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Comment by peutetre | Hacker News Reader

> it’s been a massive boost to my productivity, creativity and ability to learn

What are concrete examples of the boosts to your productivity, creativity, and ability to learn? It seems to me that when you outsource your thinking to ChatGPT you'll be doing less of all three.

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i used to use gpt for asking really specific questions that i cant quite search on google, but i stopped using it when i realized it presented some of the information in a really misleading way, so now i have nothing

Not OP, but it helped me to generate story for a d&d character, cause I’m new to the game, and I’m not creative enough and generally done really care about back story. But regardless, i think ai causes far more harm than good.

If you didn't care enough about it to write it, why should your fellow players care enough to read it?

Generating fiction is a fantastic use of generative AI. One of the use cases where hallucinations are an advantage.

It's useful to get started but I wouldn't say fantastic. It's style comes out as trite and an average of common cliches.

For me:

* Rapid prototyping and trying new technologies.

* Editing text for typos, flipped words, and missing words

Exactly this for me as well - think people really underestimate how fast it allows you to iterate through prototyping. It's not outsourcing your thinking, it's more that it can generate a lot of the basics for you so you can infer the missing parts and tweak to suit your needs.

I mainly use it for taking text input and doing stuff that's easy to describe but hard to script for. Feed it some articles and ask for a very specific and obscure bibliography format? Great! Change up the style or the wording? Fine. Don't it ask for data or facts.

Getting to the heart of some legal matters, ChatGPT AND Gemini have helped 100 times better than a google search and my own brain.

And how do you know it's accurate? By your own admission, you don't know enough to understand it via a Google search, how do you know it's not making up cases or interpretations like https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-f...

You trust things that you can actually verify and other things you use as further research directions.

It's not so much the understanding of it. It's the putting together a decent summary of the issues involved such that I can make a reasonable judgement and do further research as to what to do next.

Don't me wrong, it's not replacing expertise on important legal matters, but really helps in the initiation of solutions, or providing direction towards solutions.

On the simpler stuff, it's still useful. Drafting first templates, etc.

To do the same in Google would be 30 minutes instead of 1 minute in AI.

AI first, Google for focused search, Meat expertise third

How do you know what your lawyer is saying isn’t incorrect? It’s not like people are infallible. You question, get a second opinion, verify things yourself etc.

People aren't infallible, but in my experience they're much less likely to give me incorrect factual information than LLMs. Sometimes lawyers are wrong, of course, but they are wrong less frequently and less randomly. I've typically been able to get away with not verifying every single thing someone else tells me, but I don't think I'd be that lucky relying on ChatGPT for everything.

Edit: and it's a good thing, too, because I'd never be able to afford getting second legal opinions and I don't have time to verify everything my lawyer tells me.

Sources for really specific statistics and papers

Ideas and keywords to begin learning about a brand new topic. Primers on those topics.

Product reviews and comparisons

Picking the right tool for a job. Sometimes I don’t even know if something exists for the job till chatgpt tells me.

Identifying really specific buttons on obscure machines

Identifying plants, insects, caterpillars etc.

Honestly the list is endless. Those were just a handful of queries over the last 3 days. It is pretty much the only thing that can answer hyper specific questions and provide backing sources. If you don’t like the sources you can ask for more reliable ones.

Not op, but for productivity, I'll mention one example: I use it to generate unit tests for my software, where it has saved me a lot of time.

Won't it generate tests that prove the correctness of the code instead of the correctness of the application? As in: if my code is doing something wrong and I ask it to write tests for it, it will supply tests that pass on the wrong code instead of finding the problem in my code?

I use it for the same and usually have to ask it to infer the functionality from the interfaces and class/function descriptions. I then usually have to review the tests for correctness. It's not perfect but it's great for building a 60% outline.

At our company I have to switch between 6 or 7 different languages pretty regularly and I'm always forgetting specifics of how the test frameworks work; having a tool that can translate "intent to test" into the framework methods really has been a boon

That's what a unit test does.

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