eg say you don't remember the syntax for a rails migration, or a regex, or something you're coding in bash, or processpool arguments in python. ChatGPT will often do a shockingly good job at answering those without you searching through random docs, stack overflow, all the bullshit google loves to throw at the top of search queries, etc yourself.
You can even paste in a bunch of your code and ask it to fill in something with context, at which it regularly does a shockingly good job. Or paste code and say you want a test that hits some specific aspect of the code.
And yeah, I don't really care if they train on the code I share -- figuring out the interaction of some stupid file upload lib with aws and cloudflare is not IP that I care about, and i chatgpt uses this to learn and save anyone else from the issues I was having, even a competitor, I'm happy for them.
For a real example:
> can you show me how to build a css animation? I'd like a bar, perhaps 20 pixels high, with a light blue (ideally bootstrap 5.3 colors) small gradient both vertically and horizontally, that 1 - fades in; 2 - starts on the left of the div and takes perhaps 20% of the div; 3 - grows to the right of the div; and 4 - loops
This got me 95% of where I wanted; I fiddled with the keyframe percents a bit and we use this in our product today. It spat out 30 lines of css that I absolutely could not have produced in under 2 hours.
Exactly. Even when it gives an answer that contains many mistakes, or doesn't work at all, I still get some valuable information out of it that does in the end save me a lot of time.
I'm so tired of constantly seeing remarks that basically boil down to "Look, I asked ChatGPT to do my job for me and it failed! What a piece of garbage! Ban AI!", which funnily enough mostly comes from people that fear that their job will be 100% replaced by an AI.
The proof is in the puddling. I am far from being alone in my use of LLMs, namely ChatGPT and Copilot, day-to-day in my work. So how does this reconcile with your worldview? Do I have a do-nothing job? Am I not capable of determining whether or not I’m being productive? It’s really hard for me to take posts like these seriously when they all basically say “anyone that perceives any emergent abilities of this tech is an idiot”.
Who are these people that go around getting random answers to questions from the internet then blindly believing them? That doesn't work on Google either, not even the special info boxes for basic facts.
Up until relatively recently, people didn't just vomit lies onto the internet at an industrial scale. By and large if you searched for something you'd see a correct result from a canonical source, such as an official documentation website or a forum where users were engaging in good faith and trying their best to be accurate.
That does seem to have changed.
I think the question we should be asking ourselves is 'why are so many people lying and making stuff up so much these days' and 'why is so much misinformation being deliberately published and republished.'
People keep saying that we're 'moving into a post-truth era' like it's some sort of inevitability and nobody seems to be suggesting that something perhaps be... done about that?
The internet was a short reprieve because putting data up on the internet, for some time at least was difficult, therefore people that posted said data typically had a reason to do so. A labor of love, or a business case, in which these cases typically lead to 'true' information being posted.
If you're asking why so much bullshit is being posted on the inet these days, it's because it's cheap and easy. That's what has changed. When spam became cheap, easy, and there was a method of profiting from it, we saw it's amount explode.
Because it's still more efficient that way [0].
What I see here is the automated plagiarism machine can't give you the answer only what the answer would sound like. So you need to countercheck everything it gives you and if you need to do so then why bother using it at all? I am totally baffled by the hype.