Strongly agree. I don't understand the excitement around ChatGPT. It's a bullshit machine, unreliable and inconsistent. It just adds noise to the world, to the point where it could actually drown all form of signal.
"Mutate this code so it adheres to XYZ pattern"
"Factor this code out into a React component and wire it up"
"Tell me what this code does, what do I need to change to make it do XZY"
"I need to programatically access AWS <service>, guide me through AWS console to set up the right IAM policies and generate those for me, then generate the correct boto3 code to call this service"
"Take this email, write a friendly and brief response and ask for setting up an appointment next week"
"Write me a bash script that uses imagemagick to perform a bunch of transformations on image files with the following filenames"
"Take this curl command, turn it into a Python function, add type annotations and comments where necessary"
And many, many more usecases. Does it bullshit? Absolutely, but that's just not always an issue. A lot of the bullshitting can be circumvented by prompting it in the right ways and having the right discourse with it.
It's a room full of employees, and you are the manager. Will you hear plenty of bullshit? Absolutely, but you will also get heaps of useful output that can solve your problem, make you think outside the box etc. It's all about how you interact with it.
It's a significantly more pleasant and productive interaction mode than using a search engine and sifting through the SEO spam. I still do that, if I need to verify something or validate if something I don't have enough domain knowledge of is bullshit or not, but more often than not I don't need to. and that's been incredibly liberating.
I find GPT very useful as well!
Strictly from a rhetorical position, I’ve noticed that the “GPT fails like people fail” argument has not been very convincing in these discussions for whatever reason.
ChatGPT did it for me in about 3 minutes. I was intrigued so I asked it to write Swift code to RSA256 encrypt and then decrypt a string. It did that in about 30s. I told my colleagues and someone joked "ask it to do my HealthKit integration haha". I did, and it did. Not perfectly, but instructively.
Yeah there is a lot of noisy hype around this, but for me it's already shown itself capable of massively improving my productivity.
For example - as part of a low code/no code product. The user of these typically doesn't know much about code, but some simple scripting might greatly enhance what they can accomplish with the product. Enter ChatGPT...
Though maybe I’m too optimistic; they should have done this a long time ago. I’m tired of searching for, for eg. “boiling point of X” and I get a poorly written 1500 word article —- clearly aimed at robots and not humans —- instead of my desired answer.
ChatGPT is only a tool, yet a powerful one. There are many uses that are quite reliable and producing no bullshit. If you don't see them, too bad for you.
How should we call the rejection of AI? Intelligism? Artificialism?
No, I don't. Google Search has absolutely NOTHING in common with ChatGPT. The comparison arises often here and elsewhere, and it's absurd. I will keep repeating that as many times as necessary. I guess this is my plight now.
Google Search produces no content at all. Zero. It returns page urls, and snippets of text extracted from those pages. It's always possible to verify where the information comes from, on which page.
ChatGPT speaks in its own name and says "I", and asserts that it's right, even when it obviously has no clue what "right" even means.
I don't reject AI; but ChatGPT isn't "intelligent". Yes, it's a tool. It's a hammer that randomly hits your thumb hard, and then claims it absolutely, positively was a nail.
> No, I don't.
Well, I do. Because Google's signal to noise ratio is absolutely terrible.
I see ChatGPT as a student and you as the teacher. The student can be sometimes smart but oftentimes quite stupid. She/he's in a hurry and always try to pretend she/he knows because she/he wants the best graduation. You, as the teacher, you have to detect the bad and the good.
Later, you hire the student. Because, although she/he produces sometimes silly responses, she/he's very quick at collecting information from all kind of sources, and at making nice summaries of it, and can perform many "directed" tasks almost perfectly. And maybe, someday, she/he'll learn and produce less bullshit.
AI-generated content is soon going to account for >99.99% of the internet. A significant chunk of that will be propaganda or deliberate misinformation.
We’re on the verge of some massive changes.
That’s an extremely impressive leap from what we could do a decade ago. Sure, it lies. Sure, it needs improvement. Still if you can’t see why it’s significant and how it has tremendous potential, well, I fear there is not much we can do for you.
So are most humans
I'm not so sure. For many human bullshitters, perhaps. But there's plenty of human bullshitters that exhibit the same air of authority you talk about and they're mostly employed as politicians.