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Comment by SLHamlet | Hacker News Reader

Anytime someone sends me something generated by ChatGPT, I think about how AI expert Hilary Mason puts it: "By design, ChatGPT aspires to be the most mediocre web content you can imagine."

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2023/03/chatgpt-explained-hilary-m...

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This resonates with my experience using Copilot. It generates lowest-common-denominator code, and displays a stunning unawareness of language and library features. Some understandable due to training cutoff (but still very frustrating), but it also refused to use Pillow functions that seem to have been around for a decade, instead crufting together some shitty pipeline by hand.

> it also refused to use Pillow functions that seem to have been around for a decade, instead crufting together some shitty pipeline by hand.

Definitely passes the Turing test.

I sometimes need this. It’s nice to get an average of all mediocre content summed up as a bullet list sometimes.

Sometimes I want the average tourist guide, the average recipe or the average answer. Now I get it instantly without sifting through ad-infested shallow content. ChatGPT made it so much easier to be curious about new things. It’s a good trailhead for curiosity.

Point of note: this is all well and good until these tools become inevitably ad-infested.

I'm starting to think we need to add "advertising" to the list (Death, Taxes, etc).

It's only a matter of time

Benedict Evans often invokes the analogy of the concept of "infinite interns", which is pretty apt, at least in the current state.

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