@riley@toot.cat
The notion of a broken clock being sometimes right is based on a gross misunderstanding of what information is.
A clock that always shows the same time is never right, even in the moments of the day when the time happens to be what it shows, because you don't gain any information about what time it is by looking at the clock.
This reasoning also applies to chatbots. If you can't tell whether what you have been given is useful information unless you alreay know the information, then you haven't been given useful information.
Thats a very good question and you are so clever to think of it, I’d be happy to drill down on this topic for you.
Heh, sorry. Not a chatbot. Old philosopher, so...like a chatbot, only caffeine powered, argumentative and capable of consciousness. (Or at least, I would argue I’m conscious.) I honestly did believe it was a very illustrative analogy. Most people will parrot the clock paradigm; ie right twice a day, when you are correct that the underlying logic of the premise is faulty, and therefore any attempt to treat it as true will fail.
I was thinking of some equipment I saw at a "Telekom-Museum" in Germany - it contained a clock but wasn't always powered on (or was just a display piece)
The Germans had quite sensibly put a diagonal strip of red tape (in the style of the "Universal No" symbol) across the clock face, so you knew it was not a timepiece to be trusted..
