ChatGPT Misunderstands Towel Drying Time Problem (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: If it takes three towels three hours to dry on the line, how long does it take nine towels to dry? I asked this to ChatGPT, the AI chatbot, which is designed to mimic human interactions. And this is what it said. If it takes three towels three hours to dry on the line, then it would take nine hours for nine towels to dry. And it gives this reasoning. It uses the correct reasoning because the drying time is directly proportional to the number of towels. If you double the number of towels, then you should double the amount of time it takes. If you triple the number of towels, then you should triple the amount of time it takes. Clearly, if your line is big enough, it shouldn't take you any longer to dry nine towels than it takes to dry three towels. But maybe this is the expected behavior for ChatGPT because it's trying to mimic human behavior, human interactions. And actually, I think if you asked a lot of people, that's maybe the answer that they would give. Because again, we're so ingrained with this idea of linearity that we don't stop to think. That actually, in this case, the relationship is just constant. It doesn't matter how many towels you're drying on the line. It takes the same amount of time.