008 - Are You Sure About That?
008 - Are You Sure About That?
Battling hallucinations, Checking out Whiteboards and Learning about connectors
Hey Friends,
Today we’re going to talk about one of the things that get brought up in almost every conversation that I have about ChatGPT and BingAI – “hallucinations”.
What’s a hallucination? A hallucination is when the AI returns an unexpected or untrue response. There is still a lot of research going into hallucinations, but they seem to occur when the AI is pushed for an answer that it would have no way of providing. Hallucinations also occur when the AI is “writing a story” with you rather than “answering your question” – ChatGPT and BingAI aren’t human and don’t always do a good job of distinguishing between a real and make-believe question.
Fortunately, this seems to be improving, at least on the ChatGPT side (if BingAI thinks it’s time to have a petty debate about “facts”, it will still throw down with conviction). In fact, one of the lessons in my ’30 Days of AI’ class (July cohort sign-ups closing in, like, 6 days) had to be rewritten because one of my reliable hallucination triggers got fixed.
The good news is that you can still find them in the wild. The even gooder news (go away, Grammerly) is that there’s often a simple check.
I wanted ChatGPT to help me come up with Microsoft 365 apps and simple Power Automate flows that worked with the topic of the ChatGPT feature I was discussing. (I thought it’d be cool to tie everything together so that each newsletter was like a cohesive meal instead of three random appetizers.)
Here was my prompt:
I like to think that when ChatGPT says it’s a fantastic idea, it really means it. 😂
(Spoiler Alert, this article was supposed to be about using ChatGPT to learn something new. But, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to showcase a hallucination and how you can address them.)
This was one of ChatGPT’s suggestions:
…Now, I’m not a Power Automate master but any means, but I *have* spent quite a bit of time flailing around in the application. And not once do I recall seeing Microsoft Whiteboard as an automation option…
What is one of the hallucination solutions? Simply ask ChatGPT if what it wrote was correct.
If it knows that it made something up, it will let you know.
The only challenge is when it tells you something that it earnestly believes to be true (or not false) – this happens a lot with Power Automate quirks. I like to run a flow suggested from ChatGPT by BingAI to just double-check if it’s possible and also if anyone else had had any trouble.
Did someone say “Microsoft Whiteboard”?
Yes, I believe ChatGPT suggested it.
Okay, so what IS Microsoft Whiteboard? If you’ve ever used a tool like Miro, Whiteboard will be somewhat familiar. You can check out the Microsoft page here. If you’re not familiar with Microsoft Whiteboard and how you can use it for yourself, I’m going to show you a little cheat using BingAI…
And here are the results (for me – you would get different results based on what you do with your practice, of course).
Hmmmm, I don’t mind the suggestion of brainstorming ideas… Let’s see if we can create a Whiteboard for that.
When I open up a new Whiteboard, I get an option for a bunch of different templates – and of course, I choose “Brainstorm” because that’s what we’re here for, right? Aaaaand, Topic Brainstorm? I have to be honest, I don’t know all the brainstorming terminology.
Aaaand, this is kind of cool! I could definitely see it as a holding pen for ideas or space for teams to work on client issues – especially if it’s integrated into a Teams channels for easy access.
I’m going to play around with this some more but if you’re already using Whiteboard, I’d love to hear what you and your team are using it for.
Power Automate – Checking Connectors
What’s a “Connector”? Oh sure, it’s what Microsoft calls the applications that you’re hitching together using Power Automate. If you go to make.powerautomate.com and click “Connectors”, you’ll see an overwhelmingly large list of connectors.
I just scrolled through another representation of the connectors available here and saw some familiar faces, like Cognito Forms, Freshbooks (go Twyla and Alex!), and Harvest; some surprises like Google and MailChimp; and social media applications like LinkedIn, Pinterest (!), and Twitter. I can finally automate posting the cool calculators that I find on my Pinterest page! (Yes, there is one. Yes, it’s a joke)
Oh, but you know what I *didn’t* find? Microsoft Whiteboard. Here’s the thing – I didn’t need to do all of that scrolling to find that out – this is the age of AI! Which means it’s also the age past the age of the search bar! So I just used the search function…
It’s okay, though. I can still use Loop Components in a Whiteboard which is *almost* just as cool.
Thanks for spending time walking through hallucinations and whiteboards and connectors with me. Is there anything you’re most excited to take a closer look at?