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.

I liken it to a calculator, do they make people lazy for not working out the maths themselves, no, they make them more efficient.

Whenever I've tried it it gets things wrong. I assume this is because its fed by the most popular search results rather than having any discretion.
I find just googling gives faster and better results because I can weed out the crap myself, which ChatGBT cannot do.

It is to me. But I guess I do focus on the bits it tells me that seems wrong or I disagree with.
And it pissed me off because it came up and annoyed me. So I remembered it.

If you ask it not to make things up in settings, then also ask it to provide the link to the info it gives you or ringfence where it should look (I.e. only in the documents you have uploaded and to tell you where in those documents it’s found it), you can check the output quite easily. I’ve got the paid version, maybe that’s different.

You do realise that Google is powered by AI. It summarises what it finds into natural language outputs rather than what it used to do, just signpost to relevant websites. The narrative is Google Gemini, its AI model, summarising what it has found, trawling the internet for relevant info to satisfy the search

there is nowhere nowadays that isn't integrated with AI in one form or another.

I think AI makes me cleverer. It gives me the confidence to give almost anything a try. As I mentioned in an earlier post I do a lot of DIY property maintenance and car repairs etc and AI is very helpful. It’s so fast and, generally, accurate. I take a photo of something and then it tells me how to do something. I often then explore the issue further. AI presents the information so clearly and quickly. It helps me learn. I’m quite a techy person and perfectly capable of googling things but AI is so much better.
Im not stupid and I’m not going to become stupid by using AI. I know to double check things and I know the limitations of AI.
The pp who mentioned AI told her to go to A&E because she missed some periods presumably missed the clear AI medical disclaimer which reads something like “I am an AI, not a doctor. Do not use this information to make medical decisions” It’s the same as googling some thing or asking on Mumsnet, you have to blindly follow a suggestion like that while, presumably, ignoring the rest of the advice ai would have given alongside.

Also, do people who claim they will never use AI actually understand how daft that sounds.

It hallucinates and it keeps your data and uses it for training the LLM. Environmentally it’s not great either.

I think there already are. The SEO industry has rapidly shifted to optimising for AI rather than google rankings.

The water needed to cool AI servers is likely to contribute to water shortages across the planet in future. According to Google, 500 milliliters (about 16 oz) of water are used for every 5–50 ChatGPT prompts

@Daisychain01 yes, I do realise that. What I was saying is that I prefer to see the full results of a search (often over multiple pages) rather than rely on an AI summary of the most popular results, many of which are often tripe.
I hope you didn't mean to sound quite as patronising as you did.

It takes 10,000 litres of water to make a pair of jeans and fast fashion has killed many lands. It’s the 2026 version. We couldn’t beat fast fashion but has likely passed its peak

It’s ok, I wouldn’t go as far as saying amazing yet. It’s way too much of a sycophant and it can’t count to 200 which is weird. I saw a YouTuber trying it so did it myself and it just can’t do it. So yeah, it’s not ‘amazing’ but it’s useful at times.

You are going to be left in the dark ages. It’s everywhere. You may not like it, but if you don’t start embracing it, you will be considered a dinosaur.

Yawn.

Ok fair enough. You are already a dinosaur.

If you ask it not to make things up in settings,

It astonishes that this would even be necessary. Surely (unless you specify that you're looking for a work of fiction) it shouldn't be making things up in its answers.

I prefer CoPilot to be honest. Although CoPilot has too many morals and won’t do some of the things I ask it to for work but ChatGPT will happily do them so I use it then. 😆

im just about to start an apprenticeship in AI. Looking forward to it.

People who learn things for themselves and don't outsource everything on life to their phone will never be in the dark ages.

I intend to keep all of my faculties into old age (a long way away). Use them or lose them, if you're outsourcing your thinking to AI then you'll end up unable to come up with an original thought.

Do you mean that Google AI blah which you have to trawl halfway down the page to ignore, it is very often wrong. I always have to remember now to avoid it.

It's easy to avoid. Forever, the first results on Google have been the ones that pay to be there and are rarely the ones you want because they'll be crap in some form. So it's instinctive the scroll past until you see the proper website or other reliable source.

Nope. None...I mean literally zero. We copied and pasted huge reams of code hundreds of times, when and where told to, and when the page wouldn't save and threw up an error we screenshot it and told Chat GPT to fix it.

I used it to calculate the interest rate on something (as I couldn't be bothered to do it). It was good for that, but I work in the creative industry and it's terrible at coming up with writing that works in the correct context. It doesn't 'think', understand context or have critical thinking, so it just tells you what you want to hear. It also uses up a huge amount of electricity and water

So you have no idea if the code works properly and traps errors, what it does with user data or if it is riddled with trojans, viruses and ransomware. What is your plan when all the devices with it on freeze and all users are locked out, with their bank accounts being emptied.

It's not glorified Google. The way it works is quite different and that difference is key. unlike Google it's not a keyword search at all. In fact it's not a search at all. It generates text by always trying to predict the next word but this ability is based on text it has been trained on which is why people are confused about its difference to search engines. When you send a query to chat gpt it doesn't just bring up text it finds on some website but it generates text. This means it is really good at text generation obviously but not so great at search, which might be why a simple Google search is more useful when you just want to look for existing text.

And yeah data centres used to train language models are terrible for the environment.

I'm still amazed at how well it works.