[hnuser847]

Can you help me understand what exactly is so scary about ChatGPT? The only places where I see this hype/fear around ChatGPT is here on Hacker News. I've played around with it a bit and the magic wore off in less than 10 minutes. I asked it to generate code for a sudoku solver and the result it gave me was perfect. I then asked it to write code for a crossword puzzle generator and gave me a word search puzzle generator instead, where it simply shoved all the given words together at the bottom of the puzzle. These were just toy examples - I can't imagine ChatGPT is actually useful at work outside of generating very basic text snippits.

I asked a group 10 friends, none of who work in tech, about what they think about ChatGPT and then consensus is that it's a slightly better Google in certain situations. None of them are worried that it's going to put them out of work, take over the world, or violate their privacy. I have to agree with them. I think all this AI stuff is way overhyped, just like all the other fads that came before: VR, crypto, drone delivery, CRISPR, autonomous vehicles, metaverse, etc.

[SanderNL]

The first car was slow too. The first computers were awful and nothing like today. There's countless examples like this. Lots of people are showing disturbing levels of lack of vision.

[hnuser847]

But now you're asking the government to regulate against a hypothetical damage that may never occur. The problem with "vision" is that we can all let our imaginations run wild about new technology is capable of.

I remember having the exact same discussions on HN about autonomous vehicles over a decade ago. The consensus then was that autonomous vehicles would make truck and taxi drivers obsolete within 5 years, and that this massive, sudden loss of jobs would cause a lot of social unrest. Yet here we are in 2023 and there are a grand total of zero driverless trucks on the road. I'm not saying AV tech is totally useless or that we won't someday get to a world where a large percentage of vehicles are self-driven, but it's clear now that the hype and fear around them was heavily exaggerated.

I feel the same way about ChatGPT. It's definitely cool and impressive, but the hype will die down once people realize how truly limited it is.

[SanderNL]

Oh right. I didn’t mean to say I think it needs regulation. I meant to say that I can imagine conservative people feeling threatened by this. Not saying they should, because I agree. It is limited and the real uses of GPT are quite a bit more subtle than “do everything for me” and it all needs to diffuse into society for a while. Which will probably take longer than we techies imagine it.

Edit: I do think there is a slight difference from your example here. Trucks are already here and driving them is a known thing and it is easy to see how it could work (making it work is still hard). Automating cognition itself is automating a nearly unknown skill. Nobody quite knows what it is we are doing and what box we are opening.

[tablespoon]

> But now you're asking the government to regulate against a hypothetical damage that may never occur.

That is entirely reasonable ask, especially when the harm could be large. It's a lot harder (and often impossible) to put a genie back in a bottle once it's out.

> I remember having the exact same discussions on HN about autonomous vehicles over a decade ago. The consensus then was that autonomous vehicles would make truck and taxi drivers obsolete within 5 years, and that this massive, sudden loss of jobs would cause a lot of social unrest.

So some internet commenters' schedule was wrong, but that doesn't mean the bigger point was wrong. Some people thought we'd die in a nuclear war in the 80s, and they'd still be prescient if it turns out we die in on in the 2030s.

Technologists tend to be pathologically optimistic about technology, and tend to hand wave away the problems it will cause. It's important to keep that attitude in check, because they sure as hell don't seem to have the wisdom to do it themselves.