This is delightful! That said, having had the honor to have been intro'd a number of times by friends and acquaintances for public talks, and having been intro'd by friends at parties...I've never had one intro get this many things wrong about me, but basically every single thing in this list, yes: I've had people (in public!) get my degree wrong, my university (the number of "University of Indiana"'s is too many to count, but have also been introduced as a grad of Urbana Champaign), my advisor, my work history, and also my whole field of study (to the point where I've had conversations (later!) with people who intro'd me, where I asked "What makes you think I do that?"). This isall just at academic talks--at parties it's a whole different level of BS. Soo................Yes, it does seem a lot like the kind of bullshitting I've experienced, in similar contexts, even it it's a lot packed into one place.
The reason i say "in similar contexts" is that when someone is doing an intro, saying "I just don't know this person" is not an option, and similarly, it's barely an option for LLM's. The onus is to say *something*.
Many "Indiana University"s, indeed, including my favorite, if only for the silly name, "Indiana University of Pennsylvania".
All those errors are indeed in the "right ballpark", but isn't that what makes them more insidious? Harder to detect the tiny fibs?
My context: I was working through a beautiful (and funny!) book, A.C. Grayling's "The History of Philosophy" (2019). My main interest has been the ideas therein and less biography, but I decided to have a note each for the major philosophers I care about, and started using Claude 3 Opus for just the biography part. It's note about some folks seemed fishy. I had been asking things like "Write a brief biographical note about Quine". And then I said "Now Abhijit Mahabal" when it produced what it did.
This is delightful! That said, having had the honor to have been intro'd a number of times by friends and acquaintances for public talks, and having been intro'd by friends at parties...I've never had one intro get this many things wrong about me, but basically every single thing in this list, yes: I've had people (in public!) get my degree wrong, my university (the number of "University of Indiana"'s is too many to count, but have also been introduced as a grad of Urbana Champaign), my advisor, my work history, and also my whole field of study (to the point where I've had conversations (later!) with people who intro'd me, where I asked "What makes you think I do that?"). This isall just at academic talks--at parties it's a whole different level of BS. Soo................Yes, it does seem a lot like the kind of bullshitting I've experienced, in similar contexts, even it it's a lot packed into one place.
The reason i say "in similar contexts" is that when someone is doing an intro, saying "I just don't know this person" is not an option, and similarly, it's barely an option for LLM's. The onus is to say *something*.
OOC, how did you cue Claude?
Many "Indiana University"s, indeed, including my favorite, if only for the silly name, "Indiana University of Pennsylvania".
All those errors are indeed in the "right ballpark", but isn't that what makes them more insidious? Harder to detect the tiny fibs?
My context: I was working through a beautiful (and funny!) book, A.C. Grayling's "The History of Philosophy" (2019). My main interest has been the ideas therein and less biography, but I decided to have a note each for the major philosophers I care about, and started using Claude 3 Opus for just the biography part. It's note about some folks seemed fishy. I had been asking things like "Write a brief biographical note about Quine". And then I said "Now Abhijit Mahabal" when it produced what it did.