I tried to get it to write _1984_ erotic fanfiction, which it did - but everything it spewed out was a cliche. I imagine it had read all of FFN and AO3.
> gathering information
It will probably be like the Google infoboxes and “People Also Search” entries we’ve had for a while, only more superficially coherent.
It seems like the “fake it until you make it” craze has fully taken over the AI/ML scene.
If the outputs are boring it ain’t chatgpt at fault…
It is assessing the quality of the output as if a human had made it. Most of human writing is cliche. Expecting it to produce good output is, as you say, a matter of prompt engineering.
But I completely agree with you: it’s often spitting out boring stuff. And yes, it makes almost everything up based on language statistics and similarities.
Perhaps, we are just in a hype cycle? There are lots of specialty tools and bots available based on GPT-3 customized for different tasks. Complaining that ChatGPT or Bing+ aren’t equally suited for every task gets tiresome. Especially if more than 2/3 of the examples simply follow the pattern „junk in - junk out“.