Comment by ChatGTP | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChatGTP | Hacker News Reader

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If your role doesn't involve things ChatGPT would be useful for (eg you're a blue collar carpenter), it doesn't seem very useful, but neither do computers or the Internet, really.

Are you freaking serious? Carpenters use computers all the time. Ever heard of CAD? Calculators? Talking to customers via email? Ordering materials, researching, I'm shocked actually this is how naive people are ?

Crypto and web3 still has yet to have a clearly defined use case by anyone outside that industry.

What exactly is the use case for ChatGPT? I mean it can do a bunch of different things, but to what degree really depends on a great deal of factors, so I don't really get your point.

I actually think maybe this will be a problem for ChatGPT as a product in the future. It doesn't really do anything especially well and it's not clear when you should trust it to be correct. Maybe it will get 99.9% accurate soon, until then, will be interesting to see what actually happens when the novelty wears off.

I do remember walking home from my friends house after using a VR headset about 6 years ago and thinking, well that's it, I'm going into the matrix. It's been 6 years and I've never had the need to use one again. Maybe when designing our house I would've liked to have put one on for 10 minutes to walk through the plans.

ChatGPT I has had a similar effect for me, I used it, it was fun, didn't really have that much daily use for it, now it's just a tool, like many in my toolbag, I pull out of I can think of a good use for it, it sometimes yields good results, then I move on.

Edit: Please if you down vote, I'd like to hear why, don't hate on people for having a difference of opinion.

My girlfriend uses it to write her Instagram captions. My nephews use it to do homework.

Anywhere you need text written, it can generate something. Like you said, it might not be correct, but you can read what it tells you, you don't need to copy paste it verbatim.

Rather than asking it a question, feed it some bullet points and watch it convert it into paragraphs. Read the paragraphs and remove anything extra it added. It probably saved you 10-20 minutes and lots of frustration depending on how much you hate writing.

If you can't see the use for yourself, that's fine. But I really don't believe that you can't see how it would be useful to other people.

I find it hilarious to compare with crypto, where the majority of projects are purely about speculation.

> Anywhere you need text written, it can generate something. > Rather than asking it a question, feed it some bullet points and watch it convert it into paragraphs.

Part of me is hopeful that this will have the effect of people recognizing that maybe a) The text didn't need to be written after all, or b) The bullet point you started out with, were enough after all.

There is too much content being produced out of a notion of "something has to be here" for layout reasons, or because its simply what somebody expects.

Probably, ubiquitous use of generative text model will worsen the signal-to-noise ratio we see in media today.

Fair point, but - uno reverse card - maybe it will make tedious exposition so effortless and superfluous that nobody wants to do it anymore.

It might do to overlong text what border-radius did to rounded corners, and discourse will trend back to wit and concision over ceremony and formality. Businesses will value drafts - unpolished bullet points, like you describe - over finished pieces, because they’ll feed everything into standardized models fine-tuned by Brand Prompt Engineers to generate copy in the organization’s voice.

Yeah, I 100% agree. I'm hopeful that the end game will be that people will realize that having AI write garbage to have AI then summarize it is pointless.

But for now, it's not acceptable to communicate with half sentences and bullet points, so AI is useful.

Not just bullet points, but tone and professionalism too. ChatGPT will translate "fuck you, pay me" to "Please provide payment as soon as possible."

Now, in the future, after the Zoomers take over, it's entirely possible that "fuck you, pay me" will become acceptable language between professionals and seen as a reasonable way to request remittance. But until then, we'll still need to rewrite things for a different audience in a way to best accomplish your goal.

Funny though, I actually know people who are still using crypto for various things. So you're kind of snarky remark about how I might not find ChatGPT useful also applies to people who use crypto too.

Like I said I do use the GPT...when I see fit, mostly just when I want to see what it can do, or how it might do something different. Of course it can be useful in some ways. I still don't understand what the actual use of it is. ChatGPT comes with a disclaimer on the box which alerts you to the fact that it's basically an experiment and by using it, you're part of the experiment.

Should a my lawyer use it when giving me legal advice even though we don't know that it's giving correct information? Should I use it instead of a doctor? Should your doctor use it in your next visit?

I mean there is a chance that even OpenAI were never expecting it to blow up the way it did?

People have become a little too defensive over a product because it talks?

Society has already accepted a light form of this for quite sometime already now. Which is grammar check.

> It doesn't really do anything especially well and it's not clear when you should trust it to be correct.

You just described most humans. Imagine someone gave you access to a free digital workforce that you can only interact with through chat; it’s text in, text out, they only do what you say, and although you’re conversing with middle-tier experts they don’t have internet access or even a paper or pen handy so you have to take any facts or hard numbers they reference with a grain of salt. What is the use case for that?

What I’m getting at here is that ChatGPT doesn’t have a single clear use case. OpenAI is positioning themselves to be vendors of foundational AGI and it will be up to the market to create specialized fine-tuned models with higher levels of agency and built-in accountability.

You just described most humans.

I don't think so. Sorry if you work with people like that.

I am an independent contractor, but my comment was in no way intended as a slight to anybody I work with or have in the past. I have had the pleasure of working with some exceptional people.

We may however have different standards for what constitutes doing something “especially well”. I’m talking top percentile performance. That is by definition rare, but that seems to be the standard we’re holding the LLMs to.

Well you are wrong.

I didn't downvote (because I can't, since I'm the poster you're replying to), but I'm willing to point out what stuck out to me since you asked.

You wrote:

> I'm shocked actually this is how naive people are ?

There was no need for name calling, and this is mentioned in the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Moreover, let's assume that since I've made it to this site that I'm not a complete idiot (well, I mean, I can be, sometimes), and that it's entirely possible for me to make my claim, while also being well aware of the fact that carpenters use email and the Internet these days. I did some renovations to my home a few months back and, surprise surprise, we used email, along with texting for communicating. (We even used gasp pictures in these emails.) So maybe I'm trying to make a deeper point about the intersection of carpentry and computers that you maybe missed?

> now it's just a tool, like many in my toolbag

Right it's just a tool, one which doesn't get much daily use by you. Which is totally fine. But say your job was to hammer in nails all day long, would you ask about the use case for screwdrivers? At your hammering job there are no screws, so screwdrivers must be totally useless, right?

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