Slow June, people voting with their feet amid this AI craze, or something else?
It’s Summer. Students are on break, lots of people on vacation, etc. Let’s wait to see if the trend persists before declaring another AI winter.
Agreed. I think being between academic years is likely a much bigger factor than we realize. I’m a college professor, and at the end of spring quarter we had a lot of conversations with undergrads, grad students, and faculty about how people are actually using AI.
Literally every undergrad student I spoke with said they use it for every written assignment (for the large part in non-cheating legit educational resource ways). Most students used it for all or most of their programming assignments. Most use it to summarize challenging or long readings. Some absolutely use it to just do all their work for them, though fewer than you might expect.
I’d be pretty surprised if there isn’t a significant bounce-back in September.
This worries me though. I’ve found chatgpt to be wrong in basically every fact-based question I’ve asked it. Sometimes subtly, sometimes completely, but it always hallucinates. You cannot use it as a source of truth.
Honestly I feel like at this point its unreliability is kind of helpful for students. They have to learn how to use it most effectively as a tool for producing their own work and not a replacement. In my classes the more relevant “problem” for students is that GPT produces written work that on the surface feels composed and sensible but is actually straight up garbage. That’s good. They turn that in, it’s extremely obvious to me, and they get an F (because that’s the grade AI earned with the garbage paper).
But they can and should use it for things it’s great at: reword this long sentence I’m having trouble phrasing concisely, help me think of a title for my paper, take my pseudocode and help me turn it into a while loop in R, generate a list of current researchers on this topic and two of their most recent publications, translate this paragraph of writing from Foucault/Marx/Bourdieu/some-good-thinker-and-bad-writer into simpler wording…
I have a calculator in my pocket even though my teachers assured me I wouldn’t. Students will have access to and use AI forever now. The worry should be that we fail to teach them the difference between a homework-bot and an incredible, versatile tool to leverage.
I have been using it to do deep dives into subjects. Especially text analysis. Do you want to know the entire voc of the Gospel of Mark in original greek for example? 1080. Now how does this compare to a section of Plato’s republic of the same size? About 6-7x as large.
So right there we can see why Mark is often viewed as a direct text while Plato is viewed as a more ambiguous writer.
Mark is a direct and terse narrative of a specific segment of Jesus’s life and teachings while the republic is an attempt to expound a philosophy and system of government.
I agree with you, but I’m not sure I’d call him a more ambiguous writer, mark is a ‘just the facts, ma’am’ notation of verbal histories near contemporary, with the other gospels being attempts to add on contemporary allegories and legends attributed by different groups to Jesus (or John who just did his own thing).
I’d be curious at the comparison of the apology and crito, similar narratives of a similar figure in a specific segment of his life (the end of it). It’s fairly direct and terse as Socrates was portrayed as being direct and terse, but otherwise the styles are similar as (throw on hard hat) Jesus appears to have been attributed many of the allegories of Socrates in the recorded gospels, which makes sense if you’re trying to appeal to followers of hellenic religions such as those in Rome and Greece.
I think you’re being a bit self-centered, i’s always going to be summer somewhere. This is a tool used globally.
Well yeah it’s kinda cool but the novelty will wear off. It’s useful sometimes but it’s not a magic elixer.
I use it for quick dnd ideas. Need an NPC on the fly? Chatgpt will help you out
I have noticed that I use it less myself. I think honestly though, at least for me, that it is 90% related to the clunky and awkward UI of ChatGPT. If it was easy to natively type the prompt in the browser bar I’d use it much more.
Plus, the annoying text scrolling thingy … Just show me the answer already, hehe.
The annoying text scrolling can’t be removed because the AI generates one word at a time, which is what you are seeing.
Sure it can. Finish generating it server-side, then send it as one big chunk to the user.
To be honest though, ChatGPT is pretty fast at generating text these days compared to how it was at the beginning so it doesn’t bother me as much.
What still bothers me, is that it doesn’t do smooth scrolling while generating. It’s tons of tiny jumps and hiccups which make it very hard to read. I tend to scroll up a little as soon as it has generated a few lines, then read at my own pace. Annoying default behaviour though.
Give phind.com a try. It can be set as your default search provider (manually or with a plugin), so you can just type in the search bar.
Personally I’ve abandoned ChatGPT in favor of Claude. It’s much more reliable.
I still use it sometimes, but ohhh boy it can be a wreck. Like I’ve started using the Creation Kit for Bethesda games, and you can bet your ass that anything you ask it, you’ll have to ask again. Countless times it’s a back-and-forth of:
Me: Hey ChatGPT, how can I do this or where is this feature?
ChatGPT: Here is something that is either not relevant or just does not exist in the CK.
Me: Hey that’s not right.
ChatGPT: Oh sorry, here’s the thing you are looking for. and then it’s still a 50-50 chance of it being real or fake.
Now I realize that the Creation Kit is kinda niche, and the info on it can be a pain to look up but it’s still annoying to wade through all the shit that it’s throwing in my direction.
With things that are a lot more popular, it’s a lot better tho. (still not as good as some people want everyone to believe)
I’ve been building a tool that uses ChatGPT behind the scenes and have found that that’s just part of the process of building a prompt and getting the results you want. It also depends on which chat model is being used. If you’re super vague, it’s going to give you rubbish every time. If you go back and forth with it though, you can keep whittling it down to give you better material. If you’re generating content, you can even tell it what format and structure to give the information back in (I learned how to make it give me JSON and markdown only).
Additionally, you can give ChatGPT a description of what it’s role is alongside the prompt, if you’re using the API and have control of that kind of thing. I’ve found that can help shape the responses up nicely right out of the box.
ChatGPT is very, very much a “your mileage may vary” tool. It needs to be setup well at the start, but so many companies have haphazardly jumped on using it and they haven’t put in enough work prepping it.
Have you see the JollyRoger Telco - they’ve started using ChatGPT to help have longer conversations with telemarketing scammers. I might actually re-subscribe to the jolly roger (used them previously) if the new updated bots perform as well enough.
If you don’t mind me asking, does your tool programmatically do the “whittling down” process by talking to ChatGPT behind the scenes, or does the user still talk to it directly? The former seems like a powerful technique, though tricky to pull off in practice, so I’m curious if anyone has managed it.
Don’t mind at all! Yeah, it does a ton of the work behind the scenes. I essentially have a prompt I spent quite a bit of time iterating on. Then from there, what the user types gets sent bundled in with my prompt bootstrap. So it reduces the work considerably for the user and dials it in.
Edit: adding some more context/opinions.
I think the error that a lot of tools make is that they don’t spend enough time shaping their instructions for the AI. Sure, you can offload a lot of the work to it, but you have to write your own guard rails and instructions. You can tell it things like you would a human, and it will sometimes even fill in the gaps.
For example, I asked it to give me a data structure back that included an optional “title”. I found that if you left the title blank, ChatGPT took it upon itself to generate a title for you based on the content it wrote.
A lot of the things I got it to do took time and a ton of test iterations. I was even able to give it a list of exactly how it should structure the content it gave back. Things that I would otherwise do on the programming side, I was able to simply instruct ChatGPT to handle instead.
What method did you use to generate only JSON? I’m using it (gpt3.5-turbo) in a prototype application, and even with giving it an example (one-shot prompting) and telling it to only output JSON, it sometimes gives me invalid results. I’ve read that the new function-calling feature is still not guaranteed to produce valid json. Microsoft’s “guidance” (https://github.com/microsoft/guidance) looks like what I need, but I haven’t got around to trying it yet.
Lol, Chat has it’s pros and cons. For helping me write or refine content, it’s extremely helpful.
However I did try to use it to write code for me. I design 3D models using a programming language (OpenSCAD) and the results are hilarious. Literally it knows the syntax (kinda) and if I ask it to do something simple, it will essentially write the code for a general module (declaring key variables for the design), and then it calls a random module that doesn’t exist (like it once called a module “lerp()” which is absolutely not a module) - this magical module mysteriously does 99% of the design… but ChatGPT won’t give it to me. When I ask it to write the code for lerp(), it gives me something random like this
module lerp() { splice(); }
Where it simply calls up a new module that absolutely does not exist. The results are hilarious, the code totally does not compile or work as intended. It is completely wrong.
But I think people are working it out of their system - some found novelty in it that wore off fast. Others like myself use it to help embellish product descriptions for ebay listings and such.
I recently asked it about Nix Flakes, which were very niche and bew during ChatGPTs Training. It was able to give me a reasonable answer in English, but if I first asked it in German, it couldn’t do it. It could reasonably translate the english one though, after it generated that. Depending on what language you use to prompt it, you get very different answers, because it doesn’t do the transfer of ideas and concepts between languages or more generally, disconnected bodies of text sources.
It is somewhat obvious if you know about the statistical nature of the models they use, but it’s a great example of why these things don’t KNOW things, they just regurgitate what they read in context before.
