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I’ve found that AI prompting has been nearly as time consuming as doing it myself from the get-go. This includes content writing and visual art. Maybe I’m an ed

I’ve found that AI prompting has been nearly as time consuming as doing it myself from the get-go. This includes content writing and visual art. Maybe I’m an edge case. I’m not a skilled programmer. However, I’m a decent writer and painter. At most, it generates quick, solid, though generic ideas. Unfortunately, I have to do a lot of reverse engineering and curation to make any valuable changes. Try writing a tech article about, say, an iPad, and it will give you a lot of generic, but well-written content devoid of any tech specs. Add tech specs and use lose the style. What should be a simple fluff piece takes a couple of hours to get the balance right. Or try creating a visual work of, say, two people running down a street, holding hands, and unless you’re very open to interpretation, many hours later, you still won’t have anything approximating what you imagined. You change the “camera” angle, and they’re no longer holding hands. You add a small detail, and the entire scene morphs, etc. I’m saying this as someone who also uses weights and negative prompts. I look forward to further advances, though I’m perfectly happy if these skills remain in the realm of humans. I will admit chatgpt and copilot are very good at offering up bite-sized pieces of code, like particular objects and functions as well as templates.

still_grokking 4y ago
It's the exact same for code tasks. The AI is actually quite a waste of time… You need to check every word of the AI for truth anyway, so you need to research all the stuff it tells you, as it could be made up, everything it tells you is very shallow, so you need to dig into the topics anyway, and making even small changed by the AI requires ridiculous amounts of explaining details in prose, instead of just changing a few lines by hand. All in all it's much easier to come up with some more reasonable solution in a shorter time by just doing it the "classical" way: Read the docs and copy-paste code snippets from proper curated examples some human actually tested. I don't say that an AI could not program at some point in the future. But I guess it would require AGI to be competitive with people who actually know what they're doing. But at the time we have AGI we have anyway much larger "problems" than how to write code, as more or less all human intellectual work would be superfluous.
- jliptzin 4y ago
  It definitely speeds up my programming but it makes mistakes here and there (like any programmer) that need to be fixed. For me it’s a lot faster to proofread code or adjust the prompt than write it from scratch. And of course there’s cases where the AI can’t come up with a decent solution and it needs to be written from scratch. Anyone saying programming jobs are in trouble don’t really know programming. You can’t just have someone from the bizdev team prompting ChatGPT for JavaScript code and just doing copy/paste…it would be difficult to even come up with the prompt without sufficient programming jargon knowledge. Like the article says, the tool will allow programmers to work faster and therefore tackle more things. Expectations will go up but I don’t think the jobs themselves are in trouble.
andreyk 4y ago
I've definitely found this to be the case with writing. ChatGPT gets you a "valid" output, but usually a bland and lame one. I think it's better for editing and brainstorming, or for simple tweaks. Specialized tools like SudoWrite are actually more useful as part of a writing work flow. Pardon the plug, but I co-wrote a little blog post about this with concrete examples, if it is of interest: https://open.substack.com/pub/storiesbyai/p/chatgpt-for-creative-writing-the https://open.substack.com/pub/storiesbyai/p/chatgpt-for-crea...
- spookybones 4y ago
  I haven't tried SudoWrite. I'll check it out as well as your post.
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
I’ve not actually tried using it for writing help yet, though we’ve had a lot of interesting conversations. My thinking is that when I do some writing, I’ll give it my plan and then ask it for specific content or topic suggestions based on writers and philosophers I’m interested in, or other goals. Then I will write the piece myself, feed it to GPT-4, and ask it for feedback and advice. I’ll re-state my goals and ask it how I’m doing. I absolutely would not expect it to fully write what I want, but I’ve found it very thoughtful for analysis so far in our conversations.
holbrad 4y ago
I've certainly felt that the public version of ChatGPT isn't great at helping to write fiction. Does anyone know if version 4 is any better in this regard?

still_grokking 4y ago

It's the exact same for code tasks. The AI is actually quite a waste of time… You need to check every word of the AI for truth anyway, so you need to research all the stuff it tells you, as it could be made up, everything it tells you is very shallow, so you need to dig into the topics anyway, and making even small changed by the AI requires ridiculous amounts of explaining details in prose, instead of just changing a few lines by hand. All in all it's much easier to come up with some more reasonable solution in a shorter time by just doing it the "classical" way: Read the docs and copy-paste code snippets from proper curated examples some human actually tested. I don't say that an AI could not program at some point in the future. But I guess it would require AGI to be competitive with people who actually know what they're doing. But at the time we have AGI we have anyway much larger "problems" than how to write code, as more or less all human intellectual work would be superfluous.

jliptzin 4y ago
It definitely speeds up my programming but it makes mistakes here and there (like any programmer) that need to be fixed. For me it’s a lot faster to proofread code or adjust the prompt than write it from scratch. And of course there’s cases where the AI can’t come up with a decent solution and it needs to be written from scratch. Anyone saying programming jobs are in trouble don’t really know programming. You can’t just have someone from the bizdev team prompting ChatGPT for JavaScript code and just doing copy/paste…it would be difficult to even come up with the prompt without sufficient programming jargon knowledge. Like the article says, the tool will allow programmers to work faster and therefore tackle more things. Expectations will go up but I don’t think the jobs themselves are in trouble.

andreyk 4y ago

I've definitely found this to be the case with writing. ChatGPT gets you a "valid" output, but usually a bland and lame one. I think it's better for editing and brainstorming, or for simple tweaks. Specialized tools like SudoWrite are actually more useful as part of a writing work flow. Pardon the plug, but I co-wrote a little blog post about this with concrete examples, if it is of interest: https://open.substack.com/pub/storiesbyai/p/chatgpt-for-creative-writing-the https://open.substack.com/pub/storiesbyai/p/chatgpt-for-crea...

spookybones 4y ago
I haven't tried SudoWrite. I'll check it out as well as your post.

TaylorAlexander 4y ago

I’ve not actually tried using it for writing help yet, though we’ve had a lot of interesting conversations. My thinking is that when I do some writing, I’ll give it my plan and then ask it for specific content or topic suggestions based on writers and philosophers I’m interested in, or other goals. Then I will write the piece myself, feed it to GPT-4, and ask it for feedback and advice. I’ll re-state my goals and ask it how I’m doing. I absolutely would not expect it to fully write what I want, but I’ve found it very thoughtful for analysis so far in our conversations.

holbrad 4y ago

I've certainly felt that the public version of ChatGPT isn't great at helping to write fiction. Does anyone know if version 4 is any better in this regard?