4 ms·

Most people have heard of blockchain (through crypto), but non-techies are _actually using_ ChatGPT for daily tasks. Departments of ed and universities moved fa

by nunez 4y ago

Most people have heard of blockchain (through crypto), but non-techies are _actually using_ ChatGPT for daily tasks. Departments of ed and universities moved fast in integrating anti-ChatGPT into their programs. The hype is real.

wpietri 4y ago
I suppose I should have been more specific. I can believe people will be using this. I'm just not yet seeing how it will make things net better. So yes, academic cheaters will surely be trying to use it, although we'll see whether they actually succeed. But continuing with your analogy, I'll note that the people who fight financial crimes and fraud have absolutely had to integrate responses to cryptocurrencies. That didn't prove that there was lasting value to the cryptocurrency hype wave.
- simonw 4y ago
  I used it to release some software that used AppleScript to export data from Apple Notes, starting from zero knowledge of AppleScript two hours earlier: https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/chatgpt-applescript https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/chatgpt-applescript
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Thanks for the example. I will note that you didn't use it for most of the coding. And that looking at your code, you also seem perfectly capable of figuring out the AppleScript if you had wanted to. In an amount of time that would not have wildly increased the total project time. So overall, this looks very "stone soup" to me. Did it get you over a hump? Surely. Did it actually contribute much in terms of code? Not from what I see in your script.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Not op, but this seems like a particularly weird take... I do support work myself, and our developers have a function that is broken and shoving too much stuff into the database. This crap is compiled into a DLL so I can't do anything about directly. Went to GPT and said "hey, I have a table named X, when Y updates write a trigger that deletes this" In a few seconds it dumps out a working trigger. Now, I've never written one of these before, dong SQL stuff isn't really my forte, but with a basic understanding of what I needed done I got working code with an explanation faster than I could parse the how to. Even if AI doesn't contribute more than that, for lots of use cases it's more than enough.
      - wpietri 4y ago
        Sure, I totally believe you found it valuable, and it's great that it helped you solve your problem. As with simonw, it sounds like it got you over a hump. One you could have gotten over on your own, but maybe you didn't want to or couldn't take the time. But in both cases, what GPT coughed up was a dead end in development terms. It's not like you could just ask it to fix your app or to replace your app. This sort of reminds me of the 3d-printing hype cycle. People were very excited! We could make any object! We could soon be 3d-printing 3d printers! But in practice, 3d printing is now mostly useful for small, marginally valuable stuff. That's not nothing; I have friends who are excited about their 3d printers. But I also have friends who are excited about woodworking and accordion playing and falconry. But none of these are particularly world-changing.
        simonw 4y ago
        Aha! Yeah I see where you're coming from now. There's a huge amount of hype around this stuff which is completely unjustified: it's not going to replace programmers! It's (hopefully) not going to put vast numbers of people out of work. My interest in it is this: given this (flawed) technology exists, what are the things we can use it for that are genuinely useful and help us build interesting things that we may not have built before? I've been finding an increasing number of areas where it gives me a 10-30% productivity boost... and a few areas like the above one where that tips me from "not going to do that project" to "doing that project". Those are what's exciting to me, far away from the breathless hype around this stuff.
- travisjungroth 4y ago
  > I can believe people will be using this. You should start believing people are using this. People are comparing LLM hype to crypto and VR hype and that’s really not accurate. Those are both always in a state of “someone is using it now, and a ton of people will use it in the future”. ChatGPT is in a state of “a ton of people are using it now”. It would remind me of the explosion of social networking, except it doesn’t have network effects! It’s crazy how much it’s getting used by all sorts of people not because they want to interact with their friends (messaging apps) but just because they want to use it. I was a big AI and even just generally ML doubter until I started using it as part of my workflow and reading about how other people are, too. At that point, you kinda have to update your priors.
treeman79 4y ago
I mentioned ChatGPt to my non techie wife. To my shock, She started explaining to me how awesome it is and how all of her teacher friends are using it to offload a lot of the boring work like writing comments and stuff for students report cards. They are required to write numerous paragraphs for each student several times. Something in the past I would take my wife an entire week each time. These are people that need help setting up Wi-Fi on a laptop. And they are in love with ChatGPT.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Sure. Prose generation is a use case I'm hearing a lot. I'm just not convinced that it's value generating. E.g., ChatGPT doesn't know shit about the students, so it is being used as a bullshit generator here. If I were a parent, I would be incandescent with rage to learn that one of the few communications I got from a teacher all year was machine-generated bullshit.
  - treeman79 4y ago
    Cuts an every other monthly task from 40 hours to 4 hours. Still need to give it general points that are relevant. She manages 80 students. Alternate would be school hire a lot more staff.
    - baumy 4y ago
      Wouldn't the alternative be to reconsider the merits of the 40 hour bimonthly task? If I'm understanding right, your wife is coming up with some bullet point style feedback about each of her students as part of a recurring evaluation, then using ChatGPT to generate lengthy prose from those bullet points. Hailing ChatGPT as a savior here feels something like the tail wagging the dog. Why not just change the nature of the task so that what's required is to provide the quick bullet points, instead of using language model prose generation as a go-between for communication from teacher to student? What value is being added by the middle ChatGPT layer? More importantly, what value was being added by the 36 hours of marginal effort previously spent doing this manually? That's one of my main hang ups with all the proposed use cases of ChatGPT - it seems we've created arbitrary problems and now have this complicated tool to solve them. Which in turn will enable us to keep making bigger and more arbitrary problems. But the problems don't need to exist in the first place
freejazz 4y ago
Do you mean in order to detect whether students are using them? I haven't heard of ChatGPT being used in education at all, tbqh.
- Barracoon 4y ago
  Here's an experiment at JHU: https://alperovitch.sais.jhu.edu/five-days-in-class-with-chatgpt/ https://alperovitch.sais.jhu.edu/five-days-in-class-with-cha... I'm not fully convinced it was a net-positive, because sometimes asking the "dumb" question shows that other people in class had that question but didn't want to ask, or didn't know they had that question until someone else voiced it.

by nunez 4y ago

wpietri 4y ago

I suppose I should have been more specific. I can believe people will be using this. I'm just not yet seeing how it will make things net better. So yes, academic cheaters will surely be trying to use it, although we'll see whether they actually succeed. But continuing with your analogy, I'll note that the people who fight financial crimes and fraud have absolutely had to integrate responses to cryptocurrencies. That didn't prove that there was lasting value to the cryptocurrency hype wave.

simonw 4y ago
I used it to release some software that used AppleScript to export data from Apple Notes, starting from zero knowledge of AppleScript two hours earlier: https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/chatgpt-applescript https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/chatgpt-applescript
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wpietri 4y ago
  Thanks for the example. I will note that you didn't use it for most of the coding. And that looking at your code, you also seem perfectly capable of figuring out the AppleScript if you had wanted to. In an amount of time that would not have wildly increased the total project time. So overall, this looks very "stone soup" to me. Did it get you over a hump? Surely. Did it actually contribute much in terms of code? Not from what I see in your script.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Not op, but this seems like a particularly weird take... I do support work myself, and our developers have a function that is broken and shoving too much stuff into the database. This crap is compiled into a DLL so I can't do anything about directly. Went to GPT and said "hey, I have a table named X, when Y updates write a trigger that deletes this" In a few seconds it dumps out a working trigger. Now, I've never written one of these before, dong SQL stuff isn't really my forte, but with a basic understanding of what I needed done I got working code with an explanation faster than I could parse the how to. Even if AI doesn't contribute more than that, for lots of use cases it's more than enough.
    - wpietri 4y ago
      Sure, I totally believe you found it valuable, and it's great that it helped you solve your problem. As with simonw, it sounds like it got you over a hump. One you could have gotten over on your own, but maybe you didn't want to or couldn't take the time. But in both cases, what GPT coughed up was a dead end in development terms. It's not like you could just ask it to fix your app or to replace your app. This sort of reminds me of the 3d-printing hype cycle. People were very excited! We could make any object! We could soon be 3d-printing 3d printers! But in practice, 3d printing is now mostly useful for small, marginally valuable stuff. That's not nothing; I have friends who are excited about their 3d printers. But I also have friends who are excited about woodworking and accordion playing and falconry. But none of these are particularly world-changing.
      - simonw 4y ago
        Aha! Yeah I see where you're coming from now. There's a huge amount of hype around this stuff which is completely unjustified: it's not going to replace programmers! It's (hopefully) not going to put vast numbers of people out of work. My interest in it is this: given this (flawed) technology exists, what are the things we can use it for that are genuinely useful and help us build interesting things that we may not have built before? I've been finding an increasing number of areas where it gives me a 10-30% productivity boost... and a few areas like the above one where that tips me from "not going to do that project" to "doing that project". Those are what's exciting to me, far away from the breathless hype around this stuff.
travisjungroth 4y ago
> I can believe people will be using this. You should start believing people are using this. People are comparing LLM hype to crypto and VR hype and that’s really not accurate. Those are both always in a state of “someone is using it now, and a ton of people will use it in the future”. ChatGPT is in a state of “a ton of people are using it now”. It would remind me of the explosion of social networking, except it doesn’t have network effects! It’s crazy how much it’s getting used by all sorts of people not because they want to interact with their friends (messaging apps) but just because they want to use it. I was a big AI and even just generally ML doubter until I started using it as part of my workflow and reading about how other people are, too. At that point, you kinda have to update your priors.

treeman79 4y ago

I mentioned ChatGPt to my non techie wife. To my shock, She started explaining to me how awesome it is and how all of her teacher friends are using it to offload a lot of the boring work like writing comments and stuff for students report cards. They are required to write numerous paragraphs for each student several times. Something in the past I would take my wife an entire week each time. These are people that need help setting up Wi-Fi on a laptop. And they are in love with ChatGPT.

wpietri 4y ago
Sure. Prose generation is a use case I'm hearing a lot. I'm just not convinced that it's value generating. E.g., ChatGPT doesn't know shit about the students, so it is being used as a bullshit generator here. If I were a parent, I would be incandescent with rage to learn that one of the few communications I got from a teacher all year was machine-generated bullshit.
- treeman79 4y ago
  Cuts an every other monthly task from 40 hours to 4 hours. Still need to give it general points that are relevant. She manages 80 students. Alternate would be school hire a lot more staff.
  - baumy 4y ago
    Wouldn't the alternative be to reconsider the merits of the 40 hour bimonthly task? If I'm understanding right, your wife is coming up with some bullet point style feedback about each of her students as part of a recurring evaluation, then using ChatGPT to generate lengthy prose from those bullet points. Hailing ChatGPT as a savior here feels something like the tail wagging the dog. Why not just change the nature of the task so that what's required is to provide the quick bullet points, instead of using language model prose generation as a go-between for communication from teacher to student? What value is being added by the middle ChatGPT layer? More importantly, what value was being added by the 36 hours of marginal effort previously spent doing this manually? That's one of my main hang ups with all the proposed use cases of ChatGPT - it seems we've created arbitrary problems and now have this complicated tool to solve them. Which in turn will enable us to keep making bigger and more arbitrary problems. But the problems don't need to exist in the first place

freejazz 4y ago

Do you mean in order to detect whether students are using them? I haven't heard of ChatGPT being used in education at all, tbqh.

Barracoon 4y ago
Here's an experiment at JHU: https://alperovitch.sais.jhu.edu/five-days-in-class-with-chatgpt/ https://alperovitch.sais.jhu.edu/five-days-in-class-with-cha... I'm not fully convinced it was a net-positive, because sometimes asking the "dumb" question shows that other people in class had that question but didn't want to ask, or didn't know they had that question until someone else voiced it.