Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by thyrox 1518 days ago
Not asking rhetorically but what's the genuine use for these things apart from generating a.i. writer type seo spam or some funny text for discussion.

I mean with openai i can certainly tell one use case: GitHub copilot. Can this be used to create something equally useful? Or maybe like an ai game like the dungeon game.. is this that powerful too?

3 comments

To me, this feels like something that might be really useful in generating sample code and documentation for APIs, but I'm not sure the cost of producing those samples is worth it. The time taken to create just a basic template of a docstring is a few minutes, but the output is not great. However, as with most things AI, in time, those that work on this will refine it and make it better. But I don't think that's what this is currently about. In time, this would be quite useful for filling in documentation for existing packages and modules, but this is not currently the case. For now, I would just use something like this as a learning tool for learning how to generate docstrings, and not expect it to make any large contributions to my current work. I don't see this having the kind of AI sophistication that you can write whole apps with.
One example: they can do semantic tasks such as information extraction, that's very useful.
Assisted writing: Drafting news articles with prompts generating the article text and then editing the result.

In other words, kind of like Github Copilot, but not for code.