this AI thing

That’s how I use Chat GPT. Not for coding, but for help on how to get Excel to do things. I guess some of what I want to do are fairly esoteric, so just searching for help doesn’t really turn up anything useful. If I explain to GPT what I’ll trying to do, it’ll give me avenues to explore.

Yeah, that's about it. I've trown buggy code at it, tell it to check it, says it'll work just fine... scripts as well. You really can't trust anything that that thing outputs and it's more than 1 or 2 lines long (hello world examples excluded, they work just fine in most cases).

I've found it's best use to me as a glorified auto-complete. It knows pretty well what I want to type before I get a chance to type it. Yes, I don't trust stuff it comes up with on its own though, then I need to Google it

Yeah, I find it works really well for brainstorming and “rubber-ducking” when I’m thinking about approaches to something. Things I’d normally do in a conversation with a coworker when I really am looking more for a listener than for actual feedback.

I can also usually get useful code out of it that would otherwise be tedious or fiddly to write myself. Things like “take this big enum and write a function that converts the members to human-friendly strings.”

100% this yeah.

All the hype are grifters and Google trying to convince people this isn’t just a search engine assistant.

I think of it as a step between a Google search and bothering actual people by asking for help.

Tell ChatGPT you want to do the project as an exercise and that it should not write any pseudocode. It will then give you a high-level breakdown which is usually a decent guide line.

No, seriously: all they are good for is making things sound fancy.

This is the danger though.

If "boomers" are making the mistake of thinking that AI is capable of great things, "zoomers" are making the mistake of thinking society is built on anything more than some very simple beliefs in a lot of stupid people, and all it takes to make society collapse is to convince a few of these stupid people that their ideas are any good.

A little reductive.

We use CoPilot at work and whilst it isn’t doing my job for me, it’s saving me a lot of time. Think of it like Intellisense, but better.

If my senior engineer, who I seem like a toddler when compared to can find it useful and foot the bill for it, then it certainly has value.

all they are good for is making things sound fancy.

Ehh, I use NovelAI, and it kind of turns writing into an interactive CYOA game. If I get stuck in a scene and I dunno what to put next, I'll have a character say or do something, and let the AI go "yeah! And---" like a good improv partner in my voice.

But it's not a "discussion" or instruct model, so it's slightly less stupid. Except when it gets written facts wrong that are active in the lorebook and memory, and it ignores them.

This is what AI actually is. Not the super-intelligent "AI" that you see in movies, those are fiction.

The NPC you see in video games with a few branches of if-else statements? Yeah that's AI too.

Exactly. It's a language learning and text output machine. It doesn't know anything, its only ability is to output realistic sounding sentences based on input, and will happily and confidently spout misinformation as if it is fact because it can't know what is or isn't correct.

Mass effects lore differences between virtual intelligence and artificial intelligence, the first one is programmed to do shit and say things nicely, the second one understands enough to be a menace to civilization... always wondered if this distinction was actually accepted outside the game.

*Terms could be mixed up cause I played in German (VI and KI)

There are many definitions of AI (eg. there is some mathematical model used), but machine learning (which is used in the large language models) is considered a part of the scientific field called AI. If someone says that something is AI, it usually means that some technique from the field AI has been applied there. Even though the term AI doesn't have much to do with the term intelligence as most of the people perceive it, I think the usage here is correct. (And yes, the whole scientific field should have been called differently.)

It's artificial.

I will continue calling it "shit AI".

That's why we preface it with Artificial.

Lol, the AI effect in practice - the minute a computer can do it, it's no longer intelligence.

A year ago if you had told me you had a computer program that could write greentexts compellingly, I would have told you that required "true" AI. But now, eh.

In any case, LLMs are clearly short of the "SuPeR BeInG" that the term "AI" seems to make some people think of and that you get all these Boomer stories about, and what we've got now definitely isn't that.

In fact it's probably it's probably due to its low competence that will destroy humanity.

I hate it when robots replace me at being stupid

Exactly. AI is a tool, not a direct replacement for humans

TL;DR: LLMs are like the perfect politician when it comes to output language that makes them "sound" knowledgeable without being so.

The problem is that it can be stupid whilst sounding smart.

When we have little or no expertise on a subject matter, we humans use lots of language cues to try and determine the trustworthiness of a source when they tell us something in an area we do not know enough to judge: basically because we don't know enough about the actual subject being discussed, we try and figure out from the way others present things in general, if the person on the other side knows what they're talking about.

When one goes to live in a different country it often becomes noticeable that we ourselves are doing it because the language and cultural cues for a knowledgeable person from a certain area, are often different in different cultural environments - IMHO, our guesswork "trick" was just reading the manners commonly associated with certain educational tracks or professional occupations and some sometimes and in some domains those change from country to country.

We also use more generic kinds of cues to determine trustworthiness on that subject, such as how assured and confident somebody sounds when talking about something.

Anyways, this kind of things is often abused by politicians to project an image of being knowledgeable about something when they're not, so as to get people to trust them and believe they're well informed decision makers.

As it so happens, LLMs, being at their core complex language imitation systems, are often better than politicians at outputting just the right language to get us to misevaluate their output as from a knowledgeable source, which is how so many people think they're General Artificial Intelligence (those people confuse what their own internal shortcuts to evaluate know-how of the source of a piece of text tells them with a proper measurement of cognitive intelligence).

Every time they try and lock it down more, the quality gets noticeably less reliable

I've noticed that too. I recall seeing an article of it detailing how to create a nuclear reactor David Hahn style. I don't doubt that they're making it dumber to get people to buy premium now.

i mean they are right, it's just.. they're the ones responsible for ruining it..

around the 60's is when most of the world nuked its public transport infrastructure and bulldozed an absurd amount of area to build massive roads, and older cars were actually reasonably repairable and didn't have computers and antennas to send data about you to their parent company..

but they merrily switched to cars so they could enjoy the freedom of being stuck in traffic and having to ferry kids around everywhere, and merrily kept buying new cars that were progressively less repairable and ever increasing in size, until we're at the point where parents are backing over their own children because their cars are so grossly oversized that they can't see shit without cameras.

Remember: LLMs don't give you answers. They generate text that looks like answers. Whether that text actually contains a valid answer is not the LLM's problem.