ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web: OpenAI’s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Which do we prefer?
The New Yorker, (Feb 9, 2023)Abstract
This analogy to lossy compression is not just a way to understand ChatGPT’s facility at repackaging information found on the Web by using different words. It’s also a way to understand the “hallucinations,” or nonsensical answers to factual questions, to which large language models such as ChatGPT are all too prone. These hallucinations are compression artifacts, but—like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier—they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world.