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by namaria 925 days ago
I feel like anyone who claims chatgpt is helping them work is just telling on themselves as trying to do things out of their depth and producing output they don't understand well enough to vet.
2 comments

It's just a tool to be used--didn't say it solves every problem. I think of it like a better version of a search engine. ChatGPT basically just summarizes the best (i.e. most popular) content out there. So if you search "Singapore notary/certification laws" you get a better/faster 3 sentence summary than if you were to click through Google results. I find it useful for things, but only so far as it points you in the right direction and provides some useful starting point to then expand on manually.
ChatGPT sets a baseline. If my answer isn’t better than ChatGPT there would be no point in employing me. But students use it all the time. They use it to cheat. They use it to brainstorm.

I have plenty of criticism for chatGPT. It attempts to fake nuance by creating shallow syntheses of conflicting info. It doesn’t understand anything it talks about systemically. It has no insight into the user.

But it can regurgitate a list that you can use to structure your answer to a student’s question. It’s interesting to me because people do want me to believe it’s coming for my job. It’s a way off yet.

It’s somewhat useful to brainstorm, it really helps with the empty page problem but it’s not good and the resultant nudge could be in a very generic direction. Instead of promoting creativity it pushes you toward sameness.
Very true.

Certainly I find that it reminds me of what I know that it doesn’t.

Thinking about it more fully it’s like it pulls the “Cunningham’s Law” trigger in me that a lazy question just can’t.