Comment by achenatx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by achenatx | Hacker News Reader

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its good for so many things:

Need to write a speech as a best man

Write a eulogy for a deceased family member

Recently used it to speed up the time to fix an oauth problem in code I didnt write, knowing nothing about oauth. Replaces stackexchange with much more tailored answers.

can take hundreds of pages of text and distill it down to an executive summary of any length

Daughter uses it to explain how to solve algebra problems, not just give an answer. Will completely change education.

Marketing using it for all content. Devs hate writing blog posts, it will take some code as an input and write a blog post about what it does. Can use it to come up with questions to seed a podcast

Paralegals are virtually redundant. AI with all legal caselaw making it much easier

HR using it to write customized offer letters, review resumes, etc.

It isnt just about asking a question and getting an answer. You can keep adding context and the answers keep getting better.

> Need to write a speech as a best man

> Write a eulogy for a deceased family member

Yeah, if you're okay with sounding like marketing copy written by a robot.

Remember last month when Stable Diffusion was supposed to put Disney out of business? Not gonna happen.

No one said Stable Diffusion would put Disney out of business but nice straw men

Really?

I'm too lazy to search for the Hacker News threads, but trust me, they did.

Though I agree, that was two months ago and we are so over that already.

Amen.

It outrages me that someone would waste my time making me listen to a regurgitated, averaged-out, speech written without any emotional fire or depth at an occasion that is profoundly meaningful.

A speech as a best man should be personal, heartfelt, it should be funny and a little cringy maybe, and it should mean something.

Same with eulogies; this is a moment to celebrate someone's life, to state what that person meant to you, how they affected you, to share something about that person with everyone else who is mourning.

It's like those services that will buy gifts on your behalf for your "loved ones" or at least, the "acquaintences" that you seem to be obliged to provide gifts for. You've outsourced your taste, your chance to buy something quirky, meaningful, useful based on how well you know a person... which shows that you just don't know them at all.

Better to say nothing than say it with ChatGPT.

That's quite arrogant.

Not everyone has ever written something like it.

Why is it unfair or unpersonal if chatgpt helps you, guides you and gives you a good starting point?

Guess how many people would Google some example and starting with that, what's so wrong to let chatgpt generate a shitty first draft already tailored to your situation?

Hello greeny7373, nice to meet you.

> Why is it unfair or unpersonal if chatgpt helps you, guides you and gives you a good starting point?

As somewhat extreme examples: Rodin didn't swoop in and smooth off "The Kiss" after an apprentice chiselled the basic outline out of a lump of marble; pretty sure Salvador Dali started with blank canvas instead of getting a basic landscape from a $2 Art Shop and added a melting clock and a giraffe to it.

We all have language.

Take your age, subtract maybe 5 years, and that's how much experience you have expressing yourself in your language.

Say you're 20; by that metric you have 15 years experience communicating. Now, I don't play guitar and I'm not remotely musical, but I'm pretty sure if I did it every day for 15 years I could at least bash out somthing original, if possibly influenced by things I liked.

I'm not suggesting that people entertain us for half an hour with heartfelt, witty speech about their relationship with the groom; I'm not suggesting ten minute poetic ode to a life well-lived that leaves everyone simultaneous trying not to cry and trying not to laugh, and nodding and saying "yes, that's how they were".

It doesn't need to be long: just one memory or incident. It doesn't need to be Shakespeare: just heartfelt. It doesn't need to win the Academy for Best Actor. It doesn't need to be a 5 paragraph essay (though if you did use that model, there's nothing wrong with it).

It just needs to be you; it just needs to be yours.

(I already know what I'll say at my Father's funeral when the time comes: it'll be about two sentences, just something he said to me once. But I know that's all I need to say).

Maybe I am arrogant, but I want human feeling and human expression at human events. I don't want to be snoring through regurgitated pap.

I started to see a huge issue with knowledge: people don't know what they don't know.

If you have a magic Maschine your solution is no longer 'no clue how to do this' but it becomes 'i will ask my trusty expert machine'.

This machine now gives you the next step, the guidance you need without being jugemental OR much simpler: just looks to busy to you that you are not confident to disturb the other.

Some people are just bad at this kind of thing, and sometimes saying nothing is not an option if there is a social expectation that you say something. Which can create a lot of anxiety.

I don't care how bad it is, I just want something from your heart.

And I'm sure you can still make something heartfelt with the help of a chatbot, but I'm afraid that people won't.

Many people won't with or without a chatbot. A chatbot might at least make it less cringe.

Yep. The best man's speech at my brother's wedding was a disaster zone in every possible way, it was a sad blemish on an otherwise great day. It'd have been far better if he'd have some AI help along the way.

> can take hundreds of pages of text and distill it down to an executive summary of any length

This is the kind of breathless claim that no doubt fuels the skeptics.

None of the context windows are large enough for "hundreds of pages" nor "executive summaries of any length".

I did believe that it's possible to make LLMs do that kind of task with significant engineering effort to make it do summaries iteratively somehow, essentially "compressing" parts of the document recursively. But it's not something that you can just give to ChatGPT and have it work.

So yes, the hype is real, in both ways: there's lots of potential to explore over the next years, but also a lot of the claims you read today are not sufficiently hedged, which makes them look outlandish.

There are plenty of tools that make it possible, such as langchain and the rest

Sure, quite likely - but only with significant engineering effort. I said as much in my comment.

The point is that it's not a turnkey solution today, but some of the comments on here make it sound like it is. That's a form of hype.

You describe it in a way that sounds like hype is negative.

Hype can also just mean a lot of media attention.

This doesn't indicate anything good or bad.

Unrelated to the general question of usefulness, but I'd be careful using it as a mathematics tutor. Maybe the algebra in this case is sufficiently basic as to be trivial for chatgpt, but I've found that quite often it gets confused by relatively simple mathematics in very baffling ways (One particular example I found amusing is it trying to use the pigeonhole principle with exactly N pigeons and N pigeonholes). There's also the problem that, being a complete pushover, it's hard (specially for a learner) to pinpoint whether the error is in the source or in the understanding of the reader. A teacher may, upon the request of a student to clarify what it seems like a mistake, say "No, this may seem wrong but it's correct for so and so reasons", but chatgpt usually goes "You're right, that was a mistake" and gets itself into messier and messier reasoning.

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