https://gizmodo.com/did-trump-use-chatgpt-to-determine-disastrous-new-tariffs-2000584894#comments

Did Trump Use ChatGPT to Determine Disastrous New Tariffs?

Following President Trump’s announcement of sweeping global tariffs on Wednesday, users on social media were quick to try and decipher the math behind them. On top of a baseline 10% tariff against the entire world, individual countries will face additional tariffs based on how “unfairly” Trump believes they are treating the U.S. It turns out, however, that the White House may have used rudimentary suggestions from a chatbot to come to its calculations.

From The Verge:
Economist James Surowiecki quickly reverse-engineered a possible explanation for the tariff pricing. He found you could recreate each of the White House’s numbers by simply taking a given country’s trade deficit with the US and dividing it by their total exports to the US. Halve that number, and you get a ready-to-use “discounted reciprocal tariff.” The White House objected to this claim and published the formula it says that it used, but as Politico points out, the formula looks like a dressed-up version of Surowiecki’s method.

Asking various chatbots for a “simple” way to rectify trade imbalances with other countries, The Verge found that they all suggested a formula that aligns closely with the one used by the White House.

That should not be terribly surprising to anyone who understands the fundamentals of chatbots. They are imitating what they frequently see posted online. The trick to understanding chatbots is to preface anything they say with, “I have heard a lot of people are saying that…” But in the same way that you would not trust a survey of fifty people who do not know anything about a subject, you should not trust what a chatbot says either. They confidently say things that are wrong or confounding all the time.

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