I feel that by referencing a concrete example of a conversation I had with GPT that others elevated their perception of my response from mere gossip to ~fact.
I literally was able to build an android app that interfaces with chatGPT, I'm thinking it might be cool to also create some sort of web scraper that scrapes many pages, for instance all of the 'how much have you earned with sideprojects pages' on HN, then summarize data from 50+ webpages into bullet points. It doesn't have access to the internet but that doesn't mean you can't GIVE it access to the internet, through the prompt...
Some people are afraid of misuse, but others are just surprised that the advancement of tech is now applying to them. I empathize with the feeling, but I don't know how to be genuinely sympathetic as it seems to be the nature of the beast.
I don't think ChatGPT can hold 50 webpages in its short-term memory, but maybe. I have found it starts to lose shape of specific details we talked about after I drench it in information.
The idea of ants using a crystal for radio wave detection is in that book as well :)
Here's the email thread:
Go for it with my blessing, sounds like a great project!
Adrian
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My name's Sean! I'm reading Children of Time. It's amazing and thought-provoking, thank you for all your hard work.
I'm also really big into ants and was stoked when I read about ants on your world and their interactions with the crystal / messenger.
I'm writing some software as a hobby. It's going to be something like an online Tamagotchi meets mental health app. I'm trying to get people journaling and meditating by having them nurture a virtual pet.
To that effect, I decided the virtual pet would be an ant colony. I then started trying to build some lore around it. A daily-check in means there's a window of time when the check-in occurs, kind of like when the satellite had LOS to the ant colony. The satellite had a biologist on it. Makes sense that biologist would take notes on their ants and I can draw parallels to that to promote journaling, etc.
I just wanted to be respectful of your work and let you know that I was planning on building something that honors a small sliver of the lore you outlined in one of your books. I'm not ripping verbatim, taking any of the names, there are no spiders, etc. If you felt incredibly strongly about wanting me to avoid this then I'd respect that. Conversely, if you were curious to hear more about how I am riffing on your idea, then I'd be happy to elaborate or share more.
Anyway. Hope you are well over there. Thanks again for all the content. Cheers.
Sean
And thanks for this, I reached out to Adrian to promote awareness of my idea based on this feedback since it's so apparent where my ideas are drawing from :)
I've found it useful for discussing my side projects when I can't find someone who is willing to read what I've written and engage with me.
As an example, https://i.imgur.com/afXNZaR.png here I am having an extended conversation about lore for software I am writing.
I thought I would easily tell chatGPT about a plot device from a book, but I did not realize that my understanding was limited. In failing to convey my idea to chatGPT I realized I needed to dig deeper and switched from explaining to learning.
Ultimately, I realized that I was trying to describe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_detector#Cat_whisker_d... which, while not directly identified in the conversation, was something I was able to surface by having had the thought-provoking talk.