@neauoire a few people at the company I work for use ChatGPT all the time, and I'm alarmed at how...gullible, I guess...they are about what it says, even after they've been using it long enough to know it lies ALL THE TIME. They mostly don't advertise it, but I know who's using ChatGPT, and I can tell when someone new starts using it. The kinds of lies it tells, and the confidence with which it tells them, is like a beacon flashing in their Slack messages and their PRs.

@neauoire 100% agree. Copilot is the closest I’ve come to finding AI useful and it’s still just…. mediocre?

@neauoire yeah i ask it code questions i know the answer to all the time, and it always lies in some fundamental way that would make the code completely do the wrong thing, or just not work at all, if i followed its advice. i truly don’t understand how people find it helpful

@neauoire I know a few professional developers who use LLMs as coding assistants and they claim they're getting a productivity boost. I haven't attempted that personally, and can't imagine doing so. It would take a lot of the fun out of the process.

@neauoire oh my god i know. i hear *so* many people say this and it's almost frustrating. the only time i've ever used it was to generate google glass documentation for an obscure app that i found on github, but like some people use it for everything... even personal stuff like text messages or birthday cards. makes all of that kind of stuff worthless to me

@neauoire I have tried to get an LLM to express an unpopular opinion, and it fought me. I fought it, yelling at it to cut out its verbal tics and weasely equivocations. In the end, only my words were left. I could have written it myself without the debate.

LLMs seem to me to be for people who have nothing to say and want to say it nicely

@neauoire i have a theory that a lot of people have been holding themselves back from asking questions of others since childhood, and now they feel like they can without bothering a real person

(an ersatz good, because asking people things is one of the nicer ways to connect as humans)

@neauoire

It all reminds me of that smiley chatbot from forever ago

@neauoire chatgpt works pretty well as a replacement for Google when you're just sort of looking for the right path to go down in terms of an idea or a reference. I find myself using it as a starting point for further reading that I'll probably do on web pages.

@neauoire As far as I can tell, the difference is just that some people used ChatGPT that first time and believed the responses were real, and so they continued using it and acting as if the responses were real

@neauoire maybe they mean things like using google maps (assuming they now use some ML), gmail autocomplete suggestions, asking LLMs to write simple emails/letters/student papers/etc.?
i think there are many people that love that s***

@neauoire it’s a mixed bag but I use ChatGPT a lot for annoying little code problems that I don’t want to have to focus on. here’s an example from yesterday

@neauoire they are very good when it comes to pointing you in a direction for a topic where you don't know where to start. It will often get technical details wrong, especially the deeper you go, but it gets broad strokes right and knows most broad strokes in many topics. Good for pointing you in the direction for further research.

It's very helpful to have a jack of all trades that can point you in the right direction.

@neauoire I think they're using it as a search engine replacement. I guess it's easier to use, and correct enough for people not asking deep technical questions or who don't care much about the answers.

@neauoire My interaction with LLMs is much like yours: played with an early one for a little bit and thought it was a neat toy but that's about all. I continue to think that it's a fad, and in a year or two it'll be about as important as NFTs are today.

But maybe I'm wrong! It does seem to be a way for people to avoid thinking, and a lot of people really, really do not like having to think.

@neauoire

My team have christened ChatGPT 'Chad.'

Chad is our dumb but useful intern. When we don't have time or the inclination to do something truly stupid, we give it to Chad.

Yes, we have to check his work but if we give him really good directions and guidance (as you would any intern), Chad does a pretty good job, saving us some time from doing the stupid things.

I'm in Comms, PR, and Marketing. There are a LOT of stupid things.

@neauoire It’s fantastic at answering “what’s this word I’m thinking of but am drawing a blank on”, pretty much all I use it for. Can’t think of any use case that would fit it better than that!

@neauoire I use it a lot to generate code snippets. Gpt4 and copilot are both very good at this. It works very well for generating boring tests. If you are writing novel aůgorithms its useless, if you're writing API glue code (which is %90) of Python it's far faster to just ask GPT than to spend a few hours in the docs of an API you've never or rarely used and finding that one function...

@neauoire Well, a part of me is wondering what they get for saying that. I know the money has mostly moved to Tiktok now, but paying for blog posts certainly used to be a thing.

@neauoire it's larping the scifi AI future that they assume vN+1 will be

@neauoire I use it sometimes like Google, I don't bother to say "Hello" or "Thank you" to a machine. I just put in "linux function timing in ms" and it gives me C code. Sometimes it doesn't understand you or is wrong, not a magic bullet for sure.

@neauoire its like a programming interface that uses natural language to code and debug programs, lines of thought and large data sets. You can do anything with it.
I use it all the time for coding. There is zero reason to trawl through poor documentation where all you want is to describe a human readable way to do things that the machine can translate into actual code, help you reason through it and debug it. It's an incredible learning tool and I wouldn't go back to a world without it.