Technology

It can speed up the process, but it’s not like it would replace a programmer. It still requires someone with enough knowledge to check it’s output and correct it’s mistakes or call it’s bullshit.

I used to do some coding in high school and early college. I’ve since moved on to other things but it’s fun to have ChatGPT write me a little python script or something and debug my way through it.

Higher ed, primary ed, and homework were all subcategories ChatGPT classified sessions into, and together, these make up ~10% of all use cases. That’s not enough to account for the ~29% decline in traffic from April/May to July, and thus, I think we can put a nail in the coffin of Theory B.

It's addressed in the article. First, use started to decline in April, before school was out. Second, only 23 percent of prompts were related to education, which includes both homework type prompts, and personal/professional knowledge seeking. Only about 10 percent was strictly homework. So school work isn't a huge slice of ChatGPTs use.

Combine that with schools cracking down on kids using ChatGPT (in classroom assignments and tests, etc), and I don't think your going to see a major bounce back in traffic when school starts. Maybe a little.

I'm starting to think generative AI might be a bit of a fad. Personally I was very excited about it and used ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard all the time. But over time I realized they just weren't very good, inaccurate answers, bland writing, just not much help to me, a non programmer. I still use them, but now it's maybe once a day or less, not all day like I used to. Generative AI seems more like a tool that is helpful in some limited cases, not the major transformation it felt like early in the year. Who knows, maybe they'll get better and more useful.

Also, not super related, but I saw a static the other day that only about a third of the US has even tried ChatGPT. It feels like a huge thing to us tech nerdy people, but your average person hasn't bothered to even try it out.

It's really limited to basic, junior level programming assistance, and even then it's not 100% reliable. Any time I've tried asking it something more advanced it takes a lot of coaxing to get it to output reasonable code. But it's helpful for boilerplating basic code sometimes.

Have you tried 3.5 or 4?

I haven't had many issues in 4. Occasionally it does what you're saying and I just say "bro, that doesn't exist" and it's like "oh, my bad, here you go." And gives me something that works.

Sometimes I use it for laughs. I usually use it as a search engine one steroids when I cant find the answer to a problem. Not having data past 2021 is a huge limiting factor for real producity though.

I also use it for programming and today is the first day that I experienced the degradation that everyone has been talking about. It was spitting out the same code over and over, saying it was changing it, and then it slowed to a crawl and barely responded. Most of its answers were wrong and unhelpful. I have really enjoyed using it instead of stackoverflow for a few months now, so I hope this isn't something that's going to continue.

As for other uses, my wife and I used it to find a movie to watch a few days ago. We described the type of movie we wanted to see and asked it to recommend 10. We picked one and it was exactly what we wanted to watch. That was really neat.

Recently, I used it for book/Author recommendations. At first I also used it for coding, but now I just ask it to explain concepts to me (what's the difference between... / what are some ways to approach...)

Basically how non-tech people thought search engines worked at the beginning of this century.

When Im feeling blue I ask it to say nice things about me.

I write a lot of emails for work, but I'm not the most eloquent writer, so I get wordy.

I sometimes feed my email into chatgpt and ask it rewrite it to be more concise, but remain in a friendly but professional tone. Boom, done.

It’s amazing for DMing. You can use it to whip up a random town, create NPCs, and generate plot hooks.

You still need to work it into the context of your game and be ready to improvise, but it is a very nice alternative to random tables.

Same, I use it for ideas and inspiration, not fully built out anything

It's moderate at making up npc statblocks if I give it a description and a CR. I do find myself having to tweak the numbers a bit but it's great for coming up with special abilities or unique spell like effects.

What open source models? Can you recommend one?

That was way too recent. And it wouldn't affect the users of GPT directly, only the training, which wasn't using super-recent data to begin with anyway.