Re: 🇳🇿 ‘Zero to 100 ’: ChatGPT disputes clogging up the rental system, agents warn of price hikes

Lawrence D’Oliveiro <[email protected]> writes:
> 🇳🇿 tenants are increasingly using ChatGPT to help them write
> complaints for submission to the Tenancy Tribunal
> <https://www.oneroof.co.nz/news/zero-to-100-chatgpt-disputes-clogging-up-the-rental-system-agents-warn-of-price-hikes-49682>,
> and this is not always a good thing. The closing lines sum it up best:
>
>     However, [Tenancy Advisory director Sarina Gibbon] describes AI as
>     an amplifier, not an equaliser.
>
>     “If you have a Tribunal case that has merit and understand how the
>     law applies to your situation, AI can amplify that. But if you
>     have a weak case and little understanding of tenancy law, AI will
>     amplify that too.”
>
> How does a user tell whether they’re on the right track or completely
> the wrong one? AI will happily drive them further in the same
> direction, regardless ...

They don’t seem to be able to say “no”.

Two experiences:

ChatGPT has at some point learned to count the number of Rs in the word
strawberry.  But while exploring this, I asked it increasingly
nonsensical questions (like “which eight days of the week have a Q
in?”). Although it consistently got the numeric part of the answer
right, it continued to generate responses stating that I was engaging in
wordplay - rather than just asking it stupid questions. A human with any
common sense whatsoever would have told me to stop being so silly.

That’s just mucking around, but the other one was an attempt to get
something somewhat useful done:

https://blog.trailofbits.com/2026/06/12/factoring-short-sleeve-rsa-keys-with-polynomials/
publishes a couple of weak RSA public keys, in the form of a
screenshot. I wanted to have a play to see if I could reproduce pattern
1 from a plausible key generation strategy (bugs in key generation are
professionally relevant to me), and didn’t fancy copy-typing 512-digit
numbers, so I asked Copilot to do it for me. It identified immediately
that there were two columns, but struggled with two things: the exact
boundaries between them, and the zero digits, which I never got it to
reproduce at all. I spent several iterations pointing out its mistake,
and each time it generated a response apologizing and stating it would
be more careful, and then getting output wrong in the essentially the
same way again. Obviously after a few tries I gave up and copy-typed
pattern 1 myself: it would all have been much quicker if it had admitted
from the start that it couldn’t do this task that a child could have
easily achieved.

-- 
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/