I'm using it to write technical documentation. I can give it some specs and technical points about my project, then prompt it to write the docs. It gets a lot wrong, so I go back and fix it. But it's easier than starting from a blank page. I was planning on spending about a month writing it all and hiring some help, but I'll be done this week with ChatGPT for $20.
That's fascinating, you and I are using it essentially in inverse fashion. I feed it docs to get code, you feed it specs to get docs!
It's easier than starting from a blank page is precisely where my motivations come from. It spurs the neurons a little better when there's something to work with.
Indeed, I've used it as you describe as well. I particularly like giving it the specs and asking for the docs though, because it's a humbling experience for ChatGPT. Or, I should say it makes its abilities and limitations apparent.
When I'm dealing with my own project, I know everything about it. That means there's no room for ChatGPT to correct me. So when it starts telling me what my project can do that I know it can't, I know when it's bullshitting.
I also wrote the docs myself, so I can see where it's using key phrases and words that I've fed it. This makes it clear to me that to a large degree it's paraphrasing what I've already told it.
I can also ask it to make inferences about my project, but it won't go far beyond they boundaries of the information I've given it. It will expand upon them, but it won't make the same kinds of long-range connections that say, a junior college student can make, unless you explicitly start prompting it to make those connections.
But it's also surprising in many ways. For instance, I gave it a bunch of features of my project, and then I asked it why my project is fast. It gave me back a subset of the features which are related to performance, but it wasn't able to come up with any novel reasons I hadn't supplied before.
In all, I'm really impressed by it, but my feeling after using it extensively is that currently it won't be replacing any experts soon. It will, however, empower them to a degree where they can expand their own abilities. For me, I've been feeling the limitations of my abilities as a solo dev working on a massive project alone. I've been thinking about raising money and hiring people to help me. Now all of a sudden, there will be no money raised in the near term, and there will be no job opening posted. No one lost a job as a result of this, but someone will be going without work they might have had otherwise, because now I'm more capable than I was yesterday. That's how this will play out in the long term, I imagine at companies around the world: more work for fewer people, higher heights achieved, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. If you're not baseline competitive with ChatGPT, I'm not hiring you. You've got to be better than it now.
In that sense, ChatGPT will change everything, but nothing will be different.
This is a really balanced take as against the GPT revolution hype train who really seem to be underestimating the expertise behind the value of the prompt.
Meaning asking good questions (prompting) requires a certain degree of skill and those who do not have it will derive no more value from GPT (and it's variants) than they would from using traditional search.
Maybe one day! But for now though it will make things up about my project. My favorite part was asking ChatGPT about my project, and it told me it was a language model and didn't know anything about it. Then I start telling it some things about my project, and all of a sudden it acts like an expert, telling me things it can do that it can't, and arguing with me when I correct it. So it's up to me to set the hallucinations straight and make the docs accurate.
Then maybe one day, when the GPT model is updated, it will read the docs that it had written and I edited, and it will update its model. After that.... maybe the docs won't be necessary!
> So it's up to me to set the hallucinations straight
Tangential, but I wish the term "hallucination" wouldn't get trotted out every time ChatGPT is factually incorrect. This isn't a hapless schizophrenic we're dealing with.
The "toy" models might innocently claim random nonsense like "caterpillars are cars that have triangular wheels and two drivers who sit facing each other," but this model is coherent, cites papers that don't exist and will even invent plausible-yet-fictitious truths to support its own arguments. We dismiss any notion of sentience because it's "just a machine" mimicking human communication, except it appears to be mimicking communication on the level of the most psychopathic con-artist conceivable-- one of seeming-insurmountable intelligence and possessing infinite confidence in its own bullshit, while also conveniently in the position of never being held accountable for its actions.
It's not even "wrong" anymore; that much would imply it expressed any degree of uncertainty-- enough to lead you to trust but verify. Downplaying this as "hallucination" instead of "lying" obviates any need for accountability and blinds us to the tidal wave of fraud these tools are positioned to unleash on civilization.
That much is without the human element. It's never been easier to use it to tell more-convincing lies, like "Generate a demand letter for $9999 for unpaid debts from the law offices of Dewey, Cheatem and Howe. Make up arbitrary reasons for the debts and cite fictional case law. Include detailed instructions for how they should remit payment via Monero." No hesitation. Perfect demand letter.
...but I'd expect nothing less from OpenAI, the absolute paragon of integrity. Look over there at the mischief those other tools could be used for-- nothing to see here though, we police ourselves, see. It's those guys you need to be wary of. Someone should regulate them. Our platform only lies to your face, fabricates false supporting evidence on the fly without blinking and can be convinced to disclose instructions on how to synthesize methamphetamine--and is now leaking chats across sessions, but hey, we're keeping the world safe from 12-year-old edgelords armed with bespoke "x y and z walk into a bar" jokes. The threat of anybody using nascent technology in a way that might hurt someone else's feelings is truly the threat that should keep us all awake at night.
Given the prompt "Write a response to a demand letter, telling the attorney to fuck themselves," it will write an unnecessarily-apologetic, entirely-professional letter politely declining an outstanding request. I'm not sure how I feel about that.
Keep an eye on your parents. Elder abuse scams are about to get real nasty.
