I love the way this response is written and agree with a lot of it, but I wonder if you are conflating the effusive press reaction to the technology with the re

I love the way this response is written and agree with a lot of it, but I wonder if you are conflating the effusive press reaction to the technology with the reality of how it is most practically used right now. The press reaction screams “IT’S ALMOST LIKE US!” The reality is that there is a powerful but subtle gap between stringing together words in context (even helpful words) and decision-making. Everyone who’s used the tools has seen this but the experience of using it is still powerfully evocative, making our brains go haywire as we mentally bridge the gap between where it is and where it could be. The companies building these tools lean into our imaginations — it’s hard to get multi-billion dollar valuations on “it’s like autocomplete but really really good at it” — and the press does for similar reasons. Your response strikes me as more of a critique of this than the tool itself. My experience with the modern tools is that they are capable of assisting with many tasks in relatively surface level ways. It’s still extremely impressive but it hasn’t done anything truly new or creative. GitHub Copilot helps with boilerplate, comments, and tests, but it hallucinates so much that I leave it disabled a good 50% of the time. ChatGPT will throw words at me when I’m blocked writing song lyrics, which never gives me anything usable but it does help me think from different perspectives. They can help rapidly spin up a prototype, using “understanding” of docs and prompts to write code. But none of it can be trusted because of its hallucinations, none of it makes me fear for my job. It’s a utility akin to autocomplete, or intellisense, a super advanced compiler. (Somewhat aside, it’s telling that we live in an age where the press and the industry are falling over themselves raving about ChatGPT while we’re still struggling with troll farms and spam bots manipulating discourse. We shouldn’t be surprised that many can’t differentiate between extremely capable word association coming from code and humans crafting ideas when we’re unable to recognize bad actors deliberately engaging in bad faith arguments online.) My downgraded interpretations and expectations aside, I honestly do think it’s exciting and brilliant, I reach for it all the time, and I can’t wait for a more capable Siri and better integration into productivity tools. But it’s not intelligence and I think we should be careful to separate hype from reality.