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Comment by Satam | Hacker News Reader

EDIT: After trending #1 spot on the front page, this got removed it seems. Hopefully this gets resolved but I hope HN'ers had fun either way!

Hey HN!

Quick project to get my brains warmed up. Used GPT to generate layoff texts and DALL-E for the CEO images. The text generation took a bit of prompt-massaging to get it working as expected but not too long.

This is obviously meant to be satirical and not very useful. However, it got me thinking. To create something like this pre-GPT, it would have taken me 10s or 100s of contractors writing the texts. Now it's just me, one person.

It's common startup wisdom that to win your product has to 10x better than your competition. It sure does looks like LLM's are 10x-ing or 100x-ing the status quos, at least in certain areas.

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Dang I was hoping I could fill in the parameters myself so I could send it to a coworker with something like publicly bitching on Blind (we know who you are) as the reason. We all work in cybersecurity and just assume anyone signing up via corporate email as Blind insists you must is on the list for the next round of layoffs. Nobody signs up to Blind in order to sing the praises of where they work, after all.

I signed up to Blind to lurk. I assumed that's why most people do. Like most "anonymous", lightly moderated forums, it's a bit of a cesspool. I wouldn't recommend spending too much time there for the sake of one's mental health.

In retrospect I forgot that people will also sign up on levels.fyi or blind to brag about compensation. Yeah I would love to lurk, but not at the potential cost of my job.

Certain areas like... selling satirical fake layoff notices? This is really going to disrupt that market! Nobody will ever have to pay hundreds of contractors to write satirical nonsense layoff notices again.

But thank you for your project, it's coming up with some pretty hilarious stuff, it made me laugh.

It has already captured the whole market for this service!

Something's broken, I only get Accountability=TRUE messages. Please allow the robot to write in full snark mode

It should be 50/50. But maybe Copilot left a backdoor in my codebase to make itself look more empathetic.

What I'm saying is, I take 0 accountability for this not functioning as expected.

I mean, it 100x’d the productivity of a project where the measure of success is legible content that’s adequately mad-libbed. ;) I think the PR people writing these layoff notices don’t have anything to worry about for at least… 3 months minimum.

But I got a good laugh out of it! Good job!

Glad it gave you a good laugh!

Overall, yes, the tech is still quite rough and its not exactly straightforward to get economically valuable outputs out of it. However, even if further AI breakthroughs don't come along, I think smart engineering and duct tape will be enough to create a decent amount of disruption and value.

We've never had the "calculator for text" so even a bad one opens ups a lot of new doors.

re "calculator for text": gpt => wolfram alpha is scary good

Dare I ask, what was your DALL-E Prompt? It looks pretty spot on for a CEO stereotype, which itself is kinda disturbing if the prompt is generic.

I knew the prompts were GPT but had no idea the CEO images were DALL-E.

This is great. Haha

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