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.

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

When your body finally ovulates again, you get a period — sometimes it’s heavier or more painful than usual because the lining built up longer. 2️⃣ Pregnancy-related bleeding If you’ve had sex in the last few months, take a pregnancy test — even if you’re bleeding. Sometimes:

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

If the bleeding is very heavy (soaking a pad/tampon every hour), or you have severe one-sided pain, dizziness, or shoulder pain — seek urgent care to rule out ectopic pregnancy. 3️⃣ Hormone imbalance Missing periods for months can be caused by:

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

When hormones fluctuate, your period may suddenly return. 4️⃣ Birth control changes If you:

• Stopped hormonal birth control
• Missed pills
• Switched methods

Your cycle can disappear for a few months and then restart. 🚩 When to see a doctor urgently Get medical help if you have:

• 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

💬 I need a bit more info to guide you better:

• 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?

Tell me those and I’ll help you figure out what’s most likely going on ❤️

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.

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.

Humans are officially fucked.

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

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.

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.

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.

It guzzles resources, lies to you, takes your inputs and reuses them, and has just put thousands of people out of jobs where I live. Just use Google.

Well if it told you to go to hospital under some circumstance as one point in a wall of well reasoned common sense advice that’s not really the same as “I told it I had my period and it told me to go to hospital” is it?

And people say don't use ai it gets things wrong while confidently giving an incorrect answer 😂😂😂

@daisychain01 Seems a bit ironic to use it for help with environmental issues 😩😂

I also tried this but just a heads up - it isn’t always accurate as people have said. It told
me to take the kids to Istanbul Legoland which has literally been shut down for years and I had to correct it.

The problem with wider societal arguments against AI, whilst enormously important, is that very few people care enough to change their own behaviour in order to be part of a societal shift. Like climate change generally.

People seemingly don't give a shit about their own data, or the very real potential of mass surveillance, which astonishes me. The growing use of facial recognition tech, plus AI should give pause, but usually doesn't. How many use use a VPN, Tor browser, or temporary email addresses to sign up to things?

The only arguments that people seem to hear are 'it will give you wrong answers' (true, but not always and perhaps just infrequently enough that we start believing it) and 'it does you personally damage'. Which not everyone seems to get. There is already evidence that having Google available (phone in your pocket, or a computer) makes people overestimate what they actually know or remember.

A huge danger of LLMs (and this is already happening, due to the internet generally) is growth of radical cynicism. When you can't trust previously-trusted forms of news or data or information, and we are completely bathed in endless streams of information, it becomes more likely that you believe and trust nothing. That way lies conspiracy mindedness and political radicalisation. Its not a new trend, but AI risks speeding this exponentially, as it does everything else.

The argument of 'if you don't use it, you'll be left behind' is insane. It is literally designed for dummies. You don't have to get 'good' at using it. You have to get good at critically analysing the output - and the skills for this aren't learnt by using AI.

DH uses it to write code. He was computer programming in the 70s and started work writing programmes in binary. So he's very good at writing good prompts. Also the answer it gives in this kind of use can be verified and tested.

It's making people stupid and lazy, not to mention the environmental cost.

LLMs are constructed from the raw material of online human made content.
Because they are useful and popular LLMs are increasingly replacing human-made content.
You can see where this is going ... the LLMs are eating themselves and will disappear up their own arseholes.

I always eye roll when people are so ignorant towards the environmental impact. Instead of jumping on the trend like minions using valuable resources to pick your wallpaper.
I have the very basic in education skills yet it floors me that apparently intelligent educated people are so greedy and stupid.
The technology companies will be happily taking the profits from the minions.

Snap.

It’s tiring advising on 25 page grievances which sound impressive but say absolutely nothing of any substance, and contain assertions that have no legal basis whatsoever.

How is in the best interests of anyone (employee included) to have to wade through reems of nonsense to try to work out what the actual complaint is.

I’ve heard of situations where employees get into grievance hearings, are asked about points in their letter, and know absolutely nothing about them.

Hm, this makes me wonder, what is the effect when AI admits to a mistake? Does that affect what answers it gives later to simlar questions, to you or to others? Does that decrease its confidence in its response? Is it using reinforcement learning? So many questions....

Huge fan of Chatgbt use it for all sorts of things, find it so helpful.

I think it might have had some effect, as I asked it just now and it it's given me almost exact quotes but has chopped them up a little bit. When challenged it said it assumed I was looking for usable excerpts for discussion so it gave shortened quotations. Said it should have defaulted to verbatim quotations. So it assumes things, unless you repeatedly emphasise what you need.

I’ve heard of situations where employees get into grievance hearings, are asked about points in their letter, and know absolutely nothing about them

This is what I don't understand. For the people who think that ChatGPT is a good idea for this sort of thing, wouldn't they at least sense check what it had written and whether it was a reasonable representation of what they wanted to say?

See also academic work. No-one is fooled that you used AI, it's blindly obvious to an expert when the content is nonsense so wouldn't you at least only submit what you actually understood?

No it’s shite and will result in humans being a species incapable of independent thought.

You must have some coding skills though? To be able to check that the code it wrote for you was correct? Did it also act as a tester to test that the app works as intended?