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Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

You reminded me: I discovered that ChatGPT had invented an API for me. Has that happened to you yet?

Since it went to the trouble of writing code for the API as well, I contacted the API developers to follow up about the topic. The code given was kind of a hand-wave anyway so I'd need to polish it up.

The developers were surprised to hear they had an API. In truth, there was no such thing.

I then found myself in one of those awkward "welp, guess I can keep my job" conversations...good for them, but for me: Go home, no API here. A disappointment with some meta-commentary sprinkled on top.

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I asked it to `curl` my homepage and pretend to be a terminal, only executing the command and showing the output.

It got the format etc right but the actual content was completely hallucinated.

Yeah I was coding up a fairly complicated payment form for a Stripe like processor the other day. I thought I’d give chatgpt a go and it confidently gave me the example code I needed and told me how to use it, etc. I was blown away until about 30 seconds later when I realised it was all complete bull crap. It was quite bizarre because this company didn’t really have any public docs out from when chatgpt supposedly harvested it’s data until, but it knew about the company and knew a couple of funny keywords this company uses in its form, so it was almost believable.

One shining use case though, I typically live in Ruby and the example code for this company was all Java and Python. Getting ChatGPT to convert the boring encryption methods into Ruby was amazing.

This has improved significantly between 3, 3.5 and now 4. It used to create a lot of Apple Frameworks/Classes and Methods, many of which would have been useful if they actually existed.

That's just asking for their API to be implemented by some bot. Not sure they really get to keep their job.

yeah even asking for common node library/sdk implementations has been off for me, calling functions with options that are not accepted, or what it thinks they should be

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