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Playing with ChatGPT

 
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Some of my friends and I played with ChatGPT last night at our Zoom New Years Eve party. I wrote up how it went.

Overall, it writes well and gives terrible directions.
 
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I am also playing, but I do have many doubts here:

  • Will It Change the Marketing World?
  • Will It Replace the Content Writer/Content Creators?
  • How is it generating data? The Process behind it?
  • How trustworthy and secure is the data?


  • I have heard that in a week, 1 million subscribers of chatGPT have. It is added as one of the most viral products so far.
     
    Saloon Keeper
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    I read an article this weekend which seemed to imply that it was the next step towards Management's Holy Grail — code generated without programmers via AI.

    The example given wasn't very convincing though. The process it illustrated required being incredibly stupid about how basic Python libraries work and the question asked/answered was rather verbose. Plus, if the answer is so useful, why didn't it simply do the necessary code/environment changes itself? Or at least emit a script.
     
    Jeanne Boyarsky
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    The problem with it replacing programmers is that the customers would have to be able to specify the requirements in precise detail and learn how to write those prompts. Historically, requirements haven't been that thorough. I can see it helping (like github copilot) the programmers.

    The other problem is that we do more than just spitting out code. Can the AI understand an existing codebase? Find a bug? Identify when a requirement or edge case is missing? There's a long way to go here.
     
    Tim Holloway
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    Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:The problem with it replacing programmers is that the customers would have to be able to specify the requirements in precise detail…

    And therein lies the fundamental problem. I like to say I did "Agile" long before Agile, because I had learned when collaborating with users on projects (as opposed to waterfall projects)  that as they started using what I'd developed it suggested new and different things that they'd like to do. In many cases, there were things they'd originally wanted that they no longer wanted at all. So I ended up not doing them.

    Humans are not designed to see precisely even were the world not an ever-changing place. Any automated system that assumes well-defined inputs producing well-defined outputs is going to frustrate. Few systems are in fact, "one-size-fits-all", which is why we still have developers at all. Even "perfected" systems like accounting and office-suite software still get the occasional tweak.

    Now, automated code analysis I have more faith in. We've been doing it sans AI for years. There are all sorts of things that automated analysis tools can do. But again, that stops at the mechanical level. I do not expect automated tools to be able to make inferences about the larger abstract environment. We have enough grief with automated language translators and it has been more than half a century since the "Invisible Idiot" era.
     
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    Tim Holloway wrote:I read an article this weekend which seemed to imply that it was the next step towards Management's Holy Grail — code generated without programmers via AI.



    I was just talking to my son the university professor today about ChatGPT. He said that people have made it write full scientific papers which sounded convincing. Those papers even included citations to papers with reasonable authors (real people in the field) and titles. However those citations didn't refer to actual papers in the literature, they just imitated real citations. I suspect that the annoying requirement for having actual connections to reality is also going to interfere with ChatGPT generating real code.
     
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    Paul Clapham wrote:. . . requirement . . . connections to reality . . .

    Nobody else on the net seems to bother about that requirement
     
    Tim Holloway
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    Paul Clapham wrote:

    Tim Holloway wrote:I read an article this weekend which seemed to imply that it was the next step towards Management's Holy Grail — code generated without programmers via AI.



    I was just talking to my son the university professor today about ChatGPT. He said that people have made it write full scientific papers which sounded convincing. Those papers even included citations to papers with reasonable authors (real people in the field) and titles. However those citations didn't refer to actual papers in the literature, they just imitated real citations. I suspect that the annoying requirement for having actual connections to reality is also going to interfere with ChatGPT generating real code.



    Is that really any diffferent than AI-generated literature and art?

    As for "being connected to reality", though, this is the wrong century for that. We all live in a poor perception of reality, and always have, but only in the last decade or so has it been possible to easily connect with and thus "validate" manufactured reality. And more importantly, run with it unchecked.
     
    Tim Holloway
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    Well, it appears that we have someone attempting to program with ChatGPT right here on the Ranch!

    https://coderanch.com/t/767404/java/OpenCV-Compiles-dosen-run

    Not as a programmer replacement, but as a diagnostic aid.
     
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