Of course, we won’t stop here, but as one of the seeds from which AGI will spring, I truly believe it will be seen as a historical innovation in the same league as early search engines, crypto (yes, unironically), or even the internet itself.
From what I've seen, ChatGPT is changing the world... it's absolute goldmine for the spammers, the content mills, the bullshitter industries. We've already seen at least one magazine cease unsolicited submissions because ChatGPT overwhelmed their editors. We've had a contributor on an open-source project get incredibly belligerent when told not to use ChatGPT to respond to bugs (because its advice wasn't helpful).
Pointing to two very real anecdotes as evidence of systemic uselessness of a technology is not super convincing. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of saying cars will never amount to anything because Ms. Agnes Thompson was run over by one in Cleveland, or that the internet is pointless because someone sent a hoax UUCP message.
If it was frozen in current state, however, it would still be a springboard for innovation because businesses will find new ways to integrate it with their products and compose its functionality with other code and itself. It’s impossible to imagine the kinds of influence these products will have because progress will be following the exponential part of an S curve for some time to come.
Finally, even if in this artificially constrained world of our imagination we don’t allow for third party products that use it as a platform, it will completely upend the way business is done, on a 10 year timescale, just as search engines have before it.
2. Much, much easier for non-native speakers to ensure writing is grammatically and tonally correct.
3. Huge reduction in make-work exercises where the idea is to just soak up an hour of someone’s time to validate they have some understanding of a topic.