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I've been trying to use ChatGPT productively by asking it instead of looking up docs or search Duck Duck Go. I'm becoming more and more disillusioned. I was sc

I've been trying to use ChatGPT productively by asking it instead of looking up docs or search Duck Duck Go. I'm becoming more and more disillusioned. I was sceptical at first, then thoroughly impressed by all the blog posts, but actually using it is extremely frustrating. It's really good at composing answers that look plausible, but it just has no idea what you want. The only thing it is truly good at is composing unnecessarily verbose responses to spam emails.

fnordpiglet 4y ago
I’ve had the opposite experience. While at times it’s just wrong, it’s usually been pretty right even when I loosely phrase my request and ask it things Kagi or other IR systems wouldn’t be able to grok into meaningful results. Often it’s responses are also direct and succinct (even with all its boilerplate blah blah) and faster to process than clicking through 50 blogs and navigating SEO garbage, or distilling documentation to find the specific answer I need from it. Where it is insufficient it provides enough context and relevant search terms to construct a better IR query on a search engine. I have definitely had it get stuff just flat out wrong, but it’s easy enough to pick it out and I degenerate to old practice of searching and filtering in those cases. As has been posted about here many times in different ways, as they graft IR and reasoning systems onto chatgpt I expect these problems to disappear. I find it amazing how dismissive folks are of a tech that is barely a few months old. It’s like a whole generation of nerds have lost the capacity to dream.
james-revisoai 4y ago
I had this feeling too, so I began feeding text from my documents and videos into the same GPT engine. It results in much more relevant and grounded answers(well... grounded to whatever you documents claim, for better or worse). If you want to try it, there's a demo at fragen.co.uk
superdisk 4y ago
I've used it to port code to different languages, and it seems to do a pretty good job.
shagie 4y ago
I've had fairly good results in doing zero shot classifications, or asking it to summarize structured data in a human friendly way (e.g. a weather report). I've found its knowledge to be flawed if you poke enough into it though that feels more like it doesn't "understand" the facts that are embedded into the words. However, using it to do the classification natural language, extract certain pieces of information from the query, and then convert the structured data back to natural language it shows itself to be very capable and able to be "better sounding" than rules based summaries of that data. I've also found it to be quite capable at rewriting poorly written questions (e.g. Stack overflow questions - yea, I know, banned and all) to remove extraneous parts ("I'm a noob", "Thanks in advance"), fix grammar, and change the tone to be more professional... and creating a good summary title.
kerpotgh 4y ago
You’re nuts, I use it to generate all my employee reviews, props etc. I used it to come up with high level interview questions. I used it to generate a JD. I used it to write a podcast. I could not disagree with you more. It’s… smart and witty and honestly almost feels like a real person sometimes rather than a token generator.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

I’ve had the opposite experience. While at times it’s just wrong, it’s usually been pretty right even when I loosely phrase my request and ask it things Kagi or other IR systems wouldn’t be able to grok into meaningful results. Often it’s responses are also direct and succinct (even with all its boilerplate blah blah) and faster to process than clicking through 50 blogs and navigating SEO garbage, or distilling documentation to find the specific answer I need from it. Where it is insufficient it provides enough context and relevant search terms to construct a better IR query on a search engine. I have definitely had it get stuff just flat out wrong, but it’s easy enough to pick it out and I degenerate to old practice of searching and filtering in those cases. As has been posted about here many times in different ways, as they graft IR and reasoning systems onto chatgpt I expect these problems to disappear. I find it amazing how dismissive folks are of a tech that is barely a few months old. It’s like a whole generation of nerds have lost the capacity to dream.

james-revisoai 4y ago

I had this feeling too, so I began feeding text from my documents and videos into the same GPT engine. It results in much more relevant and grounded answers(well... grounded to whatever you documents claim, for better or worse). If you want to try it, there's a demo at fragen.co.uk

superdisk 4y ago

I've used it to port code to different languages, and it seems to do a pretty good job.

shagie 4y ago

I've had fairly good results in doing zero shot classifications, or asking it to summarize structured data in a human friendly way (e.g. a weather report). I've found its knowledge to be flawed if you poke enough into it though that feels more like it doesn't "understand" the facts that are embedded into the words. However, using it to do the classification natural language, extract certain pieces of information from the query, and then convert the structured data back to natural language it shows itself to be very capable and able to be "better sounding" than rules based summaries of that data. I've also found it to be quite capable at rewriting poorly written questions (e.g. Stack overflow questions - yea, I know, banned and all) to remove extraneous parts ("I'm a noob", "Thanks in advance"), fix grammar, and change the tone to be more professional... and creating a good summary title.

kerpotgh 4y ago

You’re nuts, I use it to generate all my employee reviews, props etc. I used it to come up with high level interview questions. I used it to generate a JD. I used it to write a podcast. I could not disagree with you more. It’s… smart and witty and honestly almost feels like a real person sometimes rather than a token generator.