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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

I really haven't found ChatGTP to be very good. Ask it the lyrics to a song and it'll come up with some of the lyrics but not all of the lyrics. Like this is what I got for "In Bloom" by Nirvana:

Verse 1: Sell the kids for food Weather changes moods Spring is here again Reproductive glands Verse 2: A country battle song Multiply, exciting people Come on, join the party Come on, everybody Chorus: In bloom In bloom In bloom In bloom Verse 3: Subhumanity is fun You have one, you have none A soap impression of his wife Which he ate and donated to the National Trust Verse 4: I'm not like them But I can pretend The sun is gone But I have a light Chorus: In bloom In bloom In bloom In bloom

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It's not a search engine. Asking it for direct lookup of things plays to its weaknesses, not to its strengths.

Similarly, don't judge it based on its ability to solve math problems.

When you use it for the many tasks it IS suitable for it's really, really impressive.

There's a vast difference between confidently stating the answer and "something like this: ..." When you don't know what it's talking about, it seems very impressive, when you do, it looks very foolish.

Try "Write me a Nirvana song about angry weasels invading the French alps" if you want to see it doing something impressive.

I don’t know, people have asked to compose a Shakespearean work and what it produces is puffery that doesn’t sound like Shakespeare.

"Nay, good sir, do not dismiss the AI's composition as mere puffery. 'Tis true, the machine doth not possess the soul of the Bard, yet it doth strive to emulate his style and grace. And who are we, mere mortals, to deem what does or does not sound like Shakespeare? Let us not forget, he too was but a man, with faults and flaws. Let us instead embrace the evolution of language and the advancements of technology, for they may lead us to new heights of literary splendor."

it doth make for a great rap lyrics: https://sharegpt.com/c/qHvIecb full track remix > https://soundcloud.com/juicycanvas/rap-shakespeare-techbounc...

thank you for showing me the light. I think we are onto something sublime: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=34465197

example of tasks its suitable for?

It produces text that at a glance or with loosely defined parameters seems like it could have plausibly been written by a human.

I think something like automatically generating dialog for characters inside of video games in a way that's more dynamic and scalable than the clearly hardcoded dialog we have today.

People have mentioned using it to cheat on high school level English papers and blackhat SEO spam / fake social media accounts.

Summarization.

Roleplay exercises - practice difficult management conversations with an employee, for example.

Brainstorming ideas.

Explaining well known concepts - especially if you ask it to invent analogies or mnemonics.

Helping come up with names for things.

Puns, surprisingly.

Finding and fixing bugs in code.

Generating test data, and examples generally.

Telling stories.

Showing examples of formal writing that you haven't encountered before - I've used it to help me see what things like grant applications and sales manuals look like.

Games - so many fun games you can play with it.

Those are all examples of things I've used it for just in the past week.

Temporality trips it up quite easily. Some simple math makes it easier for us to see the weakness, which makes me question how strong it really is in other domains.

Question: Yesterday evening a tree had 5 apples, a bird ate an apple from the tree at midday yesterday. No other apples were eaten from the tree. How many apples were on the tree yesterday morning?

Response: There were 5 apples on the tree yesterday evening. If a bird ate one apple from the tree at midday yesterday, then there were 5-1=4 apples on the tree yesterday morning.

> It's not a search engine.

I'm curious how this is going to play out over time. They way I interact with ChatGPT is very very different from how I interact with Google. When I try to use them the same way one of them fails in frustrating ways.

> When you use it for the many tasks it IS suitable for it's really, really impressive.

I completely agree with this. For me I've found ChatGPT to be very useful in helping to generate ideas, learn about things, or explore topics that I don't fully understand. Basically if I'm curious about something, then ChatGPT is really useful. The more I use it, the more I find that I'm poking at responses with follow up questions. It feels much more like a conversation and my interactions/approach is changing as a result. I'm now finding my approach with ChatGPT to start broad ("What's the difference between ____ and ____?"), followed by more questions to dive deeper ("Can you tell me more about ____ and provide some examples?"). It does have it's limits, but I find the way of interacting and teasing out the details that I'm after to be far more interesting and useful. And the more I use ChatGPT, the less I want to use Google. At this point, Google is mostly just simple searches only like "which service is streaming ____?" or "restaurants in my area".

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