I have only used it a few times, but it was amazing for my need. I work in IT so I’m not the best with writing. I enjoy working on projects and configuring new technology, servers, and applications for the company. What i don’t enjoy is figuring out how to write communication emails to the company about what we’re doing. So everytme I needed a write up informing people of what’s happening and it’s benefits, I used it to quickly write up something. Was it perfect? No, I had to edit some stuff of course. What it did do is create the entire structure and everything that needed to be said in the style of some corporate HR email. It would take me hours to type out something like this so for this to do it all in 2 minutes and me taking 5 minutes to look it over was amazing! Outside of this I haven’t really used it much.
If you’re good enough at writing to communicate all the information you need to something that is more different from you than any other human, why do you feel like you aren’t the best at writing?
I’ve had it improve grammar on some legal documents I had to submit and also generate a safety plan for a specific job I was working on. It did both of those things ok but I still had to edit and delete sections that weren’t relevant
Other than endless posts from the general public telling us how amazing it is, peppered with decision makers using it to replace staff and then the subsequent news reports how it told us that we should eat rocks, or some variation thereof, there’s been no impact whatsoever in my personal life.
In my professional life as an ICT person with over 40 years experience, it’s helped me identify which people understand what it is and more specifically, what it isn’t, intelligent, and respond accordingly.
The sooner the AI bubble bursts, the better.
I fully support AI taking over stupid, meaningless jobs if it also means the people that used to do those jobs have financial security and can go do a job they love.
Software developer Afas has decided to give certain employees one day a week off with pay, and let AI do their job for that day. If that is the future AI can bring, I’d be fine with that.
Caveat is that that money has to come from somewhere so their customers will probably foot the bill meaning that other employees elsewhere will get paid less.
But maybe AI can be used to optimise business models, make better predictions. Less waste means less money spent on processes which can mean more money for people. I then also hope AI can give companies better distribution of money.
This of course is all what stakeholders and decision makers do not want for obvious reasons.
The thing that’s stopping anything like that is that the AI we have today is not intelligence in any sense of the word, despite the marketing and “journalism” hype to the contrary.
ChatGPT is predictive text on steroids.
Type a word on your mobile phone, then keep tapping the next predicted word and you’ll have some sense of what is happening behind the scenes.
The difference between your phone keyboard and ChatGPT? Many billions of dollars and unimaginable amounts of computing power.
It looks real, but there is nothing intelligent about the selection of the next word. It just has much more context to guess the next word and has many more texts to sample from than you or I.
There is no understanding of the text at all, no true or false, right or wrong, none of that.
AI today is Assumed Intelligence
Arthur C Clarke says it best:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
I don’t expect this to be solved in my lifetime, and I believe that the current methods of"intelligence " are too energy intensive to be scalable.
That’s not to say that machine learning algorithms are useless, there are significant positive and productive tools around, ChatGPT and its Large Language Model siblings not withstanding.
Source: I have 40+ years experience in ICT and have an understanding of how this works behind the scenes.
I think you’re right. AGI and certainly ASI are behind one large hurdle: we need to figure out what consciousness is and how we can synthesize it.
As Qui-Gon Jinn said to Jar Jar Binks: the ability to speak does not make you intelligent.
we need to figure out what consciousness is
Nah, “consciousness” is just a buzzword with no concrete meaning. The path to AGI has no relevance to it at all. Even if we develop a machine just as intelligent as human beings, maybe even moreso, that can solve any arbitrary problem just as efficiently, mystics will still be arguing over whether or not it has “consciousness.”
we need to figure out what consciousness is and how to synthesize it
We don’t know what it is. We don’t know how it works. That is why
“consciousness” is just a buzzword with no concrete meaning
You’re completely correct. But you’ve gone on a very long rant to largely agree with the person you’re arguing against. Consciousness is poorly defined and a “buzzword” largely because we don’t have a fucking clue where it comes from, how it operates, and how it grows. When or if we ever define that properly, then we have a launching off point to compare from and have some hope of being able to engineer a proper consciousness in an artificial being. But until we know how it works, we’ll only ever do that by accident, and even that is astronomically unlikely.
We don’t know what it is. We don’t know how it works. That is why
If you cannot tell me what you are even talking about then you cannot say “we don’t know how it works,” because you have not defined what “it” even is. It would be like saying we don’t know how florgleblorp works. All humans possess florgleblorp and we won’t be able to create AGI until we figure out florgleblorp, then I ask wtf is florgleblorp and you tell me “I can’t tell you because we’re still trying to figure out what it is.”
You’re completely correct. But you’ve gone on a very long rant to largely agree with the person you’re arguing against.
If you agree with me why do you disagree with me?
Consciousness is poorly defined and a “buzzword” largely because we don’t have a fucking clue where it comes from, how it operates, and how it grows.
You cannot say we do not know where it comes from if “it” does not refer to anything because you have not defined it! There is no “it” here, “it” is a placeholder for something you have not actually defined and has no meaning. You cannot say we don’t know how “it” operates or how “it” grows when “it” doesn’t refer to anything.
When or if we ever define that properly
No, that is your first step, you have to define it properly to make any claims about it, or else all your claims are meaningless. You are arguing about the nature of florgleblorp but then cannot tell me what florgleblorp is, so it is meaningless.
This is why “consciousness” is interchangeable with vague words like “soul.” They cannot be concretely defined in a way where we can actually look at what they are, so they’re largely irrelevant. When we talk about more concrete things like intelligence, problem-solving capabilities, self-reflection, etc, we can at least come to some loose agreement of what that looks like and can begin to have a conversation of what tests might actually look like and how we might quantify it, and it is these concrete things which have thus been the basis of study and research and we’ve been gradually increasing our understanding of intelligent systems as shown with the explosion of AI, albeit it still has miles to go.
However, when we talk about “consciousness,” it is just meaningless and plays no role in any of the progress actually being made, because nobody can actually give even the loosest iota of a hint of what it might possibly look like. It’s not defined, so it’s not meaningful. You have to at least specify what you are even talking about for us to even begin to study it. We don’t have to know the entire inner workings of a frog to be able to begin a study on frogs, but we damn well need to be able to identify something as a frog prior to studying it, or else we would have no idea that the thing we are studying is actually a frog.
You cannot study anything without being able to identify it, which requires defining it at least concretely enough that we can agree if it is there or not, and that the thing we are studying is actually the thing we aim to study. We should I believe your florgleblorp, sorry, I mean “consciousness” you speak of, even exists if you cannot even tell me how to identify it? It would be like if someone insisted there is a florgleblorp hiding in my room. Well, I cannot distinguish between a room with or without a florgleblorp, so by Occam’s razor I opt to disbelieve in its existence. Similarly, if you cannot tell me how to distinguish between something that possesses this “consciousness” and something that does not, how to actually identify it in reality, then by Occam’s razor I opt to disbelieve in its existence.
It is entirely backwards and spiritualist thinking that is popularized by all the mystics to insist that we need to study something they cannot even specify what it is first in order to figure out what it is later. That is the complete reversal of how anything works and is routinely used by charlatans to justify pseudoscientific “research.” You have to specify what it is being talked about first.
and let AI do their job for that day.
What? How does that work?
Usually these tasks are repetitive, scriptable. I don’t know exactly what happens but I suppose AI will just cough up a lot of work and employees come in on Monday and just have to check it. In some cases that would be more work than just making it yourself but this is a first step at least.
It writes all the bugs so the engineer can fix it over the following 4 days
it works okay as a fuzzy search over documentation.
…as long as you’re willing to wait.
…and the documentation is freely available.
…and doesn’t contain any sensitive information.
…and you very specifically ask it for page references and ignore everything else it says.so basically, it’s worse than just searching for one word and pressing “next” over and over, unless you don’t know what the word is.
It’s made my professional life way worse because it was seen as an indication that the every hack-a-thon attempt to put a stupid chat bot in everything is great, actually.
AI has completely killed my desire to teach writing at the community college level.
Agreed. I started steps needed to be certified as an educator in my state but decided against it. ChatGPT isn’t the only reason, but it is a contributing factor. I don’t envy all of the teachers out there right now who have to throw out the entire playbook of what worked in the past.
And I feel bad for students like me who really struggled with in-class writing by hand in a limited amount of time, because that is what everyone is resorting to right now.
It must be something like(only worse) what math teachers felt when the pocket calculator became cheap and easily available. It doesn’t mean you can do math but people conflate the two.
It’s useful when you want to write some algorithm using specific versions of libraries. It first craps out wrong functions but after 1 or 2 redirects it usually shoots something that I then adapt to my use-case. I usually try googling it first but when most fucking guides use the new way of coding and I’m forced to use fixed versions due to company regulations, it gets frustrating to check if every function of known algorithms is available in the version I’m using and if it’s not, which replacement would be appropriate.
It might hallucinate from time to time but it usually gives me good enough ideas/alternatives for me to be able to work around it.
I also use it to format emails and obscure hardware debugging. It’s pretty bad but pretty bad is better than again, 99% of google results suggesting the same thing. GPT suggests you a different thing once you tell it you tried the first one.
As always, it’s a tool and knowing that the answers aren’t 100% accurate and you need to cross-check them is enough to make it useful.
I used it the other day to redact names from a spreadsheet. It got 90% of them, saving me about 90 minutes of work. It has helped clean up anomalies in databases (typos, inconsistencies in standardized data sets, capitalization errors, etc).
As mentioned in a different post, I use it for DND storylines, poems, silly work jokes and prompts to help make up bed time stories.
My wife uses it to help proofread her papers and make recommendations on how to improve them.
I use it more often now than google search. If it’s a topic important enough that I want to verify, then I’ll do a deeper dive into articles or Wikipedia, which is exactly what I did before AI.
So yea, it’s like the personal assistant that I otherwise didn’t have.
ChatGPT has had absolutely zero impact on my work or personal life. I do not have any useful case for it whatsoever. I have used it for goofs before. That’s about it. I cannot see it as a positive or negative influence…as it has had zero influence. I do get annoyed that every company and their mother is peddling worthless AI shit that most people have no use case for.
That’s pretty much been my experience too. I’ve messed around with it a bit, but put no effort into finding actual uses for it. And I don’t really feel like doing so because it all seems like a big cash grab. I’m glad some people find it useful though.
Only small use cases on my end: Professional - great at helping me save time on syntax related things (“help me right an excel formula that validates cell C2 as a properly formatted US phone number”). Personal - really helpful at fleshing out a comedy idea I’m toying with (“help me analyze and expand why the idea of ‘vampires benefitting from an app called Is There Garlic In This’ is funny for a stand-up routine”).
Otherwise, I spend just as much time verifying the LLM’s output as I would have just doing it myself.
My last job was making training/reference manuals. Management started pushing ChatGPT as a way to increase our productivity and forced us all to incorporate AI tools. I immediately began to notice my coworkers’ work decline in quality with all sorts of bizarre phrasings and instructions that were outright wrong. They weren’t even checking the shit before sending it out. Part of my job was to review and critique their work and I started having to send way more back than before. I tried it out but found that it took more time to fix all of its mistakes than just write it myself so I continued to work with my brain instead. The only thing I used AI for was when I had to make videos with narration. I have a bad stutter that made voiceover hard so elevenlabs voices ended up narrating my last few videos before I quit.
Eleven Labs really does good work. I’m also using it for a project, in this case to teach children to read.
Luckily we don’t need accurate info for training reference manuals, it’s not like safety is involved! …oh wait
Friends and I have had a good laugh writing rap battles or poems about strangely specific topics, but that’s about it.
Been using Copilot instead of CharGPT but I’m sure it’s mostly the same.
It adds comments and suggestions in PRs that are mostly useful and correct, I don’t think it’s found any actual bugs in PRs though.
I used it to create one or two functions in golang, since I didn’t want to learn it’s syntax.
The most use Ive gotten out of it is to replace using Google or Bing to search. It’s especially good at finding more obscure things in documentation that are hard to Google for.
I’ve also started to use it personally for the same thing. Recently been wanting to startup the witcher 3 and remembered that there was something missable right at the beginning. Google results were returning videos that I didn’t want to watch and lists of missable quests that I didn’t want to parse through. Copilot gave me the answer without issue.
Perhaps what’s why Google and Ms are so excited about AI, it fixes their shitty search results.
Perhaps what’s why Google and Ms are so excited about AI, it fixes their shitty search results.
Google used to be fantastic for doing the same kinds of searches that AI is mediocre at now, and it went to crap because of search engine optimization and their AI search isn’t any better. Even if AI eventually improves for searching, search AI optimization will end up trashing that as well.
I’ve used it to help me write batch scripts and excel formulas but found it pretty bad for LISP
It’s erased several tech jobs and replaced some helpforum commentors with bots to pretend their communities are alive and when you read their comments or ‘suggestions’ you can clearly tell, this isn’t someone trying to help it’s just a bot posting garbage pretending to help
