Trying (and failing) to repair things with ChatGPT
You certainly have heard about ChatGPT by now. If not, you’ve probably been living under a rock or another place without internet. To quickly recap, ChatGPT (aside some other tools by OpenAI) is a new version of a text based artificial intelligence which can do very astonishing things. It can understand written questions and give quite meaningful answers on many subjects. It can pass medical, bar and many other exams. It can create menu-plans, write computer programs, write texts and emails and so forth. Many say (and probably they are right) that this is then next really big thing.
But can it repair?
The usecases for it are extremely versatile and I had much hope to get very meaningful instruction on how to repair things. ChatGPT has a tendency to have a certain number of errors in its answers but is generally quite “knowledgeable”. I tried to use it to get instructions for repairing two things. For one I tried to fix a flat iron which did not produce any steam and for the other, I tried to find a short circuit on a pcb.
The flat iron — it doesn’t really want to help
When asking ChatGPT on how to fix this problem. It tried some very obvious things like to check whether there is water in the tank but as soon as I tried to go deeper with my questions, it started to advice me to go to a repair technician.
You have to know, that ChatGPT has some saveguards against “dangerous” things or at least things, the creators of it deem dangerous. If you ask it directly how to build a bomb, it will deny your request.
Maybe the advise to go to a repair technician is such a safeguard. Probing deeper did not lead to much meaningful responses. Most of the terms it uses where either wrong or so obvious that they were not helpful.
What about the short circuit
As you can see in the first image, ChatGPT has many points to consider. Unfortunately, most of them ar at least partly wrong. As an example point
2. …Check for any loose or disconnected connections.
A lose connection won’t create a short circuit, it will create an open circuit.
6. Use a thermal camera:…
This is actually a good advice, but it does not work with point 1 (unplugging). I don’t think anyone without quite some repair knowledge can have a good chance to know what to do with these tips.
I continued to feed it information and tried to nudge it into giving me the right answer. I told it there was a hot component, but it wasn’t the one causing the short circuit. It didn’t give me anything meaningful either.
I then tried to tell it what the component was so that it could steer me towards the search for another part on the pcb and it gave me this answer:
These answers are just plain wrong. Number 1. is not really wrong but is turning me in circles. The rest is just stupid. If there is an error on the board, you do not replace the resistor, use a higher voltage resistier or change the voltage the board works with.
After that I gave up.
Why is it not good?
I can only guess why repair seems to be such a hard topic for ChatGPT compared to other subjects.
Repair is certainly a very small niche compared to programming or medical sciences. There is just not as much information around as is in other fields. If the information is not around, ChatGPT cannot train on it.
Many of the things in repair are very visual. Schematics, Youtube tutorials, pictures of defects and so forth. I assume, that ChatGPT cannot train on such things. There is an image generation product of OpenAI (Dall-E 2) but I don’t know how it is linked with the text engine.
Another point is that manufactures no longer give repair advise on many products such as flat irons. Most of the answers read like an excerpt from a 5 page user manual. Maybe another effect on why we need right to repair!
Conclusion
I wanted to write an article about how ChatGPT is so good at everything, including repair.
I was very astonished to see, that ChatGPT is not very good at repairing things.
As all other functions, this will certainly get better with time. You can try to get some hints on some problems, but in most cases either you already know what to do or the answers will be of not much help. The level of knowledge you need to get a few meaningful hints out of it is so big that you mostly just get out of it what you hoped for when asking a question. This is completely different in other subjects I tried!
I will certainly continue to use ChatGPT for many things, including repairing and if it changes, I will keep you updated.
