The Analytic Garden

chatGPT and its friends have been all over the news. One of its uses is to generate program code. In fact, this article even predicts it will replace programmers. Is your job in danger? I think, you're probably safe for a little while. I have seen chatGPT tools promoted as a way for non-coders to generate code without the pain of learning Python, JavaScript, or some other language. Like it's use for text generation, it does some thing reasonably well, However, I think programming noobs should be careful. I tried to generate some very simple code using the code-davinci-002 model.  prompt = """write a python function that accepts a string and returns a dictionary with each letter in the text as key and the letter frequency as value""" Here's the code that makes the request. #!/usr/bin/env python # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- """ test_GPTcode.py - test GP# code generation author: Bill Thompson license: GPL 3 copyright:...

chatGPT and its cousins have been making news lately. The media seems enthralled with attempts to hack GPT based systems into producing outrageous statements. It's somewhat like ten year olds saying dirty words into a recorder and giggling when the recorder repeats them. It doesn't seem like much of  a trick. What follows isn't much of a trick either. It should come as no surprise that large language models (LLMs) trained on the internet might produce output that is less than factual. They are trained to produce plausible not factual text.  I have read about the supposed dangers of students using LLMs to submit essays in academic classes. I thought I might try to get GPT to produce a short paper on a medical subject. I signed up for an account with OpenAI  and obtained an API key so I could connect with one of the LLMs without going through the public website. There are a large number of  GPT models, 66 in total, to choose from when selecting a text generator. I c...