This was a fascinating and extremely useful article. I am on Team ChatGPT Is a Good Thing, Actually, but the only examples of its benefits come from fields I already know--writing and education. (Derek Thompson at the Atlantic has some good articles on this aspect of the bot.) But you are showing us that there is a huge potential field most of us aren’t even aware of, where the bot will save time and money, all while freeing humans to perform the kind of work we do best. I really enjoyed this article (and read most of it aloud to my data-scientist-mathematician husband, who enjoyed it too)!
Oh, there is a huge amount of boilerplate lawyers, technical writers, and others have to churn out, and I could imagine that the bot would be helpful in putting together a first draft. In education, teachers could flip the classroom, have students draft paragraphs or essays offline and then compare what they wrote to what the bot came up with. It might be useful for learning find points of grammar and punctuation, for example. I’m just spitballing, but it really does seem like even the creative fields have their doldrums, and the bot could take over those tasks
I remember spending (in retrospect, too much) time trying to get the words to flow together in an essay. Like I would have a streak of too many long or short sentences in a row. On Substack, I basically live with there being a handful of awkward points in my articles, but I didn't want that in school.
With ChatGPT, I probably would have said "hey can you make this paragraph flow more smoothly" and saved a lot of time (assuming it's good at that, haven't tried).
This is exactly how one my students uses it for writing scientific papers. It's even more useful for him because he's a non-native speaker. I find what it produces is usually okay, not great, but at least something I can work with.
Yup, not every technology needs to bring things to perfection. I recently bought an air fryer, and it's helped me prepare decent food in an easy manner. That's super helpful. It's true that air fryer's don't replace Michelin star chefs, but they don't need to
I find it incredibly useful. The caveat is just understanding what it is and what it's good at. If I can take your analogy further, when I use my moka pot I don't put milk in it. It can't make me a cappuccino. It just facilitates part of the process. That doesn't mean it sucks.
Glad to see someone standing up for wht I find to be one of my favorite tools I use.
Another very interesting piece. I am blown away by how well it writes code. There's sometimes something *off* about the text it produces for human consumption. But it can still work because its meaning is proximal. It surprises me that the code it makes is so functional! Can definitely see a ton of B2B use cases for this!
Think of all the different meanings a simple English word can have. Take the word "deal".
It can mean anything from "we have reached agreement!" to "these are the terms of our agreement!" to "lay out the cards" "this is the lay of the land" to "you have no choice but to learn to live with this" and several other meanings, more, once you throw in prepositions and the like.
I am yet to see AI that can reliably distinguish between these subtleties, even though chatBot has a certain cold reading advantage, in that it only reacts to prompts given and can take clues from those prompts. But a native speaker can reliably and effortlessly navigate this and hundreds more such words, even with typos, mangled syntax and all.
Great point about the challenges of understanding context with natural language. (And add in homonyms and idioms and well, everything else that makes it hard for AI to suss out meaning.)
I've only played casually with ChatGPT, always in English. Yet, that's one thing that startled and impressed me: how often, and how well, it understood the context of the questions being asked or the requests being made. Concurring with Gina SK Chua here ...
I really enjoyed this -- it’s informative and it’s got a lot of good one-liners too! :)
Kindle Unlimited ... coffee/bleach/hammer... hockey/Chaucer! Etc.
Loved it!
That French press-bleach bit made me literally lol!
This was a fascinating and extremely useful article. I am on Team ChatGPT Is a Good Thing, Actually, but the only examples of its benefits come from fields I already know--writing and education. (Derek Thompson at the Atlantic has some good articles on this aspect of the bot.) But you are showing us that there is a huge potential field most of us aren’t even aware of, where the bot will save time and money, all while freeing humans to perform the kind of work we do best. I really enjoyed this article (and read most of it aloud to my data-scientist-mathematician husband, who enjoyed it too)!
What uses do you see wrt to education and writing?
Oh, there is a huge amount of boilerplate lawyers, technical writers, and others have to churn out, and I could imagine that the bot would be helpful in putting together a first draft. In education, teachers could flip the classroom, have students draft paragraphs or essays offline and then compare what they wrote to what the bot came up with. It might be useful for learning find points of grammar and punctuation, for example. I’m just spitballing, but it really does seem like even the creative fields have their doldrums, and the bot could take over those tasks
I remember spending (in retrospect, too much) time trying to get the words to flow together in an essay. Like I would have a streak of too many long or short sentences in a row. On Substack, I basically live with there being a handful of awkward points in my articles, but I didn't want that in school.
With ChatGPT, I probably would have said "hey can you make this paragraph flow more smoothly" and saved a lot of time (assuming it's good at that, haven't tried).
This is exactly how one my students uses it for writing scientific papers. It's even more useful for him because he's a non-native speaker. I find what it produces is usually okay, not great, but at least something I can work with.
Yup, not every technology needs to bring things to perfection. I recently bought an air fryer, and it's helped me prepare decent food in an easy manner. That's super helpful. It's true that air fryer's don't replace Michelin star chefs, but they don't need to
I think that is exactly what it’s good at. The brilliantly clear explanations are still your purview though!
I find it incredibly useful. The caveat is just understanding what it is and what it's good at. If I can take your analogy further, when I use my moka pot I don't put milk in it. It can't make me a cappuccino. It just facilitates part of the process. That doesn't mean it sucks.
Glad to see someone standing up for wht I find to be one of my favorite tools I use.
Another very interesting piece. I am blown away by how well it writes code. There's sometimes something *off* about the text it produces for human consumption. But it can still work because its meaning is proximal. It surprises me that the code it makes is so functional! Can definitely see a ton of B2B use cases for this!
Think of all the different meanings a simple English word can have. Take the word "deal".
It can mean anything from "we have reached agreement!" to "these are the terms of our agreement!" to "lay out the cards" "this is the lay of the land" to "you have no choice but to learn to live with this" and several other meanings, more, once you throw in prepositions and the like.
I am yet to see AI that can reliably distinguish between these subtleties, even though chatBot has a certain cold reading advantage, in that it only reacts to prompts given and can take clues from those prompts. But a native speaker can reliably and effortlessly navigate this and hundreds more such words, even with typos, mangled syntax and all.
Great point about the challenges of understanding context with natural language. (And add in homonyms and idioms and well, everything else that makes it hard for AI to suss out meaning.)
I've only played casually with ChatGPT, always in English. Yet, that's one thing that startled and impressed me: how often, and how well, it understood the context of the questions being asked or the requests being made. Concurring with Gina SK Chua here ...
https://twitter.com/GinaSKChua/status/1607933226605215745
"Some random thoughts about where the real value of ChatGPT lies for journalism: In understanding the questions, not in writing the answers."
You had me at "it will write your regex for you" <swoons>
I can never figure that crap out.