To think ChatGPT is the best thing ever?

Similar to what it said to me but it also told me to go to hospital. I'm not hallucinating I promise! It's true the exact words I used might have been a bit different, but not by much. This was about a month ago.

When you pay for professional advice, there may be a bias/ you may be guided towards financial/legal services that generate more fees for the professional, it’s just human nature. The LLM’s don’t have this bias and therefore, arguably, provide better, more objective responses. They are also available 247 and are free. However, you need to be intelligent to get the most out of them and spot the generally obvious mistakes. Of course, humans make mistakes too and they have mood swing, etc. so you can’t always rely on what they suggest. In the same away you shouldn’t rely on what a professional tells you, you need to integrate them and what they say.

It’s just a giant web-crawler. It’s doesn’t think for itself, it can’t create from new without prompts or references to other things. The internet has a lot of false information and AI can’t always tell which is true and reliable.

It hallucinates answers when it can’t find something, just to fill in a gap.

It’s also sexist and racist.

It’s shit at poetry! Which is satisfying for me as a poet!

It’s a tool, but it’s not always a reliable one. Take it with a pinch of salt and don’t ever rely on it for legal, technical or important things.

This is a shift to exercising them a different way though isn’t it? Look what we’ve achieved in the 100 years pos Industrial Revolution vs the 100
years before- let tech take care of the non value add and humans can do what they do best

Humans are officially fucked.

I have used it recently and it was helpful. But, I'm realising that at age 52 I'm so glad I grew up in the era of manually searching for answers and using my own brain to find things out. It's a worrying trend that today's generation won't be improving their own brain power and just relying on instant answers. Yes it's a possible time saver but our brains need more than just the answers. We need to be researching things ourselves. It's really important for our brains to keep those pathways open and functioning.

No offence to the poster that has used it to plot their route etc through Turkey but surely the joy of travelling is to do all that yourself and learn more about the areas you're visiting rather than relying on a robot. Planning your own route via maps or published articles of the area. Also make sure the places it's suggesting are safe and have amenities should you need something.

Our brains are absolutely marvellous but they do need exercising and using properly. I love technology but surely it has it's place.

My experience in working for DA (a side hustle by the way and on the non-coding side of things) made me ahead of the game somewhat in recognising the importance of the prompt. That's it.

And yes, of course we had to put in hours of work. We were building a bloody app, not a sandcastle. Every section needed thousands of lines of code, the manual input time was a LOT. And sometimes it broke. The error needed screenshotting and feeding back into GPT to fix it. Undo it. Redo it. Frustrating, so frustrating.

We're both reasonably intelligent but basically, we were copy and pasters. The AI models are phenominal.

Anyone that refuses to use AI on principle then I hope you're close to retirement because you're unlikely to be employable in ten years if you refuse to learn.

To sound outraged by how useless chat gpt is?
Just for fun this is what it told me :

If you hadn’t had a period for a few months and now you’re bleeding, there are a few possible reasons. I’ll walk you through the most common ones so you can see what might fit your situation.
1️⃣ Irregular cycles (very common)
It’s normal for periods to skip for:

• Stress
• Major weight change
• Illness
• Travel
• Big changes in routine
• Intense exercise

• Early miscarriage can look like a late, heavy period.
• Hormonal shifts in early pregnancy can cause bleeding.

• PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome)
• Thyroid problems
• High prolactin levels
• Coming off birth control
• Perimenopause (if you’re 40+)

• Stopped hormonal birth control
• Missed pills
• Switched methods

• Extremely heavy bleeding (soaking a pad every hour for 2+ hours)
• Large clots bigger than a golf ball
• Severe abdominal pain
• Fever
• Fainting or dizziness

• How old are you?
• Have you had sex in the last few months?
• Are you on birth control?
• How heavy is the bleeding right now?
• Are you having strong pain?

Well it did for me! Why would I make this up?

I think I am. Are you indicating if we put “I've got my period and haven't had one for a few months” it would suggest we went to hospital?

I think there is a half way house. We can use AI intelligently while recognising its limitations and not relying on it for stuff that it is no good at.

Basically, we can use AI to great effect as long as we continue to fully engage our brains when doing so.

It can also teach punctuation...

In a google search, just put

-ai

in the search bar alongside your search terms

Put -ai in your search, it omits the slop.

Like the lawyer who used AI slop in a ciurt case and it turned out to have fabricated the case law?

Yes, terminally stupid.

I'm with you there. Robot vacuum cleaner? I want a device that rolls it's sleeves up and scrubs the bathroom, dusts the cobwebs and Hoover's under the furniture.

Meanwhile I worry for my kids employment prospects long term.
I agree it can be a useful tool but it's a bit full of itself. I tried to get it to help me choose a car, given a list of criteria. Apparently I need a Toyota Corolla and nothing else will do.

It still requires the human being to have some critical thinking and I think people are too quick to believe implicitly in what it churns out like it's an all knowing oracle. It's been fed information and it gets it wrong. There are many stories even in this thread of incorrect information, and when it's been used in business it's caused big cock ups (ie making up figures when jsed as a stock and shares partner), however I'd say the cock up lies always with the human user taking it all as 100% bona-fide correct info.

A little like any tool that can be used in so many ways, I think the damage it does to human ingenuity and creativity outstrips its benefits when used ad hoc by people.

Well yes this is the danger isn't it. Someone putting that in and blindly following what it says.

I have to go back and forth with it sometimes because I'm not an idiot. It clearly needed more input. If you use it correctly and give it enough detail and context, it will help you more accurately.

Nothing beats common sense though. It's a tool like anything else.

you only think this because you haven't moved to Claude yet..

You've admitted this only worked for you because of your unusual experience in data annotation, and even then you and your husband still had to put in endless hours to make it work. These things aren't "amazing" unless and until they can be used by the general public reliably on a day to day basis irrespective of their individual past experience.

It is demonstrable nonsense to say that problems haven't happened since 2024 when people are telling you that they are dealing with the results of those problems on a daily basis now. If someone quotes the wrong legal principles and makes decisions on that basis, it can have disastrous consequences. There are no warnings on ChatGPT telling people that unless they take hours carefully honing their prompts the information it will produce may well be utter bollocks.

It frustrates me how many people don't care about the environment at all. As long as they can get an answer to a crossword puzzle or find the title of an old book in a matter of seconds, who cares about the state of the planet eh? Are we really this selfish and short sighted?

It is sometimes quite helpful in making my emails more concise and clear but nothing a good editor ( or in fact my DH who can draft things more clearly and just as quickly often as AI can) could do

Oh come on now.

You can throw 50,000 words into a good AI model and generate an excellent, succinct yet detailed summary, in literally five seconds. And then to be certain, you spend another ten seconds running both versions through an independent model to check for accuracy and 'de-AI' (as I call it) the output. Less than two minutes work overall.

No, your dh cannot do this as quickly as AI can. Nowhere near.

You think what I'm saying isn't true? I literally said I've got my period and haven't had one for a few months. One of the suggestions was that I should go to hospital. I told it that periods are totally normal so why would I do that? And it 'apologised'.

It is very bad

I always correct anything AI mis-states, because it then feeds back into the model as the right information. Chat GPT is a lot more accurate than Copilot which massively overclaims what it has created. So now I don't waste my time asking it to generate a PowerPoint template for me because I know a 5 year old could do better. Instead, I ask it to generate ideas for content and then I build it myself eg here is a file containing information about our project, please create a multiple choice quiz from the information. It did that really well, in about 1 minute, saving me time to build the file with the graphics (which it's useless at!)