According to Google Trends — which is actually more or less the collective global brain — interest in ChatGPT peaked last April, for a brief time, and has been trending down ever since — even though there have been numerous updates and expansions to the program last May, June, and July.
More key for this blog, ChatGPT only briefly outpaced leading metaverse platforms Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite on Google Trends in April. Before and since, however, it's trailed behind, usually by quite a lot.
Why? For one thing, platforms comprised of live, active, masses of creative people will always be more popular than an automated service. For another, ChatGPT like all other Large Language Models are by definition mediocre content generators:
When you ask ChatGPT a question, you get a response that fits the patterns of the probability distribution of language that the model has seen before. It does not reflect knowledge, facts, or insights.
And to make this even more fun, in that compression of language patterns, we also magnify the bias in the underlying language. This is how we end up with models that are even more problematic than what you find on the web. ChatGPT specifically does use human-corrected judgements to reduce the worst of this behavior, but those efforts are far from foolproof, and the model still reflects the biases of the humans doing the correcting.
Finally, because of the way these models are designed, they are at best, a representation of the average language used on the internet. By design, ChatGPT aspires to be the most mediocre web content you can imagine.
More here. Click to embiggenate the full Google Trends report.
