Searching

Literally the worst possible usage. They're syntax generators, not search engines, and not knowledge fonts.

There may be exceptions but everything I've seen from AI programming is next level trash. It's like copy pasting from Stack Overflow without the thousand comments all around it saying DO NOT DO THIS!

When ChatGPT was just released to the general public I wanted to try it out. I had it write a script to handle some simple parsing of network log files. I was having some intermittent issue with my home network I couldn't figure out, so I had logged a lot of data and was hoping to figure out the issue. But I needed to filter out all the routine stuff that would be just noise in the background. I could have written it myself in about an hour, but figured hey maybe ChatGPT can help me bang it out in a couple of minutes.

The code it wrote looked at a glance to be very good and I was impressed. However as I read it, it turned out to be total nonsense. It was using variables and declaring them after. Halfway the script it seemed to have switched to a completely different approach leaving some sort of weird hybrid between the two. At one point it had just inserted pseudo code instead of actual functional code. Every attempt to get it to fix it's issues just made it worse. In the end I just wrote the script myself.

I've seen examples from other people who attempted to use it and it's just bad. It's like having a junior programmer high on weed writing your code, checking it and fixing it takes more time than just writing the code itself.

Then there's the issue of copyright, a lot of the training data wasn't licensed and stuff like Github Copilot want to add your data to it's training set if you want to use it. That's not OK on many levels and not even possible for people working on corporate codebases.

A lot of programmers work on big code bases, with things like best practices and code standards. Not only does the AI not know the codebase and thus wouldn't know how to do a lot of stuff in that codebase, it also doesn't know about the best practices and code standards. So for those kinds of situations it isn't useful.

I feel like people ask it to do some first year student programming tutorial tasks and the result looks somewhat like what one would expect and conclude the thing can actually write code. It really can't in reality and probably shouldn't even if it could.

I've only managed to find very basic info. For programming I got fed up of being recommended apps, features and settings that didn't exist.

It's decent for generating ideas or names for fiction. I've used it for tabletop stuff a couple of times to give me NPC names or lists of personality traits, and it's good sometimes for breaking writers block when I get stuck on some detail and I can't figure out what word I want to use or what to name something. You can usually get it to give you some sort of okay suggestions, but the volume of ideas is usually enough to spark a better idea for me. The only weird thing I've noticed is that GPT4 (or whatever flavor bing/copilot is currently using) REALLY likes alliteration to a degree that is downright corny. It's kinda weird but sort of funny honestly.

They are very useful for outlining and similar "where do I start" writing projects. They help break the dam and just get some damn words on the screen, at which point it's often easy to continue and flesh things out to a complete thought.

I've refused to indulge in using them for searching. Do they cite their sources now? All I've seen are screenshots where it appears you're just supposed to take their word for it. Curious if that's changed.

Oh, wow. It really isn't. Axios usually does really good reporting, but that looks more like the outline / notes for a story than something ready to publish.

I strongly dislike generative LLMs (I refuse to call them AI) for a host of reasons, but the biggest reason has less to do with the tech and more to do with the people / upper brass who are trying to replace human jobs with them and expecting it to just work (while salivating at the thought of pocketing the salary of the displaced human employee).

I don't think the article really calls that out explicitly, but they are saying it's not living up to the hype. As far as progress goes, I suppose that's a good first step.

For real, it almost felt like an LLM written article the way it basically said nothing. Also, the way it puts everything in bullet points is just jarring to read.

That music example is how I've used them, it really is spot on. Key, tempo, scale, overlapping scales that could be used, plus factoids included. It really can be very helpful.