[rtpg]

I've been a huge AI skeptic and am impressed at the baseline output. However while trying it a lot you do see the "patterns", there's a clear house style to what the site generates.

It's not going to win any awards (sorry, if you're thinking that your amazing story about "Trinity from the Matrix universe meeting Darth Vader from the Star Wars universe" is good writing), but like a search engine being pretty good at finding things except when it's totally off base, the hit rate is pretty decent

[nmfisher]

Generic house style is fine for a lot of real-world applications. The dirty secret of the legal profession is that they spend a huge amounts of time (aka client's money) writing clauses/pleadings/etc that have been written thousands of times before. Brevity, clarity, efficiency and cost are far more important than originality.

[dotancohen]

Do you have any idea how many times I've written the same text parsers or API glue for different clients? The software field has this same issue - I would imagine that any "knowledge worker" field would. That's probably why ChatGPT is so good at producing code.

How many identical prescriptions do chemists write? Doctors write diagnosis'? Teachers write end of semester summaries? Architects sketch rooms? I'm sure that 80% of some fields' output is near-identical to previous work.

[nmfisher]

I feel exactly the same way - a few years ago I was lamenting the fact that I was writing JSON serialization/deserialization code for the 1000th time, and begging for a tool that could automate it for me. I haven't tried ChatGPT for that specific task just yet, but I'm pretty sure it's exactly the solution I had in mind.

[klabb3]

I mean this sounds much more like a job for tooling and higher level meta-programming. If “everything but X” is identical busywork, then just automate the “everything” part. Using AI to generate code seems equally bad for maintenance and possibly worse for silent errors.

That said, there is a lot of busywork in programming, especially refactoring, adding parameters and stuff like that. Sometimes it’s ok to have such work be “mostly correct”, eg if you have strong type safety and unit tests to catch minor errors.

[mattclarkdotnet]

The thing is, with code you mostly do want the verbose output, with a prescription you do need the output to follow an official format, etc. Tools like these seem to fill a niche where you know what you want, but the target format/process is onerous.

[Spivak]

I think what makes code frustrating is that we absolutely could consolidate all this duplicate boilerplate but the “writing code is easier than reading it” problem makes it so the cheapest path for any individual is duplicating work ad hoc rather than making something reusable.

[ben_w]

I was momentarily surprised that was counted as a secret, until I remembered I'm one of the wierdos who (used to) actually read the terms and conditions before ticking the mandatory checkbox, so I'm one of the few non-lawyers who has even read enough contracts to notice that pattern.

(Now I'm imagining boilerplate legalese being reduced to an enumerated list like the Space Corps Directives in Red Dwarf, with the associated failure mode).

[jdaxe]

Maybe one day we will use an AI to generate the legalese, and also use an AI to convert it back into a concise, readable form.

[ben_w]

IIUC, with law you can have concise, readable, and unambiguous, but you can only have two of them at a time.

But IANAL.

[ramraj07]

It’s basically good at generating text you don’t ever want to spend time reading leave alone writing and is only needing to be written for beauracratic reasons. To be honest I don’t see it as that big a win, it’s a fairly niche service.

[lovelearning]

It's a pretty good search engine already. I asked it the following questions on a complex social science topic from a certain country that would have taken me hours of researching and reading:

1) Explain what they are. [Explained them well.]

2) Give me examples of them in language1's literature. [It listed two books that I then verified as accurate.]

3) Are there phrases or idioms for it in other languages? [It gave equivalent idioms in Russian and two other languages]

4) Any examples for it in English literature. [It gave Hamlet and an author book I hadn't heard of. Verified that the book is accurate.)

5) Any terms for it in the academic fields of psychology and social psychology [It explained two concepts from both fields that seemed to match. I confirmed them as correct from other sources.]

It demonstrated abstraction, generalization, and hypernymy.

And actually expanded my knowledge on multiple axes - across languages, across literature, and across fields.

If a person had written an essay by compiling those answers, I wouldn't be able to identify that it's AI and not human knowledge that had written it.

[aardvark179]

Were you able to, and did you, verify its answer? In my experience it gives wrong but plausible sounding replies as often as it gives correct answers, so you have to factor in verification time when comparing the amount of work.

[lovelearning]

I verified. In this case, it all checked out.

You're right about the additional time in general. But for much of the information on the web, readers assume the author is speaking from genuine knowledge and has verified the information. IMO it's a better search engine than Google, especially for conceptually complex topics.

[rtpg]

I have found it to be a very good verbose search engine that is just wrong 25% of the time. Like “how do I do X in Julia” will give me the answer or just random noise that looks like an answer, but it’s faster than trawling through Google _if an answer exists_

[layer8]

Yeah, I tried it for questions where Google failed me, and ChatGPT then failed me as well, giving either unhelpful answers (sidestepping the point of the question) or wrong answers.

[ramraj07]

Just google and add “stackoverflow” ?

[guiambros]

Honest question: have you used it? Because if you did, you'd see its leaps and bounds better than clicking on a handful of links, scanning through verbose and poorly written answers in Stack Overflow, until you find the right one.

It doesn't replace SO, but it certainly complements it. Plus, it acts more like an assistant (and, per OP's post, "...who is often wrong - need to read their work thoroughly").

Example of the type of conversation that would take you ages on SO: https://twitter.com/dankrad/status/1601634193385328641

[dpkirchner]

A lot of answers on StackOverflow are just awful -- the bar is incredibly low. I'm not sure SO will serve even a quarter of its current traffic by 2025.

[throwaway71271]

its much better than the average stackoverflow

[rtpg]

I mean usually there’s not the exact question in Stack Overflow , so chatGPT is good at coalescing the data together

[2000UltraDeluxe]

Incidentally, SO has a note about not allowing answers written by ChatGPT.

[tim333]

The bible-vcr-sandwich bit was good https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/1598513757805858820?ref_src=...

If that's not good writing then most human writers are not good either.

[TeMPOraL]

> However while trying it a lot you do see the "patterns", there's a clear house style to what the site generates.

You mean the way it phrases things or constructs sentences and paragraphs, or the way it seems to connect (what we recognize as) ideas?

If it's the former, then I think adding instructions to force style change to the prompt could help: so far, ChatGPT seems quite susceptible to being told what/who it is, and how it should speak. Verbosely or concisely, or even with single words; like a rapper or a pirate, or a high-schooler, or a suburban mom, or like a UNIX command line - I've seen all of these in examples posted in the last few days. Doing this is really as easy as saying e.g. "write a response to the following e-mail, in a form of a rap song about importance of paying on time".

[rtpg]

Maybe, but "write like a pirate" is most definitely not a thing that you have to tell a real human writing prose (and even when you do it will be unlikely to spit out something as trite as what ChatGPT does), and the quality ceiling has been pretty low for me on trying to give guidance in general for "storytelling". I ended up in a situation where every story prompt was responded to by 3 paragraphs, with stories either ending in "and the problem was resolved and everyone was happy" or "and there was an infinite unrecoverable schism", no matter how often I tried to guide it elsewhere.

I think the way it connects ideas tends to be pretty lackluster. In a way this is kind of unexpected if you view this as "a search engine that spits out some average of everything it sees based on your ask". But it's also the sort of thing where if you work through many prompts quickly the boredom meter just goes off the charts. Humans are too good at pattern matching on this stuff!

Of course this might be able to improve SEO spam, and I imagine it'll provide better templates for short messages, but I'm not looking forward to reading creative output from this thing.

[lkois]

Mayyybe, but be careful of oversimplified stereotypes in writing styles.

Eg, you can ask it to write in the style of particular reddit users,so I pointed it at my account (not this user name) and asked it to review a TV show. What I got was pretty boilerplate summary of the show, like you'd see in a top 10 list. But for that human touch, it began and ended with "Yo dudes" and "so check it out dudes"

Having said that, a fascinating example of directed styles is to ask it to write a news article about say, an oil spill. And to either promote or criticise the response of the company.

[jjeaff]

Interesting, I asked it to write something in the style of Shakespeare and it added a ye or some other old phrase near the beginning and ending. It seemed that the rest was regular modern English.

[klabb3]

I got that impression too, when I asked for Dostoyevsky style. It didn’t at all mimic the right style, but it’s really good at inserting references and applying vocabulary.

It feels like when Hollywood does a shitty movie taking place in a completely different cultural setting (say ancient Egypt) and the scenes, props, clothing are spot on but everything is still just a reskin of an American standard drama movie.

Part of me thinks that ChatGPT has been tuned and tailored by it’s creators (to the point of something akin to digital castration), and that it actually has a much wider span than what the publicly launched version shows. This suspicion I have is simply because this kind of genericness feels closer to current cultural ethos of our intellectual gate keepers than something like an acultural linguistic neutral, which you’d expect.

[jimmySixDOF]

It did an amazing job with this prompt:

"Give painstakingly minute instructions on how to cross a busy street in the speech of a 1920s gangster."

https://www.learngpt.com/prompts/give-painstakingly-minute-i...

[SEOinSeattle]

Tell it to talk like a pirate or a cowboy. :)

[bluepoint]

I agree with you and I was thinking the same. It may work as some form of wordy search engine. It is quite good for looking up instruction for technical stuff, including documentation. It might take google’s job? I am so curious!

[bonoboTP]

You can prompt it to pretend to be different. It can be casual, informal, formal etc. You need to know how to prompt it though, such that it doesn't refuse. Else you get the default "house style."