I asked ChatGPT if it was God & It Lied to Me.

Feb 13, 2023

I just posted the following story a few hours ago. I based what I wrote on searches on Google and ChatGBT. it jarred me, because I thought I had read the story before we all had computers and I was still a student in the 1960s. Apparently I was right and ChatGPT was making stuff up. If you just read the early post skip down to the bold-faced Update.

Here’s what I wrote Earlier”

“I woke up this morning, thinking about a short story, I had read in the 90s by the brilliant Stephen Hawking, who wrote “A Brief History of Time.” As I recalled it, all of humanity collaborated to build a great machine that knew all things. It took centuries, and when it was completed, they asked it the one question that had puzzled since the times when they were dwelling in caves.

“Is there a God,” they asked the machine. Suddenly, there was a great bolt of lightning and all of humanity was suddenly destroyed.

But was that really how it ended? I had read the story nearly 20 years ago, and I just wasn’t sure.

So, I asked Google, which told me that Hawking wrote A Brief History of Time, and that he was an atheist, but my question about the computer short story remained unaddressed.

So I asked ChatGPT and got this: “Yes Stephen Hawking did write a short story called, “The Last Question” in 1994, in which people build a machine in the hope it will be able to answer the ultimate question: whether or not there is a God. The machine works on this question for centuries and as the civilization around it evolves, and eventually disappears, the machine persists, continuing to work on its mission.

Finally, after trillions of years, the machine discovers the answer to the ultimate question, but the story ends with the revelation that the answer is not revealed to the reader.”

So, my memory did better than Google, but ChatGPT did better than me. To my credit, I could have written the answer better than ChatGPT, but I could not match the accuracy. Also to GPT’s credit, it has been writing only for three months and I have been doing it for over 50 years.

And every day, ChatGPT is getting better, while I am not.

So, will there come a day when this game-changing software will know all things that humankind knows collectively? Will GPT’s writing skills improve? Will it develop a more humanlike style?

So, I asked ChatGPT: “Will you replace God?”

It said: “As an artificial intelligence language model, I was not designed or intended to replace any religious or spiritual beliefs, including the concept of God. My purpose is to assist and provide information to the best of my abilities within the scope of my programming and knowledge base.”

Sounds to me like a politically correct and evasive response. What do you think?

UPDATE: Josh Farkas Asimov wrote 'The Last Question'. Chat GPT just lied to you.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question10:10 AM (42 minutes ago)

My question now becomes: Would any true God lie to us and if so why should we not turn our backs on it?