I personally have found that ChatGPT is great to bounce ideas and concepts off of. If I’m unfamiliar with something or I’m trying to learn a new skill or get a second opinion on some design or architecture details, it’s very helpful in that regard.
When it comes to pure code, ChatGPT will deceive you. I’m at the point now where I’m very hesitant to copy and paste ChatGPT code. I’ll have to completely vet it first, or it’ll have to literally just be a line or two. And even then I’ll likely have to refactor it. ChatGPT is just wrong too often when it comes to the actual code either due to lack of context about the problem or just downright hallucinations. It’s even gotten some boilerplate wrong.
When it comes to Copilot, I honestly haven’t been able to quantify how beneficial it’s been for me. I’ve often had to delete or modify its code. I think it could partially be because I’m not as skilled with it. It could also be that I’ve just had to write a lot of JS lately, and there’s probably a ton of bad JS that it’s been trained on. I remember being more impressed with it when I write Rust. But I’m also new with Rust. I need to try it with something like C#, which has more difficultly than JS but I’m also proficient with it.
All in all, AI tools for me have been just that, tools I can use to help me get the job done.
In all probability it's deceiving you the rest of the time as well. Based on what you've described here, you're trusting its expertise when you don't have much domain expertise of your own, but find it not to be particularly expert at all on matters where you yourself have suffient context and expertise to know better.
This is a common phenomenon with humans, FWIW. The same sort of thing happens with traditional information sources. For example, when a media outlet reports on things we don't know much about personally, we believe them. Then they cover something where we have direct domain expertise and find all manner of misunderstandings and errors trivially, but instead of suspecting that they're likely just as wrong about a lot of other things as well, we assume it's a special case where they just got our special knowledge domain wrong.
In any case, to answer the OP... I use these new AI tools to generate content where the details don't matter and the cost of being wrong is near zero. Such as, graphics for slides, market/product/pitch blurb pablum, etc.
I use them to compensate for my limited artistic/graphic design skills and to overcome my propensity to tediously labor over copy despite that copy being basically throwaway.
If I had to really try and pinpoint where my discomfort for this latest hypecycle is coming from, it's probably that I have this sense that the dynamic behind Gell-Mann Amnesia is being cynically exploited by the interests overselling these new products.
Kind of in the same vein as the strategies around gamification, where some identified frailty of the human psyche is being leaned on for cash.
It's not quite a con because the technology is useful and certainly worth something, but it's not non-exploitive either.
To me, the biggest value of Copilot is that you get unlimited access to a gpt-4 chat for half the price of ChatGPT Plus via Copilot Chat.
The context sensitive stuff like highlighting a line of code and asking questions about it and the completions are okay too but the chat is the most useful part imo.
Yeah, great for architecture and design especially in areas I feel impostor syndrome from knowing just enough to be dangerous. I'd say it extends the horizon of possibilities, especially in filling in grey areas.
This all makes sense, thank you. And with ChatGPT are you using the paid version? I have been experimenting with both and found the free version to be very bad. The paid version seems to make fewer mistakes.
Can you elaborate on this? From what I can tell, the outcome that you’re speaking of has occurred for the opposite reason.
Looking at the data for the US, there seems to be an even more exponential curve between 2015-2020, which would imply that these trends could have been further exacerbated by the reduction of government regulation. The same is likely true for the concentration of wealth, the loss in small businesses, disenfranchisement, etc.
Yes, the reality is we've been in a starve the beast situation for decades in the US. It's a spiral as the bad actors get to say "See, we have X but X doesn't work" leaving out the conditions they've forced on X to cause these deficiencies. Repeat until the X thing is dead or completely toothless.
Consider all the labor regulations since. All the complexity of the taxes. The design of cars today is completely driven by regulations - for example, the tendency for cars to all look alike comes from regulation of every aspect of them.
Regulation has driven a lot of industry out of America, as it made it too expensive to operate here.
> Regulation has driven a lot of industry out of America, as it made it too expensive to operate here.
Do you have any sources? I think most offshoring is driven by significantly lower labor costs in other countries. For example, China has a highly controlled economy, but American companies still offshore work there simply because labor is cheaper. Indeed, we've seen some "onshoring" in recent years[1] now that automation is far more prevalent and labor cost is less significant as a portion of operating costs.
No, I don't have a specific cite. But the reason for offshoring is always going to be about lower total costs, of which labor is a large component. There are quite a lot of regulations around labor and benefits, along with the NLRB which is very tilted towards the interests of unions. California recently passed a law where the wages of fast food workers are set by some government board.
In tech, while there are some regulations, I definitely believe that more need to be established, especially regarding the topic of the article. Tech is a bit too loose right now, with the exception of the health industry.
I think a possible explanation would be that the increasing desire for more government regulation, or at least functional government, runs counter to the world, which is increasingly ruled by inhuman, (even anti-human) forces. This breeds a desperation in people as they realize that humanity is viewed as a resource, not an end in itself, for the inhuman forces (call it capital, technology, whatever) to consume and mold toward their own ends. While the left is obviously more in favor of “big government”, I think it’s easy to forget that conservatives are also perpetually in rebellion against a government they feel has abandoned the goal of protecting the traditional structures they hold dear, while also delegating the role of speech police and moral authority to the dreaded socially liberal wings of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
No, not at all, just that (post) modern techno-capitalism has grown out of the need to justify itself via appeals to humanism. Another way of looking at this is by considering the difference between life/death drive in psychology as they relate to humanism/anti-humanism and how that manifests in systems.
When it comes to pure code, ChatGPT will deceive you. I’m at the point now where I’m very hesitant to copy and paste ChatGPT code. I’ll have to completely vet it first, or it’ll have to literally just be a line or two. And even then I’ll likely have to refactor it. ChatGPT is just wrong too often when it comes to the actual code either due to lack of context about the problem or just downright hallucinations. It’s even gotten some boilerplate wrong.
When it comes to Copilot, I honestly haven’t been able to quantify how beneficial it’s been for me. I’ve often had to delete or modify its code. I think it could partially be because I’m not as skilled with it. It could also be that I’ve just had to write a lot of JS lately, and there’s probably a ton of bad JS that it’s been trained on. I remember being more impressed with it when I write Rust. But I’m also new with Rust. I need to try it with something like C#, which has more difficultly than JS but I’m also proficient with it.
All in all, AI tools for me have been just that, tools I can use to help me get the job done.