[danielvaughn]

I think a lot of overly-eager and under-informed people are jumping on the bandwagon and shouting half-baked proclamations from the rooftops to get clicks and views.

But underneath all the bullshit is something truly useful, so I wouldn't necessarily say that Confidently Incorrect™ is ChatGPT's primary ability.

Coincidentally, over the past few weeks of this ChatGPT craze, I've needed to create a lot of fake data to seed a database. Normally not a big deal, but these records need to have foreign keys pointing to one another. I wondered whether ChatGPT could help me out, so I briefly described the fields I needed, their format and data type, the type of information they contained, etc etc. It did it almost perfectly, and fixing the little errors was trivial. I was dreading having to do this because it's such a pain in the ass.

To me that kind of thing is going to be the most useful application. Everyone's freaking out (in both the "scared" and "excited" sense) over AI's ability to replace creativity, but I'm focused on it's ability to replace toil.

[paxys]

While I agree with your premise, the "toil" that you mention is a very small use case for a tiny minority of people. And automating it away has always been trivial. What would have taken 30 minutes to write a Python script now takes 5 minutes to come up with the perfect prompt. And then you have to test and be sure that it does what you want. Neat, but not world-changing.

Meanwhile ChatGPT is already being hailed as the Google killer. People are using it to write essays and form opinions. Plenty of online and offline debates contains phrases from ChatGPT repeated verbatim. It's being adopted in newsrooms around the world. So what it is good for in theory and what people are actually using it for are worlds apart. IMO the technology is going to have its "self driving car kills pedestrian" moment very soon because of over-eager and careless users, and that is going to set the entire field back.

[turtlebits]

I disagree. Toil is part of everyone’s job and what creates procrastinators. I used it recently to help me write a browser extension, where I find writing vanilla js and xpath expressions very tedious (just a bunch of syntax lookup) and would not have even bothered in the first place.

If you approach it with the right mindset, it’s extremely valuable.

[SamPatt]

Increasing software development speed 6x would be fairly world changing already, wouldn't it?

Add in all the automation of customer service via actually good Chatbots and lots of very cheap (and fairly high quality) copywriting and it seems world changing to me.

[vkou]

> Meanwhile ChatGPT is already being hailed as the Google killer.

The only Google-killing aspect of it is a better understanding of user queries.

Although given how often I have to remind it of the details of my questions, maybe it's not even good at that.

[fock]

Given it has probably "hardcoded" a lot of questions by the usage of "finetuning" via RL, probably the latter statement is true. Also it has one way only to understand your query. If that way is wrong: welcome synonyms replaced by the tokenizer, welcome hallucinations by raising the temperature. Or you can introduce "context" (8000 tokens) or retrain.

[hungryforcodes]

> ...a better understanding of user queries.

No, lack of ads. Before content marketing, Google was pretty useful

[vkou]

How do you think it's going to be monetized, if not by ads?

[hungryforcodes]

In what sense? Google has many revenue streams -- the year is 2023, not 1997. Just HAVING the number one search engine without ad revenues brings mind share, intelligence on trends, what people are searching for, advanced notice on possible disasters...the list is endless.

[soco]

Like said somewhere on the internet, we don't need AI to create art, we need AI to do the dishes and free our time to create art.

[theonlybutlet]

But art's the easy part, I wonder if that's why it's fun...

[hungryforcodes]

...not done well though. Dishes are much easier to do well.

[prox]

When I want a quick insight to launch me into further inquiry, chatgpt has been so much more useful than regular search with the first 10 hits of AI generated advertisement spam. I use one that provide its source as well, so I can check.

Reddit tends to be a second best bet, and the most upvoted is not always the best, on a busy thread some ‘real’ experts are usually a bit down with lengthy descriptions of their analysis.

Search is third, it’s quick but I do often need to append stackoverflow and reddit to get meaningful answers. I forgo Google completely more and more since the quality is so low, perhaps 2% of my queries go there tops.

[ikekkdcjkfke]

Absolutely. I know what i want, i know how to do it, but i don't want to type it out.

[Felminor]

Just imagine how many little code snippets you used (at least I did) to make my life easier and faster

A script which parses jaon for a specific key or transforming a table from y to z.

Now everyone has this available to them.

It's great already!

[harperlee]

But those are the low hanging fruit that help me avoid rusting skills… and this is a common phenomenon on automation: you destroy the first rungs on the experience ladder, that no one wants to do but are essential to develop foundational skills.

[danielvaughn]

That's a pretty good point. I'm looking at this from the perspective of having done this for over a decade. All that stuff feels like a waste of time to me now. Even as I was using ChatGPT for my fake data, I was thinking to myself "this is like having a junior dev assisting me". So yeah, those little micro tasks that build muscle memory are going to vanish.