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ChatGPT helps a lot but it is necessary to take everything with a grain of salt - so what? It still can save a lot of time. Just Alt-tab ChatGPT/Google. Adjust

ChatGPT helps a lot but it is necessary to take everything with a grain of salt - so what? It still can save a lot of time. Just Alt-tab ChatGPT/Google. Adjust your mental model from what you think it should be to what it actually is.

slowmovintarget 4y ago
gem install hairball
- slowmovintarget 4y ago
  No one gets the reference? Rich Hickey gave a talk where he speaks about how easy it is to import dependencies you didn't know you had. That means you were getting complications to your systems in an uncontrolled fashion because it's so easy to do. Now imagine that same ease with ideas. It's so easy to just let ChatGPT write that up, I'm going to do that. I'm not even going to edit, even where what it wrote doesn't exactly reflect my thinking on the matter. At that point, you're cluttering up your own thinking with output from ChatGPT because it's easy. gem install hairball
emodendroket 4y ago
I hear this a lot but I don't find it convincing. If I know enough to know if the answer is good or bad, why would I be asking a chat bot? We could say this problem is somewhat analogous to sorting good StackOverflow answers from bad ones. But I feel that there are things like writing and presentation style (not to mention the votes and comments) that could tip me off to a bad answer that are absent when every answer is in the same voice.
- worik 4y ago
  Early days but Iam finding OpenAI better than StackOverflow for reminding me of libraries and syntax of programming languages I have tried it with:rust, dart, and swift
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    I can see that being useful, though I’d prefer something integrated with my development environment along the lines of Copilot.
- skissane 4y ago
  > If I know enough to know if the answer is good or bad, why would I be asking a chat bot? If you are trying to write a blog/essay/etc on a topic, it can help with “writer’s block”-you may know a lot about the topic already, but struggle with putting that understanding into words. And then it isn’t hard to filter ChatGPT’s output based on your pre-existing knowledge. Sometimes I don’t know the answer to the specific question I am asking it, but still have enough background knowledge of the topic to pick up when it is likely to be “hallucinating”
  - hpen 4y ago
    Does it help writers block by writing for you? If so, are you still writing?
    - skissane 4y ago
      What if you take what it writes as a starting point, adding to it, removing bits from it, rewording it, etc? Surely then you are indeed “writing”
      - jwestbury 4y ago
        No, then you are plagiarising.
        skissane 4y ago
        What counts as “plagiarism” depends on the context. It is (in most cases) unethical to present the work of another human being as your own, but what about an AI? In an educational setting, it would be unethical to turn in an AI’s work as your own. But if a professional programmer uses GitHub Copilot, are they obliged to acknowledge Copilot’s contribution? If I have a personal blog, and ChatGPT helps me write a post, am I obliged to acknowledge ChatGPT’s contribution?
        hpen 4y ago
        Somewhat of an open question really. I think for all of blogging we have concluded that the words in your blog post were in fact written by you. I see two reasons plagiarism is bad: both and injustice to whom wrote the original but also a false indicator to your cognitive and creative ability.
- osigurdson 4y ago
  I'd suggest just trying it yourself for a bit to see if you can find any use for the tool. If not, that isn't a problem either - I suspect it is completely useless in some domains.
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    I amused myself by trying to think of funny things for it to write but it was a bit hit-and-miss and now they want me to pay to fiddle with it more.
    - osigurdson 4y ago
      I remember playing around with it first and doing similar things with the openai playground. It is amusing but the novelty of this type of usage wears off quickly. I mostly use it for programming type work now. Write a little snip of code (personal projects only) or tell me how to use a library. I also use it to teach me things. I find it incredibly useful for this. ChatGPT is still free for me but it is glitchy at times. I would definitely pay the $20/ month one it is available in my region.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  It’s easier to prove an answer correct using google than it is to find one from scratch. ChatGPT can often show you when the premise of the question is wrong or assumes things that are not true. Making it easy to search on google after.
  - osigurdson 4y ago
    Exactly. I assume Google or others will combine these together in some way soon. It is a pretty obvious win.
- edanm 4y ago
  > If I know enough to know if the answer is good or bad, why would I be asking a chat bot? I mean, taken to the extreme, I can probably read through the source of VLC and know that it's correct, given enough years to read it and study video compression standards etc. Does that mean I don't get use out of someone else having written VLC for me? Knowing something is right and producing it are completely different things. You might be thinking of ChatGPT too narrowly, as a simple question-answer thing, but even now you can ask it to write code that will save you time, and scale it up by a few factors and it's doing the equivalent of writing new libraries for you. (Probably many years before it can write VLC for you, if ever.)
  - b3morales 4y ago
    This is not the same thing at all. You know whether a tool like VLC works because it has a pretty well-defined scope for "works": it plays the video or audio file you clicked on. If you're asking ChatGPT to teach you something, you have no such easy verification you can do: you essentially need to learn the same material from another source in order to cross-check it. Obviously this is easy for small factual questions. If I ask ChatGPT the circumference of the Earth, I can quickly figure out whether it's reliable or not on that point. But at the other extreme if I ask it to do a music theory analysis of the Goldberg Variations, it's going to take me about as much work to validate the output as to have just done the analysis myself.
    - osigurdson 4y ago
      I don’t think learning in many situations is as black and white as you assert
- jjk166 4y ago
  I know what a clean house looks like, but I'd still love a machine to clean my house. CatGPT's purpose is not to understand complex ideas, it is to do the tedious task of joining disparate such ideas together in an intelligible way. Much faster to have it do 95% of the work and you only need to modify the 5% that's bad, then for you to do 100% yourself.
  - jijijijij 4y ago
    That’s a bad analogy. It would actually rather be like: I know what a clean house looks like, but I’d still love a machine to describe it to me. However, I think you are somewhat on the right track as “AI” shows us which types of work can be removed all together. I think, if “AI” can do it, it’s not necessary work to begin with. Eg. instead of “AI” doing formal correspondence for us, we could then just have an interface to exchange raw information directly, as the human element is lost anyway.
    - jjk166 4y ago
      I don't think you understand how analogies work.
      - jijijijij 4y ago
        [dead]
sfpotter 4y ago
The slippery slope here isn’t obvious to you? Or you just don’t care?
- osigurdson 4y ago
  I suppose it isn't obvious to me and I perhaps don't care. I'm not going to get stressed about being made obsolete by AI, etc., if that is what you mean. That could happen but so could a lot of things. Of course, I may have completely missed what you meant by slippery slope.
GreeningRun 4y ago
Love your "adjust your mental model" sentence. Let's talk about the judge using it in ruling, or your doctor for diag... No problem for you? And now that it is listed as co-author on research papers (real)? Then using this source to reinforce his model! I really think it is a lot more than a grain of salt my man. [edit] AI is not all bad, just fun ;) "Is chatGPT accurate?" https://www.perplexity.ai/?s=u&uuid=c97b4388-958f-45cb-a0ae-cc87bf32ab85 https://www.perplexity.ai/?s=u&uuid=c97b4388-958f-45cb-a0ae-...

slowmovintarget 4y ago

gem install hairball

slowmovintarget 4y ago
No one gets the reference? Rich Hickey gave a talk where he speaks about how easy it is to import dependencies you didn't know you had. That means you were getting complications to your systems in an uncontrolled fashion because it's so easy to do. Now imagine that same ease with ideas. It's so easy to just let ChatGPT write that up, I'm going to do that. I'm not even going to edit, even where what it wrote doesn't exactly reflect my thinking on the matter. At that point, you're cluttering up your own thinking with output from ChatGPT because it's easy. gem install hairball

emodendroket 4y ago

I hear this a lot but I don't find it convincing. If I know enough to know if the answer is good or bad, why would I be asking a chat bot? We could say this problem is somewhat analogous to sorting good StackOverflow answers from bad ones. But I feel that there are things like writing and presentation style (not to mention the votes and comments) that could tip me off to a bad answer that are absent when every answer is in the same voice.

worik 4y ago
Early days but Iam finding OpenAI better than StackOverflow for reminding me of libraries and syntax of programming languages I have tried it with:rust, dart, and swift
- emodendroket 4y ago
  I can see that being useful, though I’d prefer something integrated with my development environment along the lines of Copilot.
skissane 4y ago
> If I know enough to know if the answer is good or bad, why would I be asking a chat bot? If you are trying to write a blog/essay/etc on a topic, it can help with “writer’s block”-you may know a lot about the topic already, but struggle with putting that understanding into words. And then it isn’t hard to filter ChatGPT’s output based on your pre-existing knowledge. Sometimes I don’t know the answer to the specific question I am asking it, but still have enough background knowledge of the topic to pick up when it is likely to be “hallucinating”
- hpen 4y ago
  Does it help writers block by writing for you? If so, are you still writing?
  - skissane 4y ago
    What if you take what it writes as a starting point, adding to it, removing bits from it, rewording it, etc? Surely then you are indeed “writing”
    - jwestbury 4y ago
      No, then you are plagiarising.
      - skissane 4y ago
        What counts as “plagiarism” depends on the context. It is (in most cases) unethical to present the work of another human being as your own, but what about an AI? In an educational setting, it would be unethical to turn in an AI’s work as your own. But if a professional programmer uses GitHub Copilot, are they obliged to acknowledge Copilot’s contribution? If I have a personal blog, and ChatGPT helps me write a post, am I obliged to acknowledge ChatGPT’s contribution?
        hpen 4y ago
        Somewhat of an open question really. I think for all of blogging we have concluded that the words in your blog post were in fact written by you. I see two reasons plagiarism is bad: both and injustice to whom wrote the original but also a false indicator to your cognitive and creative ability.
osigurdson 4y ago
I'd suggest just trying it yourself for a bit to see if you can find any use for the tool. If not, that isn't a problem either - I suspect it is completely useless in some domains.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  I amused myself by trying to think of funny things for it to write but it was a bit hit-and-miss and now they want me to pay to fiddle with it more.
  - osigurdson 4y ago
    I remember playing around with it first and doing similar things with the openai playground. It is amusing but the novelty of this type of usage wears off quickly. I mostly use it for programming type work now. Write a little snip of code (personal projects only) or tell me how to use a library. I also use it to teach me things. I find it incredibly useful for this. ChatGPT is still free for me but it is glitchy at times. I would definitely pay the $20/ month one it is available in my region.
Gigachad 4y ago
It’s easier to prove an answer correct using google than it is to find one from scratch. ChatGPT can often show you when the premise of the question is wrong or assumes things that are not true. Making it easy to search on google after.
- osigurdson 4y ago
  Exactly. I assume Google or others will combine these together in some way soon. It is a pretty obvious win.
edanm 4y ago
> If I know enough to know if the answer is good or bad, why would I be asking a chat bot? I mean, taken to the extreme, I can probably read through the source of VLC and know that it's correct, given enough years to read it and study video compression standards etc. Does that mean I don't get use out of someone else having written VLC for me? Knowing something is right and producing it are completely different things. You might be thinking of ChatGPT too narrowly, as a simple question-answer thing, but even now you can ask it to write code that will save you time, and scale it up by a few factors and it's doing the equivalent of writing new libraries for you. (Probably many years before it can write VLC for you, if ever.)
- b3morales 4y ago
  This is not the same thing at all. You know whether a tool like VLC works because it has a pretty well-defined scope for "works": it plays the video or audio file you clicked on. If you're asking ChatGPT to teach you something, you have no such easy verification you can do: you essentially need to learn the same material from another source in order to cross-check it. Obviously this is easy for small factual questions. If I ask ChatGPT the circumference of the Earth, I can quickly figure out whether it's reliable or not on that point. But at the other extreme if I ask it to do a music theory analysis of the Goldberg Variations, it's going to take me about as much work to validate the output as to have just done the analysis myself.
  - osigurdson 4y ago
    I don’t think learning in many situations is as black and white as you assert
jjk166 4y ago
I know what a clean house looks like, but I'd still love a machine to clean my house. CatGPT's purpose is not to understand complex ideas, it is to do the tedious task of joining disparate such ideas together in an intelligible way. Much faster to have it do 95% of the work and you only need to modify the 5% that's bad, then for you to do 100% yourself.
- jijijijij 4y ago
  That’s a bad analogy. It would actually rather be like: I know what a clean house looks like, but I’d still love a machine to describe it to me. However, I think you are somewhat on the right track as “AI” shows us which types of work can be removed all together. I think, if “AI” can do it, it’s not necessary work to begin with. Eg. instead of “AI” doing formal correspondence for us, we could then just have an interface to exchange raw information directly, as the human element is lost anyway.
  - jjk166 4y ago
    I don't think you understand how analogies work.
    - jijijijij 4y ago
      [dead]

sfpotter 4y ago

The slippery slope here isn’t obvious to you? Or you just don’t care?

osigurdson 4y ago
I suppose it isn't obvious to me and I perhaps don't care. I'm not going to get stressed about being made obsolete by AI, etc., if that is what you mean. That could happen but so could a lot of things. Of course, I may have completely missed what you meant by slippery slope.

GreeningRun 4y ago

Love your "adjust your mental model" sentence. Let's talk about the judge using it in ruling, or your doctor for diag... No problem for you? And now that it is listed as co-author on research papers (real)? Then using this source to reinforce his model! I really think it is a lot more than a grain of salt my man. [edit] AI is not all bad, just fun ;) "Is chatGPT accurate?" https://www.perplexity.ai/?s=u&uuid=c97b4388-958f-45cb-a0ae-cc87bf32ab85 https://www.perplexity.ai/?s=u&uuid=c97b4388-958f-45cb-a0ae-...