[hickelpickle]

While I am not the most experienced, I did recently finish a CS a degree and find chatgpt a great resource for getting a general understanding to go off of when approaching something outside my domain of experience. Having a core understanding of things in general makes it easier to identify when it's wrong about things, and the majority of time I am not using it to generate code, outside of asking for an example. Being able to ask a few direct question on a topic "demolishes" the time spent to become familiar with something, as most of the time I am just looking for answer about some specifics or to clear up some ambiguity in my understanding of a new concept.

I would say with someone new to coding it can be bad and good, as a lot of times it glosses over things, or can be slightly incorrect as it makes assumptions (or more so just answers in a more general context, and when asked to elaborate, or challenged on specifics it will reformat/improve it's answer, but without knowing you need to do so, I could see it easily see it providing half-baked foundational knowledge. You can ask it "x" and it will give a answer, but then if you ask it I am trying to do "y" with "x" and isn't "z" an issue or area of concern with its answer it will reformulate the information provided as its original response was flawed, but if you don't know exactly what the "y" you want to do is, or the "z" being foundational knowledge to challenge it on, you can easily get a whole wall of text that is out of context with what you are actually trying to learn.

[worrycue]

> find chatgpt a great resource for getting a general understanding to go off of when approaching something outside my domain of experience.

This is my hang up with LLMs … I don’t trust them.

Frankly it seems just as easy if not easier to just google keywords and read sites.

Google vs LLM is like asking random people on the internet (some are brilliant, some don’t know anything, some are nuts, … etc.) vs asking random people on the internet but all of them have a history of suffering from hallucinations and are routine liars with a compulsive need to answer confidently even when they know nothing.

[abenga]

Especially with an Idea of how they work, I find it very hard to trust them too. Doesn't help that the couple of times I asked them about something subtle, GPT gave me code with the same bugs I was trying to fix. I can see how a beginner would find it useful though.

[bregma]

So it's really just a refinement of Wikipedia, but with custom answers to more explicit questions.

[doctormanhatten]

I don't know about you but I trust Wikipedia a lot more than I trust ChatGPT.

[n6h6]

Plus, with Wikipedia, you can clearly see the sources or the lack of them. I tried asking ChatGPT for a source twice. One time, it gave a source. Another time, it gave the "as a language model I can't" spiel.

[__loam]

Wikipedia actually has a system for creating knowledge and verifying it, while ChatGPT was trained to convince humans.

[ModernMech]

> suffering from hallucinations and are routine liars with a compulsive need to answer confidently even when they know nothing.

Sounds like a description of narcissistic personality disorder or schizoaffective. Of course proto ai would have a personality disorder, go figure.

In the future, the job of an ai psychologist will be to certify the personality of ai products. Gotta make sure you’re not shipping a shrink wrapped psychopath.

[__loam]

They're already doing this. That's why Chatgpt is so successful. They sanded off the offensive edges by showing some Nigerians CSAM.