What gives you confidence its explanations are accurate?

> write and explain me more optimised algorithms for certain cryptographic operations

This domain in particular strikes me as a poor choice for this approach. "Don't roll your own crypto... but definitely don't let a language model roll it for you, either"

Well it gives me a direction to dig in - often papers use inscrutable notation or seemingly magical variables that I’m not sure where they come from. Will ChatGPT always be right? Probably not - but these are things I can validate better than no info at all!

Re: crypto algorithms, the quert in question was implementing exponentiation for arbitrary sized integers. My own implementation was taking until the heat death of the universe to finish for big integers and I didn’t want to just copypasta an impl from elsewhere.

ChatGPT‘s worked flawlessly and it was able to explain me certain tricks it used in depth (which I could independently verify from other sources).

Would I ship it to prod? Not without a security audit, but that ought to be the case regardless when rolling your own (or even someone else‘s) cryptography :)

This post is a clever joke, right?

Right...?

You never read something on a paper and had no clue how to even start to get it?

I talked about snippets of papers to work collueges. Chatgpt can do the same thing.

And why wouldn't it? It's only here to help me to find something I can use for further understanding/googling.

For a serious answer, my biggest reservation with using ChatGPT to explain concepts I know very little about is that ChatGPT often just makes up fake information, or very confidently explains things wrong.

Having to fact-check every thing it says feels a bit exhausting.

A bit like talking to a version of Albert Einstein with dementia or alzheimers, who can still say really intelligent things but mixes in subtle bullshit.

Well the alternative is scouring Google for answers and fact-checking them too - ChatGPT cuts out the scouring process