It just feels too good to be true.
I’m currently using it for formatting technical texts and it’s amazing. It doesn’t generate them properly. But if I give it the bulk of the info it makes it pretty af.
Also just talking and asking for advice in the most random kinds of issues. It gives seriously good advice. But it makes me worry about whether I’m volunteering my personal problems and innermost thoughts to a company that will misuse that.
Are these concerns valid?
A lot of people are talking about the privacy aspect (like you mention in your post) a lot better than me, so I wanted to share the main issue I’ve had with ChatGPT. It’s an idiot. It can’t follow basic instructions and will just repeat the mistake over and over again when you point it out. It’s uninspired and uncreative and will spit out lame, great value brand names like “The Shadow Nexus”, “The Cybercenter”, “The Datahaven”. I used to be able make it give good names when giving it example names but doesn’t work anymore. I’m writing cyberpunk fic, and I needed help with a hacker group name, and it came up with the Binary Syndicate which is pretty good. Now it comes up with “Hacker Squad”, “The Hacker Elite”, “The Hackers”. I don’t want it to write an entire book for me, but sometimes I need help with scene that require more technical knowledge than I have. It’s prose was really good when you fine tune it a little. Now it’s flat, bland, and boring. I asked it to write a scene about someone defusing a bomb and it basically was a two sentence scene that explained nothing on how he defused it. I asked it to make it longer and explain how he defused it and it saw “He opens the case and utilizes a technique known as ‘wire tracing’. He traces the wire and cuts it and the bomb is defused. The hacker is so relieved.” See how flat that is? How mechanical? I use Claude for creative writing but it’s not much better.
Claude is so censored that writing anything that sounds even nonoscopically criminal it freaks the hell out and lectures you about being ethical. For instances it wouldn’t help me write a scene about a digital forensic analyst at the FBI wiping a computer (because it encourages harm). So you can only imagine how it reacted when I asked it for help writing about my vigilante hacker character and my archeologist posing as a crime lord smuggler secretly dismantling black market trades in the middle east. You have to jailbreak it (which is a little bit less hard than hacking the Pentagon!) and eventually it goes all love guru on you and starts monologuing about light and darkness and writing inspiring uplifting tales blah blah blah.
Honestly, what I’m saying is that ChatGPT is pretty dumbed down, but I’ve heard of a lot of people who’ve noticed no difference. You could be one of them. If you’re using it for creative writing, use Claude and good luck with the prompt engineering attempting to jailbreak it.
Run an LLM locally to avoid privacy issues.
These types of uses make ChatGPT for the non-write the same as a calculator for the non-mathematician. Lots of people are shit at arithmetic, but need to use mathematics in their every day life. Rather than spend hours with a scratch pad and carrying the 1, they drop the numbers into calculator or spreadsheet and get answers.
A good portion of my life is spent writing (and re-writing) technical documents aimed at non-technical people. I like to think I’m pretty good at it. I’ve also seen some people who are very good, technically, but can’t write in a cohesive, succinct fashion. Using ChatGPT to overcome some of those hurdles, as long as you are the person doing final compilation and organization to ensure that the output is correct and accurate, is just the next step in spelling, usage, and grammar tools. And, just as people learning arithmetic shouldn’t be using calculators until they understand how its done, students should still learn to create writing without the assistance of ML/AI. The goal is to maximize your human productivity by reducing tasks on which you spend time for little added value.
Will the ML company misuse your inputs? Probably. Will they also use them to make your job easier or more streamlined? Probably. Are you contributing to the downfall of humanity? Sure, in some very small way. If you stop, will you prevent the misuse of ML/AI and substantially retard the growth of the industry? Not even a little bit.
The big problem that I see are people using it for way too much. Like “hey write this whole application/business for me”. I’ve been using it for targeted code snippets, mainly grunt work stuff like “create me some terraform” or “a bash script using the AWS cli to do X” and it’s great. But ChatGPT’s skill level seems to be lacking for really complex things or things that need creative solutions, so that’s still all on me. Which is kinda where I want to be anyway.
Also, I had to interview some DBA’s recently and I used it to start my interview questions doc. Went to a family BBQ in another state and asked it for packing ideas (almost forgot bug spray cause there aren’t a lot of bugs here). It’s great for removing a lot of cognitive load when working with mundane stuff.
There are other downsides, like it’s proprietary and we don’t know how the data is being used. But AI like this is a fantastic tool that can make you way more effective at things. It’s definitely better at reading AWS documentation than I am.
The first downside is in the use of it exactly the way you’re using it. In this case, a company may decide they don’t actually need technical writers, just a low-paid editor who feeds tech specs into a prompt, gets a response, and tidies it up. How many skilled jobs are lost because of this?
Think of software devs. Feed a project spec into the prompt: “Give me a Django backend and Vue frontend to build an online calendar” and then you have just a QA dev who debugs and tests and maybe cleans up a bit. Now, instead of a team of software devs working to make sure you have a robust, secure and properly architected app, you have one or two low-paid testers who don’t understand the full architecture, can only fix bugs, and don’t understand the security issues inherent in the minimally viable code the bot spat out.
Think of writers. Just ignore actual creatives. Plug an “idea” into the prompt and then have an editor clean up any glaring strangeness and get it out the door. It can, and already is, flood the market with absolute drivel driving actual human creatives out. Look at the current writers strike. The Hollywood execs are fucking champing at the bit to just replace them all with an LLM and say to hell with the writers.
The core issue is: the people at the top with money only care about money. They don’t care if the product is good. Quality is irrelevant if they can crank it out at a tenth of the cost and at 1000x the volume. And every time you use it, you’re giving it training data. You’re justifying its use. And its use is, and will continue, to destroy entire industries, ruin web search, create mis- and disinformation, and endanger the sharing of actual human creativity.
You’re not selling me here. Specifically because using ChatGPT in the role you are talking about is exactly what software developers have been doing for years - putting humans out of work. To use your own description, I could ask a software team to “Give me a calendar app” and a team of software devs, testers, and QA will produce a will go about working to make sure you have a robust, secure and properly architected app which will them obsolete thousands upon thousands of secretaries across the world. They were fully employed making intelligent decisions about their bosses schedules, managing conflicts, and coordinating with other humans to make sure things ran smoothly - and you caused nearly all of them to be fired and replaced with one or two low-paid data entry clerks who don’t understand the business or why certain meetings and people have priority over others.
We can go on. Bank tellers? Most of them fired thanks to automated machines. Copywriters? Some lazy programmer puts a dictionary in word and all of a sudden 90% of all misspellings are going. Usage? Yup - getting rid of most of those too. We can go back further to when telephone switchboards were automated and there was no need to talk to someone to make your connection. Sure, those people are dead now, but they wouldn’t have jobs if they were alive. And all of those functions were automated to mimic, and then exceed the utility of, humans who used to do that work. Everything from the cotton gin and mechanical thresher to a laser welder and 5DOF robotic assembly station are eliminating jobs. Artists fearing losing their jobs to ml generation? Welcome to the world of modern old school photography. Modern photography, of course, is digital and has destroyed the jobs of hundreds of thousands or millions of analog photography jobs.
The only difference this time is that its you, or people of your intellectual station, who are in the crosshairs.
But this isn’t what’s happening here. It’s not replacing menial bullshit jobs. It’s trying to replace skilled jobs and creative jobs, something that only soulless grifters and greedy capitalists want. It’s a solution in search of a problem.
Artists fearing losing their jobs to ml generation? Welcome to the world of modern old school photography. Modern photography, of course, is digital and has destroyed the jobs of hundreds of thousands or millions of analog photography jobs.
No, it didn’t. The only jobs lost were menial jobs in film production and development. Creatives didn’t lose their jobs. The medium just changed.
The only difference this time is that its you, or people of your intellectual station, who are in the crosshairs.
This is veering really close to the “creatives have been gatekeeping art and AI will ‘democratize’ it” bullshit
This is veering really close to the “creatives have been gatekeeping art and AI will ‘democratize’ it” bullshit
Ugh, that BS makes me want to blow up my own head with mind powers. Anyone can learn how to make art! It is not ‘democratizing’ art to make a computer do it and then take credit for the keywords you fed it! Puke worthy stuff, I appreciate you speaking out against that crap far better than I ever could. There’s enough of that BS on Reddit, can’t we just it leave it there?
So, it’s okay to replace jobs which seem like menial bullshit to you, but not jobs you deem to be “creative.” We’re taking a bell curve of human ability and simply drawing the line of “obsolete human” in a different place and you’re disappointed that you’re way closer to it than you were a decade ago.
NB: I sat in a room with 200 other engineers this summer and they all scoffed at the idea that a computer could take their place. But I’m absolutely certain that what we do could be - is being - automated even as we claim to be the intelligent ones who are not in fear of replacement. My job is just the learned sum of centuries of human knowledge which is honed year after year and has to be taught, wholecloth, to every new human in my profession. There are people who will say I’m the smartest guy in the room (for a small enough room ;-) but 90% what I do is just applying a set of rules based on inputs and boundary conditions. We feel like this shouldn’t happen to us because we’re smart. We think independently. We have special abilities which set us apart from ML generated outputs. We’re also full of shit. There are absolutely areas were ML/AI will not surpass our value in the system for quite some time, but more and more of our expertise will be accomplishable by application of distilled large data sets.
