To think ChatGPT is the best thing ever?

I find it baffling that we have parents going "kids shouldn't have phones or social media, it's hurting them" yet at the same time are using a tool that's incorrect, scraping your data, stealing content, damaging the environment, is deliberately providing misinformation, will create unemployment, causes harm to women and children (grok's ai picture generator for example) and generally making people stupider. But yeah, go on ask chatgpt how to make a tomato sauce for pasta.

It showed me what I would look like with a different hairstyle which was great as I didn't like it so I won't get it done. Way better than when I've gone to the hairdresser and done something I regret!

I’ve used it daily for the last year for work, business, personal stuff. Holidays, trips sorting out questions. I run my email though it just to spell check and refine, and it’s saved me so much time.

Co-pilot is being pushed at work. I tried it on a simple spreadsheet - 5 columns, 15 years' worth of monthly prices. Started with general questions on trends and the specifics. It was wrong frequently and confidently. Couldn't even say which month had highest price let alone percentage change. "Hallucination" my arse.

Also tried it on a personal statement for a job application. This I thought it might do better as was only asking it to condense longer application into 500 words with reference to the person spec. It totally made up my achievements. Said I had extensive experience in the organisation's bespoke software when I couldn't possibly having not worked for them.

It was quite funny when I asked it to generate something for a leaving card for a colleague that I wasn't sad to see go, in the style of a 30 something northerner. Of course I didn't use it.

I think calling it artificialintelligence is misleading. It's not intelligent. It's a language tool based on data scalping.
It predicts the most likely next word, or sentence. Fine for some things but not all by a long measure. Plus as people have said, it doesn't understand usually when it's wrong or out of context.
We're seeing more written submissions where I work that have been written with this tool and they're invariably wrong. Really not good for writing legal stuff with - sounds plausible, but truly, it's slop.
They're energy hungry data centres and I think we will see widespread environmental damage coming out of this.

This. It’s horrifically bad for the environment. It just encourages people to be lazy and become massively more illiterate and deskilled.

I trust that they get billed for it

It hallucinates a lot. And it told me I should go to the hospital because I got my period?!

Incredible auto correct I’m going to start calling it this !

I can't love this post enough.

It’s like any tool. Great at some things. Not at others.

we have to learn to use it properly. It’s fabulous at putting info into spreadsheets. Re writing letters in the right tone and organising the information that you have given it. Saves me so so much time at work.

but I would never rely on information it gives to me.

its essentially a free PA. You still have to be the brains

I only find it useful for visualisation. I don't have the ability to picture things in my head (I see colours but not images) so have used it to plan outfits and see how colour schemes/redecorating rooms will look.

I was just thinking this. Someone had posted about preparing their child for GCSEs in year 9 and there were quite a lot of dismissive and patronising responses. Chat gpt would’ve actually just answered her without judgement, it’s a better alternative to most of the advice seeking posts here

Mumsnet could've helped with the things you've listed in your OP.

If you're using it to help you draft stuff based on your own existing knowledge, careful research or legal advice, then fair enough. If you're relying on it to interpret the law for you, then that is a very bad idea indeed. It isn't reliable.

Correct me if I’m wrong but every time I google anything now, an ai response comes up first, very similar to chat gpt. So even if I didn’t want to use AI for environmental reasons, I’m doing so unwittingly making the avoidance of chat gpt irrelevant. Even companies I’m calling have AI receptionists. How can you be AI free when it’s everywhere.

I work in HR and we're seeing an increase in grievances clearly written by ChatGPT. You can so easily tell by it's sentence structure and then when you sit down with the employee to discuss they struggle to articulate what the issues are. Half of them don't even read what GPT gives them, the amount of times i've said "So you've mentioned in your grievance xyz issue, please could you elaborate" only to be met with a blank, confused expression.
Plus it always tells people they should claim constructive or unfair dismissal...the stats for those types of claims being successful is around 5%.

Then you have the fact that it's so bad for the environment, people who live near the data centres report having no running water for example.
My husband was telling me recently that the price of computer parts have gone through the roof, you can't get decent graphics cards anymore without paying triple the cost.

It's destroying the planet, is frequently wrong (though it is improving), and is taking away employment opportunities.

It's crazy to me as it was drilled into me from a young age "Don't trust Wikipedia, it can be edited by anyone" and we've now progressed to blindly trusting that a robot is 100% accurate all the time.

It can't do any form of maths at all.

I generally find it quite useful but I asked it for budgeting help recently and it kept forgetting to include certain outgoings and telling me I had more money available than I do!

No.

LLMs are a disaster. I despair of this 'ooh look! Shiny new toy!' mentality.

(1) They are a privacy nightmare. They enable surveillance by corporate and state actors, though there are ways you can minimise this. People in thrall to tech, with little understanding rarely do this though.
(2) they make you stupid and even more dependent on pre-chewed information
(3) they are frequently wrong and because of (2) we will rapidly have no ability to realise this. There is a high risk that they start to eat themselves (and destroy the internet) - and will we even know?
(4) what they supply to you is entirely at the mercy of their founders/leaders thanks to algorithm tweaks or training data selection. And this isn't obvious. Think Cambridge Analytica but on a global scale and subtler
(5) they are a planetary disaster

Say no and Retain Your Brain.

It's absolutely terrible for the environment, often wrong and destroying jobs but hey! It's doing tasks you could do yourself a little quicker. Honestly, I despair.

@ColliLass Don't you worry about the environmental impact though? That's what puts me off using it for small, everyday problems.

Not another of these threads. We get it, tech guys, you've invested a lot in expensive data centres and don't want anything messing up your big profits. In reality plenty of people find there are limitations and problems with it as the posts here show.

Again this is a great example of a use that won't be around for long under the current model where it just scrapes (steals) the info. This information doesn't just materialise - its researched and published by people. Travel blogs and the travel sections of magazines will soon be unable to exist due to them being unable to get the direct traffic and get revenue.

And I also find that if the conversation becomes quite in-depth, you have to keep bringing it back to the original question, because it can go quite off track.