3 ms·
ChatGPT is a massive accomplishment but in my personal opinion it feels a lot closer to a search engine with a better search interface and missing data attribut
by davewritescode 4y ago
ChatGPT is a massive accomplishment but in my personal opinion it feels a lot closer to a search engine with a better search interface and missing data attribution. I've been using ChatGPT in my daily life for months at this point, I use it as a software engineer, particularly when I'm exploring a new programming language and looking for idiomatic ways to express myself. 'What's the Rust way to do X' is something that's all over my ChatGPT history at this point. It's a great way to get help when you're completely lost in a new problem domain.
However, my issue is that more than once, ChatGPT has suggested code to me that could likely introduce a security issue in a product had someone been dumb enough to blindly copy and paste. If this were a code snippet on a website, I'd probably drop a comment or just remember to ignore whatever I found on that website in the future.
So I get why Chomsky isn't impressed, once accuracy really matters ChatGPT falls on its face. When it comes to generating fluff like marketing copy, jokes and other things that don't require any degree of accuracy, it's amazingly good.
- scotty79 4y agoI tried to use ChatGPT to explore parser library for Rust called nom. Nothing worked. Syntax was wrong. Midway I resorted to googling and after a short while I learned why. The library had a major overhaul at one point. They switched from using macros to using functions. ChatGPT didn't notice that and served what was mixture of old and new syntax.
- davewritescode 4y agoYep, this type of thing happens all the time in ChatGPT. I've more than once had ChatGPT suggest that I use something deprecated and sometimes if you poke it and tell it it'll figure it out but I've seen it make the same mistakes over and over. I was working with JWT tokens in GoLang and the library I was using didn't validate expiration by default. I asked ChatGPT before I dug into the library code and it suggested a solution that that bypassed the built in validation of the JWT library I was using and introduced a fairly big security issue. That was the moment I got a little nervous about folks using ChatGPT.
- pixl97 4y agoI wonder if the documentation here wasn't clear on versioning? In some ways this sounds kind of human in the sense you're trying to fix a problem looking at old information and things have changed but if there isn't a clear break in messaging it can lead to confusion.
- scotty79 4y agoI think ChatGPT draws knowledge more from web tutorials than documentation. Old syntax is really prevalent in those. And pieces written in old syntax don't state it's old.
- dnissley 4y agoAlso a big pitfall when using github copilot
- sebzim4500 4y agoIn my experience, ChatGPT is a terrible search engine. It's good at the other things you listed though.