The trick is to know what they can and can't do, and use them where they're useful enough.
Someone here on HN quipped that ChatGPT is "isn't intelligent" because it couldn't come up with a revolutionary new battery chemistry.
Like... what are you expecting? A god?
LLMs are useful when you can validate the output yourself. Similarly, they're useful when the output doesn't have to be precise but the inputs are English.
For example, they're awesome "filters" for human input as measured against human metrics. "Is the following text rude? Output YES or NO only?" is very useful and works well enough, right now.
They're also useful when you need to iterate to find something, or when your search parameters are incredibly vague but have a narrow Venn diagram intersection.
I've been using ChatGPT as a replacement for the /r/tipofmytongue sub-Reddit. It knows everything well enough to be able to interactively find what I'm looking for to an extent that is super-individual-human, and in some ways beyond what even a very large collection of humans can achieve.
In my opinion, the mental model you should use when evaluating LLMs-vs-Human capability: When asked a question, the LLM has to answer without being able to iterate, back-track, or even use a scratch pad such as pen&paper or a text editor. Basically it's the same as an "oral exam", where you have to stand in the middle of a room and get grilled by a professor to determine your knowledge on a subject.
Don't compare "human with tools and unlimited time" to "LLM with no tools and seconds of time". Compare "human being interrogated in an empty room" and then it is much more clear where an LLM rates.
GPT 4 is definitely super-human in some areas, such as general knowledge and translation between languages.
No human knows as much, or can speak as many languages.
Ask yourself this: can any human, when asked to "invent something", just do it, then and there?
Can you share the prompt and your expected output? I'm interested to see where it goes wrong.
TL;DR. I start by asking it to generate sentences where subject-object inversion yields a meaningful sentence where the verb's meaning is shifted metaphorically. For instance "I smoke the cigarette vs the cigarette is smoking me". After some back and forth it comes up with:
The painter captures the landscape vs. The landscape captures the painter. The gardener shapes the garden vs. The garden shapes the gardener. The chef creates the dish vs. The dish creates the chef.
Maybe that will change your mind.
Whilst to the untrained eye, sure, the NGINX config looked great, but it didn't function, and it didn't include the URL rewrites as instructed, hallucinated a bunch of rewrites that didn't exist and would serve no purpose, and despite refining the prompts over many days, and consulting with self-proclaimed "prompt engineers", it still didn't give the expected output.
It's neat. Reliable? Not in my experiences for my needs, but I am genuinely glad you're making it work for what you need, that's definitely cool, provided it doesn't hallucinate in an unnoticed capacity. It's a lot of trust to place in an LLM.