To think ChatGPT is the best thing ever?

[ColliLass]

So far it has:

sorted a problem with my emails that I would never EVER have been able to work out
Found a book I haven’t been able to remember for years
diagnosed a problem on the car and accurately estimated the probable cost
found recipes

and many many more little helpful day to day offerings when i can’t remember things or I wonder things.

I loathe the AI videos and pictures that seem to be everywhere but ChatGPT is amazing.

It’s a bit like sat navs. It’s guidance but if it tells you to drive into a canal, use your own brain.

i use it a lot to chat through business ideas. I run my own business and don’t have anyone to bounce ideas with.

My lads say AI will eat their jobs in the next five years , if not sooner. They work mainly in film and video. On a whim one of them asked Chatgpt how long it would take for AI to do most jobs. The answer was less than twenty years. AI also predicted social and political chaos would cause governments to introduce Universal Basic Income.
Make of it what you will.

You have to use it as a guide and still do your research. Don’t trust it blindly.

We (will) find it has advantages and disadvantages same as the internet generally.

My beef with modern tech is that it still can't do basic chores well. That's what I want tech to handle, not the fun stuff like writing, which I enjoy.

I asked it about something in the TV show Small Prophets, and it pretended to know the show. When I challenged it by saying something like, Are you really aware of this show? it admitted it wasn’t. It said something about wanting to make me
feel better 🤦‍♀️

it’s good for houseplant care - I upload a pic and say What’s this and how to I care for it, and get specific recommendations for my own individual plant, that I wouldn’t get from google. But you still need some awareness. For example, I’ve known it to get the plant species wrong - major error I would say! So I use it in combination with a bit of my own knowledge.

You do have to be careful. I give it little tests with something quite specific I actually know the answers to, and it often gets the detail wrong while swearing blind it is right, unless you directly challenge it with your information, then it will correct itself.

The River Shannon is very important for the eco system in Ireland. The government plan to divert some of it to Dublin , which is growing fast. But I've read that up to 50% of that water will be for data centres. What could possibly go wrong eh.

It's a useful guide but needs checking. It told me a village was east of a town, not west ( this was on a coastline that ran east to west so no reason to be confused). When I realised it took me 2 goes to convince it i was right.

The poster who said it takes info and this earnings from bloggers etc was correct, it is leaching off others.

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.

Oh I know it isn’t infallible. I had to tell it off quite firmly because it kept guessing at a book plot. I told it it was wrong, it apologised, guessed again, apologised again, guessed again and in the end I told it in no uncertain terms to STOP guessing and if it wasn’t sure of something to just say so.

But I tell you what it isn’t. It isn’t ever rude. Unlike those sniffy, nasty posters who are quite happy to call people thick when they know NOTHING about the poster they’re insulting.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 can't love this post enough.

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