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It's really good on things that are not hard but boring, which makes it extremely valuable. For example, I needed a tag cloud in SwiftUI. Very easy but very bo

by mrtksn 4y ago

It's really good on things that are not hard but boring, which makes it extremely valuable. For example, I needed a tag cloud in SwiftUI. Very easy but very boring task, I guess there are tons of libraries for it but I don't like using libraries for this kind of things. As if it's my junior, I told ChatGPT to generate a tag cloud and it did. It got the main things right but I need it to loop through an array of custom Structs, gave the structure of the Struct and told it to modify the algorithm. ChatGPT did it very well, as if understood the structure of my custom Struct type. But I needed the tags be clickable, told it to make it clickable and it did and it correctly guessed how to connect a property from my custom type to the click action. I told it to change the colors, size etc and it was able to do it all. Sometimes it generated incorrect syntax but that wasn't a problem because I told to fix it and it did. If having a junior developer as an assistant isn't valuable, I don't know what is. I also use it to drill down on my curiosities. Yesterday I was curious how a torrent client can connect to peers to share a file and I made chatGPT explain to me step by step how NAT works, what strategy developers use to overcome issues with it(If curious, apparently they use this thing called STUN server, which is basically a remote machine that the client can connect to learn its own remote IP address). So it's not just a junior but also an expert in a domain that can answer questions conversationally. Much better that Googling keywords because Google is ridden with spam and tries to be clever about your queries without actually being clever. So once I learned the technical keywords like STUN server, then Google became useful again.

DharmaPolice 4y ago
My concern would be the same as with a Junior Dev. It's fine if they don't know something but please don't bullshit/make something up. Maybe tech questions are immune to this but it doesn't seem to have any conception of true and false. This is a silly example but I asked for a list of Star Trek references in Seinfeld and it gave 6-7 examples that all sounded genuine (Jerry makes a joke about transporters in the Contest episode) but were 100% made up. If I wasn't super familiar with the show I wouldn't have been able to tell most were invented. With code generation that's less important because we have ways of testing code for "truth" but I would worry about relying on any factual statements from the thing.
- bmitc 4y ago
  This points out the most dangerous part of ChatGPT. It's a highly confident idiot. When I told it was explicitly wrong, it basically responded with "I'm sorry it wasn't clear".
- mrtksn 4y ago
  Sure, humans are not obsolete just yet! People are needlessly freaking out about losing their jobs or even reason for existence to AI. The reason for employing developers or designers is not that we need someone to write loops and draw lines. It's a tool that makes some things significantly more easier and it does have risks. It will replace only people who are doing jobs not suitable for people.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    20 years ago, we could have had the same conversation about outsourcing customer support. It was rife with problems and limitations, just as AI today is. But that didn't stop companies from doing it anyway. The C-suite isn't listening to researchers and the general public, they're looking at what their shareholders think they 'should' do. Once McKinsey and BCG whip out their "AI Digital Transformation" powerpoints, it's over.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    The problem is that most of us work for companies ACTIVELY TRYING to use this stuff to replace human beings, INCLUDING THE ACTUAL DECISION MAKING and slapping black boxes everywhere in their bureaucratic processes because "machine says no" is a SUPER beneficial thing to a business, especially the modern massive corporation that doesn't really have competition and is mostly profitable because it ignores problems. I give it five years until even we here are unable to get the attention of a tech company employee to fix our wrongly locked out account because not only are the primary touch points """automated""" but the appeals and appeals of appeals are also entirely automated. Everyone here will get to enjoy "machine says no" a hundred times more often. Every tech support or bill support or anything support will put you through half an hour of terrible "AI" interaction before you are even allowed to be routed to a human, and businesses will use this to get rid of even more call center employees. Hate not being able to understand the thick accent in your support call? Get ready for 1% of the time the AI in the phone call puts together sounds that don't actually form words, or just straight up misunderstand what you say, and nobody will believe you because "it's so accurate". Get ready to be gaslit by your fucking phone.

by mrtksn 4y ago

DharmaPolice 4y ago

My concern would be the same as with a Junior Dev. It's fine if they don't know something but please don't bullshit/make something up. Maybe tech questions are immune to this but it doesn't seem to have any conception of true and false. This is a silly example but I asked for a list of Star Trek references in Seinfeld and it gave 6-7 examples that all sounded genuine (Jerry makes a joke about transporters in the Contest episode) but were 100% made up. If I wasn't super familiar with the show I wouldn't have been able to tell most were invented. With code generation that's less important because we have ways of testing code for "truth" but I would worry about relying on any factual statements from the thing.

bmitc 4y ago
This points out the most dangerous part of ChatGPT. It's a highly confident idiot. When I told it was explicitly wrong, it basically responded with "I'm sorry it wasn't clear".
mrtksn 4y ago
Sure, humans are not obsolete just yet! People are needlessly freaking out about losing their jobs or even reason for existence to AI. The reason for employing developers or designers is not that we need someone to write loops and draw lines. It's a tool that makes some things significantly more easier and it does have risks. It will replace only people who are doing jobs not suitable for people.
- rchaud 4y ago
  20 years ago, we could have had the same conversation about outsourcing customer support. It was rife with problems and limitations, just as AI today is. But that didn't stop companies from doing it anyway. The C-suite isn't listening to researchers and the general public, they're looking at what their shareholders think they 'should' do. Once McKinsey and BCG whip out their "AI Digital Transformation" powerpoints, it's over.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  The problem is that most of us work for companies ACTIVELY TRYING to use this stuff to replace human beings, INCLUDING THE ACTUAL DECISION MAKING and slapping black boxes everywhere in their bureaucratic processes because "machine says no" is a SUPER beneficial thing to a business, especially the modern massive corporation that doesn't really have competition and is mostly profitable because it ignores problems. I give it five years until even we here are unable to get the attention of a tech company employee to fix our wrongly locked out account because not only are the primary touch points """automated""" but the appeals and appeals of appeals are also entirely automated. Everyone here will get to enjoy "machine says no" a hundred times more often. Every tech support or bill support or anything support will put you through half an hour of terrible "AI" interaction before you are even allowed to be routed to a human, and businesses will use this to get rid of even more call center employees. Hate not being able to understand the thick accent in your support call? Get ready for 1% of the time the AI in the phone call puts together sounds that don't actually form words, or just straight up misunderstand what you say, and nobody will believe you because "it's so accurate". Get ready to be gaslit by your fucking phone.