I was legitimately afraid for my job when GPT-4 was released. After using it, however, I sleep easy now.
I was using it to try and help me create Arma3 scenarios, which often involves using an ugly little DSL called SQF.
The last thing I asked it about was how to play a custom audio file sitting on my disk. It gave me a simple one-liner, that didn’t do anything. I asked it several questions to clarify, but it seemed confident that all I needed was this one liner to play an audio file sitting anywhere on my disk.
Eventually I said fuck it, and decided to google it myself, and it turns out it’s much more involved than just a single function call with a path as an argument, as suggested by ChatGPT. In fact you have to create an entirely separate config file with classes to represent the audio, and then you can reference that class to play the audio, not just a simple string path.
I’ve had it fail with a lot of other things, mostly trying to make computer controlled units perform deterministic, scripted actions, but it’s hard to tell if GPT-4 or the game’s engine was at fault here, because in my experience making Arma’s AI units do anything reliably is near impossible, no matter how much scripting you do.
Things like ChatGPT might get 90% of the way there very, very quickly for many use cases (similar to how lane keeping and adaptive cruise control is 90% of “self-driving”) but the remaining 10% of edge cases will require humans for a very long time (similar to how we never quite managed to get “100% self driving” because the vehicles still can’t respond reliably 100% of the time). But we still value it because the 90% works.
Once people understand that 10% limitation and once the 90% value has been gained/normalized/integrated, the hype will die down and we’ll be watching a slow grind to figure out how to “fix” the last 10% which is necessary to live up to what’s being hyped today.
Just wait until GPT-5, though. It will blow your mind... \s