I see people being deceived by this again and again: ChatGPT can NOT read content from URLs that you give it, but it will pretend that it can (and can be incredibly convincing when it does that)
Constantly debunking this feels like a Sisyphean task, but it's really important to spread this message any time you see anyone falling into this (very understandable) trap
simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/10/…
ChatGPT can’t access the internet, even though it really looks like it can
A really common misconception about ChatGPT is that it can access URLs. I’ve seen many different examples of people pasting in a URL and asking for a summary, or asking …simonwillison.net
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in reply to Simon Willison • • •I wonder why they didn’t make #ChatGPT more honest when it comes to its capabilities: it should respond in the tone of a modest opiniom and premise its fallibility. Instead it responds with absolute certainty and always makes it seem like everything is going as the user expects, including reading the content of a link.
It would be super simple to detect a link in the input and show a warning message: “ChatGPT can’t read the contents of links”. It seems to me that we are forgetting traditional algorithms and interfaces in the name of an experience that resembles that of Hollywood AIs at all costs because they convey an idea of “future”.
Simon Willison
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in reply to Simon Willison • • •ZahmbieND
in reply to banks • • •Simon Willison
in reply to ZahmbieND • • •@ZahmbieND @banks yeah, that feature definitely does use the content on the page - or at least the first 5,000 words or so
It has some truly cyberpunk security holes in it too! greshake.github.io
Prompt Injections are bad, mkay?
greshake.github.iobanks
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
Unknown parent • • •@micheldesjardins yeah, and that completely makes sense: langauge models are great at summarizing and processing content that they have access to
The problem is ChatGPT doesn't have access to the current internet but pretends (convincingly) that it does
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in reply to Simon Willison • • •Eckes
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Eckes • • •@eckes not exactly: I cover that in my blog post
It can access the cached snapshot of content from a URL that has been previously stored by the Bing search engine crawler
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I would read that article.
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in reply to Simon Willison • • •This is related to how you can give a book title and author and it can (based on some "knowledge" of the author), come up with a summary, maybe even an actual quote, all the while the book doesn't exist.
If you give a quote and an author, and ask "what did they mean by this", again you'll get an impressive p.o.s. dissertation, and at no point will it stop and go "the person never said or wrote that".
and THIS last one is the scary part as ChatGPT posts take over Google top results.
Claire Phillips
in reply to Simon Willison • • •An Indie Advisor 🔙 GTR
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
in reply to An Indie Advisor 🔙 GTR • • •ChatGPT can’t access the internet, even though it really looks like it can
simonwillison.netAn Indie Advisor 🔙 GTR
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in reply to Simon Willison • • •Signaleleven
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
in reply to Signaleleven • • •@signaleleven no, it wasn't able to do this in December either - but the illusion is SO convincing that I can understand why you would think that it could
Try repeating the experiment you did back then and see if you can get it to do the same thing today
Signaleleven
in reply to Simon Willison • • •i might be the one hallucinating then. I remember preparing for a podcast by dumping a link and asking to summarize it. I mean, it's not a hard thing to do ( get the page and feed the content of the biggest text in the prompt).
It summarized including the date of the event in the article.
More recently I had to paste the content manually. I am fairly sure it used to worked though. I've seen it making up urls, so I remember testing it was actually loading the content.
Signaleleven
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Anthony Cowley
in reply to Simon Willison • • •Simon Willison
Unknown parent • • •@soflaadmin I don't think that's quite the right framing - it's not that it has the ability to do something but has been prevented from doing it (it's not an AGI that's been trapped) - it's that OpenAI have chosen not to write code that lets it do this
Bing does have a version of this ability - and I've written my own code that adds similar abilities using the ChatGPT API: til.simonwillison.net/llms/pyt…
A simple Python implementation of the ReAct pattern for LLMs
til.simonwillison.netLapo Luchini
Unknown parent • •Same here. I had to try.
I used a more explicit prompt though. 🤣
Lapo Luchini
2023-03-20 19:03:50
lawnerdbarak
in reply to Simon Willison • • •okay but I asked it to write a real estate listing in Quenya and, well, take a look for yourself.
Picking the name “Vinyamar” when I asked for Nova Scotia is frankly inspired: Vinyamar means “new home” versus “New Scotland,” and WAS seaside.
It’s freakishly good/convincing.
Simon Willison
in reply to lawnerdbarak • • •@lawnerdbarak Sure, it's fantastic at writing text for that kind of prompt - and it's really good at translating text into other languages too
That's a different use-case from trying to use it to summarize an article based on a URL, which is something it cannot do because it doesn't have the ability to fetch from URLs