is a bit of a bigger issue.... 2. Those lines ARE NOT IN THE SONG. lol.
What this shows is clean readable responses that are oftentimes extrapolation of a thread or idea to levels not reasonably verifiable. Like how Facebook is/was tuned for giving more and more isolated extreme content, ChatGPT is tuned to follow threads and bits of information to extreme levels and confidence.