7 ms·

I dunno, more and more friends are now using ChatGPT as their PRIMARY resource in everyday tasks: - writing code snippets (switched from StackExchange/Google)

• mustacheemperor 4y ago
  I hesitate to pile on as another peanut gallery member writing off Chomsky's latest work, but...I have to feel the same way. I certainly understand skepticism and reservation about big predictions for what our current AI tools will evolve to be in 3, 5, 10 years etc. But when I see some dramatic criticisms of the tech as it exists today, I often feel a disconnect to my own experience. ChatGPT was hugely useful for me at work, and BingChat is even more useful. Does it have its flaws? Yes. But it's a tool I would happily pay for every month rather than lose now. And on that note, I don't "write off" this article entirely just because I disagree on some of the points. It's still an interesting analysis. Edit: In line with the article, I'll note I myself would not yet make a confident prediction that this very useful tool on my desktop is actually a proto-AGI.
• illiarian 4y ago
  I've tried some of the things you mention (code snippets, summarizing text and writing essay-like texts). These AIs are more often than not wrong, incomplete or lying.
  • UncleOxidant 4y ago
    Doesn't lying require moral agency? To say that an LLM is lying is to suggest that it intends to deceive you. That's anthropomorphizing.
    • pasquinelli 4y ago
      that sounds like a very intersting comment in an entirely different conversation.
    • singularity2001 4y ago
      lying here just means spitting out falsehoods
  • what-the-grump 4y ago
    It doesn’t matter? It’s a tool, you need to learn how to use it, understand its limitations. I used chatgpt today to save minutes of my life having it rewrite code from one language to another. Could I have googled the syntax of both, remember how, why , etc. transcribed it to another language, sure. Chat gpt did this in seconds.
    • UncleOxidant 4y ago
      I've found it particularly good at translating from one language to another. It will even recognize limitations and dependencies. For example, I asked it to translate some Javascript code (with a UI) into Julia. It said something to the effect of "You can't manipulate the DOM directly in Julia, but we can use GTK.jl to create a GUI". The resulting code needed some work (I'd be surprised if it didn't) but for the most part the structure was there and it provided a pretty decent frame on which to build.
      • illiarian 4y ago
        For some types of code. We translated a short bash script into windows .bat files and PowerShell. It was so wrong with the .bat files that there wasn't a single working line in the entire script. It was 99% correct with the PowerShell code. As a tool it is completely unreliable. But it does look like magic when it works.
        • imp0cat 4y ago
          No offense, but I don't think .bat files are that popular, which means ChatGPT did not see enough of them to really learn them enough. Try asking for some Bash or Python instead and compare the results.
          • what-the-grump 4y ago
            It does fine with bat and cmd stuff syntax. I used chat gpt today to convert a bat file that added/removed reg entries to PowerShell. You can always just ask it to write what's written in code if you describe it in English. I dont know why people are staring this thing in the face and pretending they can do better at the first pass. I've used chat gpt to do the following so far: 1. Answer tickets that help desk spent days trying to figure out. Simply asked the bot the same question and got better results from a piece of code than our outsourced MSP. It's embarrassing, we sent the answers it gave to the techs and asked them why we need them at all, when they can't figure out why basic things don't work... 2. Asked it to write powershell, with commands no one had time to google, with try-catch logic, and less than 5 minutes put it into production 3. Asked it to write demo C# code, which it got wrong but right enough to be helpful and move us along 4. Asked it to rewrite many of my horrible, direct emails to corporate speak so they doesn't ruffle any feathers 5. Had it write 10000-word document piece by piece, sent it to legal and received zero revisions, all I provided was a narrative and some connecting sentences and questions. 6. Rewrite so many memos 7. Write thank you emails 8. Write performance reviews, by taking one and rephrasing over and over based on minor adjustments like, more direct, less direct, more fluff, less fluff 9. I am not a native speaker, chat gpt often gets it wrong but, often it makes my two sentence emails just perfect 10. Had it take various compliance tests... Maybe ya'll are super geniuses but based on my observations over the past 15 years, the bot does better than I'd wager %70+ of the people I've ever met, interacted with, depended on or managed professionally. Its not moody, it doesnt catch feeling when its told that it is wrong, and is predictably wrong when you expect it to fail, it great at generating corporate bs speak, pleasantries, projecting forcefulness, explaining condensed thinking in words that non-tech people can absorb, etc. It's like the universal translator from star trek version 0.000000001 for me for the metric ton of BS that I deal with on a daily basis. I get better results out of the thing than out of most people I currently have to direct.
  • alfalfasprout 4y ago
    I struggle to understand what exactly people are coding up where ChatGPT actually saves them a lot of time. Is it just generic stuff that would have already been copy/pasted from stackoverflow? I wonder how many of those people would just benefit from better auto-complete like copilot + learning how to read documentation properly.
    • ianmcgowan 4y ago
      I wanted to enhance a python script that organizes my photo library to include a fuzzy city name in the name of the folder. E.g. changing from ./2023/2023-03/2023-03-03_18-29-32.jpg to ./2023/2023-03/San_Francisco/2023-03-03_18-29-32.jpg, where the city name is pulled from the lat/long in the EXIF and then looked up online. I asked ChatGPT one "chunk" at a time, and all of the suggestions it came up with needed some probing and clarifications, but got to a working solution a lot quicker that piecing together random snippets from stack overflow (I am not a python programmer).
    • imp0cat 4y ago
      It translates curl calls to python requests very well. Also things like "wrap this piece of long running code and show a progress bar" and similar low level stuff. You are right that it's absolutely possible to figure all this using google and documentation. But do you really want to spend X minutes googling for the correct python module and then figuring out ho to use it? When you can just show it your code and ask it to update it in seconds? It's like you have someone at your side who has already been there and figured out the answer for you.
    • illiarian 4y ago
      IDEA's autocomplete was consistently better and more useful for me than Copilot. I think that out of the 5, maybe 10 times when it managed to autocomplete something, it was correct maybe once. It will may be better on less idiosyncratic code base than the one I was working on, but at one point I just turned it off completely.
  • lghh 4y ago
    So are StackOverflow answers. When I look at something on StackOverflow, I am expected to use my expertise and the context of my work to adapt the collection of answers to what I'm working on. StackOverflow doesn't tell me anything I could not have figured out on my own, but searching through some library's source code to find under which situations an error can occur isn't always a good use of my time. ChatGPT fills a similar role. I type into it, much like how I would with Google, get some output, validate it, and adapt it to the specific problem I'm addressing.
    • illiarian 4y ago
      > So are StackOverflow answers. You don't embrace SO overlords though ;) Meanwhile with ChatGPT and Copilot people are losing their minds it seems. I've yet to find them useful for anything beyond mere curiosities and one-off queries like improving corporate-sounding texts.
      • LordDragonfang 4y ago
        >You don't embrace SO overlords though I mean, don't we? The number of times I've heard SWE humorously defined as "people who copy and paste from Stackoverflow"... (My favorite: https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/03/31/the-key-copy-paste/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/03/31/the-key-copy-paste/)
• cs02rm0 4y ago
  I keep trying to use it for code and it keeps leading me up the garden path with suggestions that look really reasonable but don't work. Off the top of my head - a python app for drawing over a macos screen, but it used an API which didn't support transparent windows, I could draw over a black screen which was so close in code (even set the background alpha) but miles from the desired application. And a Java android app for viewing an external camera, which it seems used an API that doesn't support external cameras. Of course, because it's not sentient when a couple of days later I figure out from searching elsewhere why it's effort would never work and tell it why, it just apologises and tells me it already knew that. As I'm going along though telling it what errors I'm getting it keeps bringing up alternative solutions which again look like exactly what I want but are completely broken. I haven't had it produce a single thing that was any use to me yet, but so often it looks like it's done something almost magical. One day I'm sure it'll get there, in the meantime I'm learning to loathe it. Separately, I've asked it to create a job advert for a role in my wife's business and it did a decent job of that, but it's far easier to walk a path there from what it provides to an acceptable solution. Programming is hard.
  • nice_byte 4y ago
    same here. often times it's not even _wrong_ per se, it doesn't do what i was _actually_ asking. it's like if you asked an enthusiastic intern to do a thing for you, except interns are smarter. I have also tested it retroactively on some tricky debugging sessions that I had previously spent a lot of time on. It really goes down the wrong path. Without asking leading questions and, well, proper prompting, you may end up wasting a lot of time. But that's the thing - when you're investigating something, you don't know the root cause ahead of time, you _can't_ ask questions that'll nudge it in the right direction. It ends up being a case of blind leading the blind.
    • singularity2001 4y ago
      more positively if you run out of ideas it can lead you to new paths
    • aliasxneo 4y ago
• Spivak 4y ago
  The best part is that you can teach them to use tools and expand what they can do. Do not perform any numeric or date calculations yourself. Respond to all questions with a JSON object of the form {“rsp”: $RSP$}. Question: What is the capital of the United States? {“rsp”: “Washington DC”} Perform calculations with a Python program and respond with a JSON object of the form {”rsp”: $RSP$, “calc”: $CALC$}. Question: What is 2 to the 7th power? {“rsp”: “2 to the 7th power is {answer}”, “calc”: “import math def answer(): return math.pow(2, 7)”} Question: What is tomorrow’s date? {“rsp”: “Tomorrow’s date is {answer}”, “calc”: “import datetime def answer(): return datetime.date.today() + datetime.timedelta(days=1)”} Question: What is the length of a standard football field? {“rsp”: “A standard football field is 100 yards long.”} It's crazy to me that for some definition of "knows" it knows what questions need calculations.
  • jmull 4y ago
    This looks neat, but after trying several ways I can't reproduce it. I don't get to the interesting part. I don't even get as far as the python program in JSON form.
    • singularity2001 4y ago
      use the api with systems channel and a few examples. it's easy to get consistent results that way.
    • Spivak 4y ago
      To be fair I am using divinci-003 and not chatgpt and the prompt includes the first two examples. So the prompt goes all the way to "Question: What is tomorrow's date?"
• crazygringo 4y ago
  Travel planning and online shopping? How does it help with online shopping when it's trained on a corpus from one or two years ago? And similarly the experiences with travel recommendations have turned out to be infamously wrong. ChatGPT does great with finding patterns and condensing information, which code snippets are a perfect example of. But using it for anything up-to-date factual like shopping or travel is disastrous.
  • inciampati 4y ago
    "What's the best market to buy X" often doesn't change every year, but can be very hard to learn due to SEO and ads that it is relatively unaffected by.
    • InitialLastName 4y ago
      What are its sources of information that you can know it's unaffected by SEO?
  • partdavid 4y ago
    ChatGPT will out and out make up products that don't exist, pricing that isn't based on anything, and reviews and evaluations that never happened. Similarly, it will rely on programming behaviors and even libraries and functions that are hallucinated.
  • asah 4y ago
    in many categories, things don't change so quickly for example in construction. Even for power tools, 2 yrs is fine for getting an overview.
• 2-718-281-828 4y ago
  are your friends using Pro? or is the free version still sufficient?
• jmull 4y ago
  > travel planning... online shopping research... Meh. You have to fact-check the important details. For travel planning and online shopping, certain facts have to align with actual reality or it defeats the purpose. That's something chatgpt isn't good at. It gets many things right, but you kinda want to make all your flights and have a place to sleep every night.
• danaris 4y ago
  I've poked at it in some similar realms. Thus far, it's given me one good gem (some meal planning advice), a couple of mildly interesting suggestions for code and writing, a bunch of relatively boring drivel, and several hilariously bad hallucinations, confidently wrong answers, and other sorts of mistakes. I'll probably continue to poke at it, but overall I think its primary positive output is going to be entertainment, not significant utility.