I don’t think that is surprising, but I’m curious as to how much it’s inaccuracies will impact our society as people start using it more and more for various things. I use it mostly for menial tasks, such as given it a mermaid table or a copy paste from a data mapping excel file to get it to auto generate the necessary types and CRUD code for me, or as a search engine. Especially in the latter task, however, it’s wise to keep in mind that it’s very good at “telling lies”. One example is that we had a discussion about the name or the horse in Pippi Longstomps at work (don’t ask), which eventually lead to us discussing the colours of the horses dots. So we asked ChatGPT and got three different answers, none of which were correct.
I do consider it a very useful tool in helping me with things that I’m already an expert on, I’m not sure how I would feel about using it for brainstorming. Maybe if you’re really just using it to speak out loud and not really listening to its responses, but if you’re using ChatGPT to learn or refine subjects that you’re not an expert on, then I think there is a very good risk that your output won’t be, well, great. But it’s not like it’s not happening, and I think it’ll be interesting to see what sort of effect that has on our society in the coming decades.
Of course the flip side of this is that search engines and various sources on the wide internet aren’t necessarily any more true than what you might gain from ChatGPT. So maybe it’s not going to be such a huge impact after all.
> helping me with things that I’m already an expert on
This is a very good point. I rarely use ChatGPT (I do not have the reflex yet to go there and some early attempt were miserable) but it helped me a lot to write some bullshit text for a presentation.
It was very good at putting together the buzzwords and the result was excellent. Since there was also some actual content in it I could check for mistakes and there were two. These were not life threatening mistakes (in the context of a corporate speech) but still.
I develop a lot as an amateur and I need to try using it for that. Right now I only use Amazon Whisperer which is great at suggesting code that I do not have to type anymore - but I did not try to have it create longer code. You gave me some ideas, thanks a lot.
Finally, I would like to use it to correct my typing. I never learned to touch type (tries about 165 times over my 30 years career in science, IT and development) but gave up after 10 minutes. This does not bother me too much as I spend a lot of time thinking rather than typing but since I watch my keyboard I have typos. Grammarly fixes some but right now I see that I typed "thater" and not "rather" and i have to go back. I would love to be corrected by the most probable word in the context of the sentence (which is almost always the first suggestion of the spellchecker.
> I don’t think that is surprising, but I’m curious as to how much it’s inaccuracies will impact our society as people start using it more and more for various things.
I think humans can be amazingly knowledgeable in their own niches, but if you talk with the average person about your niche, there seems to be no limit to the amount of slight inaccuracies. I wouldn’t be surprised if ChatGPT is on average more correct when talking with it about random things.
My experience is that chatGPT is at least an order of magnitude less full of shit than the average human.
I notice it listening to NPR though that there is a class of people who are just so worried about safety that they are only able to process the world through the lens of potential dangers.
I do consider it a very useful tool in helping me with things that I’m already an expert on, I’m not sure how I would feel about using it for brainstorming. Maybe if you’re really just using it to speak out loud and not really listening to its responses, but if you’re using ChatGPT to learn or refine subjects that you’re not an expert on, then I think there is a very good risk that your output won’t be, well, great. But it’s not like it’s not happening, and I think it’ll be interesting to see what sort of effect that has on our society in the coming decades.
Of course the flip side of this is that search engines and various sources on the wide internet aren’t necessarily any more true than what you might gain from ChatGPT. So maybe it’s not going to be such a huge impact after all.