6 ms·

I am puzzled by all the hot takes stating that ChatGPT (and other similar tools) outputs garbage and is being "discredited" when I have personally found it to b

• indymike 4y ago
  The question is, what are you using it for and how much is required to automate you out of the loop?
• charles_f 4y ago
  It's useful, it's incredible, but everyone wants it to be a revolution, similarly as crypto currency was supposed to be, which it's not.
• rnk 4y ago
  So enlighten us with some examples of useful things you found.
  • polygamous_bat 4y ago
    My partner is looking for a new job, and ChatGPT has been an amazing help in writing the cover letters that recruiters can't stop asking for. Previously, she would spend hours molding her previous cover letter to the job description. Now she can just give the job description and a bullet point list of her relevant experiences, and spend 15 minutes on the ChatGPT output to polish it a little bit and correct any potential misstatements.
    • lemmiwinks 4y ago
      You know how many minutes I "spend molding [my] previous cover letter to the job description"? 15 minutes. If you spend more than that, you are clearly doing it wrong.
    • endisneigh 4y ago
      You realize if this becomes the norm cover letters will simply be made meaningless. One could argue they already are.
      • polygamous_bat 4y ago
        As they should be! I do not know why they are not already, but as I said recruiters can't seem to stop asking for them. But be assured that I won't mourn them once they are gone, and if ChatGPT gets us there faster then I am grateful for it. Edit: on second thought, I believe "Editing ChatGPT output" might be a valuable job skill in the future, and maybe a good cover letter would give recruiters some signals in that way.
      • shrimp_emoji 4y ago
        Win-win!
      • ams92 4y ago
        Cover letters already are meaningless.
    • UncleOxidant 4y ago
      I tried using chatGPT to write me a cover letter and targeted resume given my full resume and the job description. It gave me the cover letter and the resume - but it made stuff up to match the job description. I have a masters degree but it gave me a PhD, for example (I'm not sure why it did this as the job requirements were Masters of PhD, I guess it figured a PhD was better). I'm pretty sure I would have easily gotten an interview for the position based on that cover letter + resume as it was essentially a perfect fit to the job description, but the interview would've gone badly.
      • polygamous_bat 4y ago
        That's why the 15 minute review process afterwards, at least for a cover letter the factual errors are glaring enough that they can be caught easily, and simple enough that they can be edited out in that time. It's not at the stage where I can write my partner a job application bot that scrapes job boards and fires off 50,000 applications per second, but the productivity gain is obvious.
        • ajmurmann 4y ago
          This to me is what I see want to see as the fallacy in the anti-ChatGPT argument, but at the same time have to acknowledge as the real danger. I think AI paired with a human, as you are describing, can be more effective and efficient than either on their own. However, I've never seen it stay that way in commercial applications. So I'm afraid that the smallest drive towards cost-cutting will lead to removal of the human in the loop or at least tighten throughout expectations so much that the human intervention is in practice more often missing than not. Not sure what to do about this. I want ChatGPT as a tool available to me, but I don't want any service provider I interact with to use it because I know they'll fuck it up eventually and I'll get worse service.
          • morelisp 4y ago
            > I want ChatGPT as a tool available to me, but I don't want any service provider I interact with to use it because I know they'll fuck it up eventually and I'll get worse service. This is just straightforward selfishness and narcissism. No software developer should be so naive to assume they'll always do the right thing with a powerful but incomprehensibly dangerous tool.
    • cpach 4y ago
      This is actually a perfect use-case IMHO.
  • shaunsingh 4y ago
    If you treat it as a surpercharged search engine on a compressed snapshot of the internet in 2021, then its quite useful. If theres ever a function I forgot, but I know how to explain what it does in natural language, chatGPT most of the time can find me what I'm looking for. On some more obscure bugs or if I'm sorting through a new codebase, chatGPT can help me out from time to time to understand new topics. Of course, we shouldn't rely on chatGPT. It has give me wrong and insecure code before. However, its a nice tool to have around
    • skwirl 4y ago
      >Of course, we shouldn't rely on chatGPT. It has give me wrong and insecure code before. However, its a nice tool to have around You 100% should verify any code generated by ChatGPT - but this goes for any code found off the internet. I have come across bad Stack Overflow code committed to codebases before.
      • furyofantares 4y ago
        I think what's making these hyperinformed hallucinators useful for coding right now is that fact checking is fundamentally a big part of our work. There's a bare minimum that must be done to even think anything has been accomplished at all, that it runs and does what we expected on the most basic input, but then we are also used to writing tests and reading code critically.
        • pixl97 4y ago
          I wonder what a learning model with the ability to test feedback from executing its code in an interpreter would look like? I know there are different groups testing things like integrating the ability for LLMs to use tools, wondering how this will pan out in the end.
  • LordDragonfang 4y ago
    Not them, but a short list based on my chat history: - Explained why a python variable in a closure was saying it was not assigned, after several minutes of googling/SO failed me (needed the nonlocal keyword, different from js) - Explained the difference in several slightly-different C++ lists, which I couldn't google because the differences were mostly special chars - Wrote working powershell code to output a list that has every string in $list1 that is not in $list2, on the first try, after I struggled for over an hour to do the same (and google/SO failed me). - Explained the difference between two batfiles for the Intel Fortran compiler after google failed me - Generated some really cool D&D statblocks -Unbeknownst to us players, generated a really creative heist dungeon that our DM ran us through (he thanked ChatGPT as his "co-DM" at the end). This one is particularly notable because the man works at a hiring agency, he's not exactly a techie.
    • orwin 4y ago
      +1 for the DMing. I mostly use it to generate data for my dev/test tables, but the two times I used it for DMing, I gained hours. Also live when the player go somewhere really unexpected (it wasn't my campaign). Tangent: Google is less and less useful (as is SO for 'old' languages). I look into a mix of reddit, github issues, github code and SO depending on the issue. Hopefully this advice helps you if Chatgpt/copilot can't.
    • bnralt 4y ago
      > after several minutes of googling/SO failed me ** > and google/SO failed me This is what I've been noticing as well. There have been many times when I spend 5-10 minutes trying to figure something out with Stack Overflow and Google, not getting anywhere, and then ChatGPT immediately gives me the answer. I'm not sure how anyone who considers Stack Overflow useful would think that ChatGPT is useless. Do I need to verify the answers? Sure. But I have to do the same thing with answers on Stack Overflow. Even if I'm using official documentation, I need to verify that what I think it's saying is what it's actually saying (particularly when it's as unclear as it often is). What's even more interesting is that I keep running into people who are finding completely different uses for it. The critique here is like a lot of other critiques I've seen. They seem to come from people who haven't spent much if any time working with it, but have read some articles about how it's not infallible and decided that meant it was junk (though this piece goes the extra mile when it hints that big GPU is behind it all). What's striking to me is the lack of intellectual curiosity on display.
  • skwirl 4y ago
    Sure, it's an unending stream of things, but here are some recent examples from my history: -Had it extract some gnarly string manipulation logic in a MySQL where clause into a function. It wrote clean, well commented code, and even explained what a regex did in a comment. -Had it explain to me how macOS plist files worked, how to view them, how to edit them -Asked it what some lines in an ssh config file did and it clearly explained it to me -Dropped in some XML from a spring applicationcontext file that was doing something I didn't quite understand and it explained it to me. Asked how I would change something about it and it told me how, explained how it worked, and provided example xml -Gave it a SQL Server CREATE TABLE statement and asked it to create the equivalent CREATE TABLE statement for MySQL 8, which it successfully did My only complaint has been how sometimes the system has been unavailable. I now pay for the $20/month subscription and that has been resolved.
    • incrudible 4y ago
      If you ask it something that you do not know yourself, how do you know what it is telling you is not bullshit?
      • mpoteat 4y ago
        There exist problems where finding the solution is hard but verifying the solution is easy. example in the general case: prime-factoring numbers. Are you claiming that for all possible problems posed, verifying the correctness of the output of an LLM is equal or higher difficulty than solving the problem itself? If so, that seems like a claim more arising from emotion than reason. In the general case, you can have it generate code in a proof based language that "proves" the code is correct against formal specification. Unless you consider math itself to be "bullshit" too.
        • hnfong 4y ago
          The people who are skeptical that it can be easier to verify correctness than to produce a correct work might as well try to prove P=NP (which is the theoretical and formal statement of such). They also probably never asked people to work on a task either (hint: people can get things wildly wrong, even generally competent ones)
• smoldesu 4y ago
  It's a double-edged sword, IMO. On the one hand, GPT and AI is immediately usable and arguably quite cool to the layman. It's not a perfect system, but it can write Bash scripts and handle your resignation email. Anyone who does copywriting or programming for a living will probably find a couple uses for it. It's fairly cheap, and it's definitely "worth it" more than analogs like Cryptocurrency. ...on the other hand, though, AI is kinda a bubble. It's our nature to put our hopes and dreams (and money) into the most-promising fields of computing; that's fine. But AI truly has limited application - anything that requires accountability, determinism or trust is a bad fit for AI. When you really whittle down the places you can apply AI, it looks a bit like those 4D theaters from the early 2000s - a cool concept for some stuff, but experience-ruining for others. The eager over-application of AI will be the bubble, not the technology itself.
• LelouBil 4y ago
  The bing stuff can get very wild. But I think the reason they aren't making it widely available yet (and won't for a while) is that it's just a test for "ChatGPT that can search the web" the same way that ChatGPT was (is?) a public test.
• jonahx 4y ago
  Reminds me of the mid-90s "it's just the yellow pages" hot takes about the internet.
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  There seem to be two kinds of people: ones who see the mistakes ChatGPT makes and the ones who don’t. If I was a scam artist today I would be very happy to find people of the second kind to victimize. Secondly I’d be very concerned that the second kind of person is working at the hospital dispensing drugs or on the beat as a cop or doing any kind of job where mistakes could have consequences. They're not just going to be making mistakes and letting other people's mistakes go by, they are going to be denying it and making excuses about it. If ChatGPT has a core competence it is that people give it the deference that they give to high status people, who are used to just saying whatever comes into their head and having people just nod. I think of the story of “the Emperor’s new clothes” where the Emperor pulls off something that not everybody could do. These concerns converge in the 419 scams which deliberately filter for the second kind of person with deliberately poor grammar and spelling. Amazingly there are people who have $10 million dollars to lose who fall for this! I wonder if there is somebody evil, bright, hard-working and ambitious who is HFRL training a model right now to do romance scams.
  • siva7 4y ago
    Somehow i believe the critiques and opponents of the current AI wave are as much prone to hallucinating their critique as is ChatGPT with facts.
  • greedo 4y ago
    When my "genius" boss first heard about ChatGPT etc., he was convinced that this would end up replacing all the developers in our org. I told him that the more likely COA was that it would replace all the middle managers who just collate TPS reports to push to the VPs. He was not amused.
    • Ekaros 4y ago
      Seems like it will be perfect tool to generate power points, reports and so on that no one cares or reads...
  • 41amxn41 4y ago
    Whatever. Despite its occasional mistakes, I have found it to be incredibly useful.
• bottlepalm 4y ago
  Tech people seem to fall into the ‘perfect is the enemy of good’ trap super easily. They can’t see progress in front of their faces. Be it the internet, crypto, EVs, reusable rockets - they’re all seen as jokes until they aren’t. AI is a juggernaut. If you can’t see it I’m kind of envious because the reality around the corner is potentially terrifying.
  • PaulHoule 4y ago
    I think of the story from Lem’s Cyberiad about the 8 story high ‘thinking machine’ that insisted 2+2=5, got angry like the Bing chatbot when it was told it was wrong, then broke loose from its foundations and chased Trurl and Klapucius into the mountains. People will learn the hard way there is no market for machines that get the wrong answers. There are plenty of places where people will accept one kind of imperfection or another and that’s fine, but when it comes to an accounting bot that screws up your taxes it is not fine. (Funny I have seen a few chatbots that claim they are busy as soon as you tell them they are wrong about something and I wonder if that is because they’ve been trained on many examples where things really went south when somebody called out somebody’s mistake.)
    • pixl97 4y ago
      >People will learn the hard way there is no market for machines that get the wrong answers. Eh, in machines there are markets for machines that get it occasionally wrong as long as the defect rate is lower and or cheaper than the human equivalent defect rate cost. So I'd say that's a really bad take on the last few hundred years of industrialization. In accounting there are really two different sets of things going on at once. There are 'the numbers' of which we'd run in a calculator, but then there is interpretation of the written rules in relation to the numbers you input. If your business is in any way complex, take your numbers to 3 different firms and see if even two come back with anything close to the same number. Hell, in the same damned firm we commonly see that two auditors will come up with different numbers and a supervisor had to look at the rule in question and make a judgement call on what they think the IRS agent would accept. Now, don't confuse that with me thinking that using ChatGPT is a good idea to do the above. We are not there yet.