In this and other use cases I call it a pretty effective search engine, instead of scrolling through stackexchange after clicking between google ads, you get the cleaned up example code you needed. Not a Chat with any intelligence though.
“despite the many people who have shown time and time and time again that it definitely does not do fine detail well and will often present shit that just 10000% was not in the source material, I still believe that it is right all the time and gives me perfectly clean code. it is them, not I, that are the rubes”
Ahah I’m totally with you, I just personally know people that love it because they have never learned how to use a search engine. And these generalist generative AIs are trained on gobbled up internet basically, while also generating so many dangerous mistakes, I’ve read enough horror stories.
I’m in science and I’m not interested in ChatGPT, wouldn’t trust it with a pancake recipe. Even if it was useful to me I wouldn’t trust the vendor lock-in or enshittification that’s gonna come after I get dependent on aa tool in the cloud.
A local LLM on cheap or widely available hardware with reproducible input / output? Then I’m interested.
The problem with stuff like this is not knowing when you dont know. People who had not read the books SSC Scott was reviewing didnt know he had missed the points (or not read the book at all) till people pointed it out in the comments. But the reviews stay up.
Anyway this stuff always feels like a huge motte bailey, where we go from ‘it has some uses’ to ‘it has some uses if you are a domain expert who checks the output diligently’ back to ‘some general use’.
That ChatGPT can be more useful than a web search is really more indicative of how bad the web has got, and can only get worse as fake text invades it. It’s not actually better than a functional search engine and a functional web, but the companies making these things have no interest in the web being usable. Pretty depressing.
Remember when you could read through all the search results on Google rather than being limited to the first hundred or so results like today? And boolean search operators actually worked and weren’t hidden away behind a “beware of leopard” sign? Pepperidge Farm remembers.