zlacker

> OpenAI’s president tweeted that the tool [ChatGPT] hit 1 million within the first five days.

Perhaps the reason why ChatGPT has become so popular is because it provides entertainment. So it is not a great leap forward in AI or a path to AGI, but instead a incredibly convoluted way of keeping reasonable intelligent people occupied and amused. You enter a prompt, and it returns a result - what a fun game!

Maybe that is it's primary contribution to society.

>>somewh+(OP)
I’ve found it pretty useful to _assist_ in my engineering work.

>>somewh+(OP)
It's not great at a lot of things that require genuine creativity for me, but it's AMAZING at providing d&d campaign ideas.

>>somewh+(OP)
ChatGPT provides real utility for me. Some examples:

1. Drafting directional copy I can give to a real copywriter to create something we'd all be happy presenting to users.

2. Act as a sounding board for peer-personnel issues I'm dealing with at work.

3. "Dumb down" concepts in academic journals/articles such that I can make sense of them.

4. Just today it helped me build an app to drill a specific set of chord shapes/inversions on the guitar that I've been struggling with (programming has always been a very casual hobby and, consequently, I'm not very good at it).

>>somewh+(OP)
Personally for me I've found that since Google search has been wrecked by SEO, or pivoted to targetting zoomers and gen alpha, it just doesn't work the same for me in my 40s. It used to be fantastic, but several times a day my search queries end in frustration like they did in the pre-Webcrawler search era.

Increasingly now I use ChatGPT and sometimes Kagi. And they just work like I expect. I can think of one time that ChatGPT has failed me, which was when I was trying to remember the terms OLTP/OLAP in database architecture. But for a long time now it's been a very effective tool in my toolbox, while Google increasingly wears out.

>>somewh+(OP)
I can only speak for me, but I derive no entertainment from "chatting" with a computer program. I have only used it in ways that are useful to me. And I found it very good at troubleshooting software config issues as well as generating customized boilerplate code and even for generating fake data to insert into databases for testing. I have also found it quite good at extracting data from unstructured information like logs. Something that before, would have required maybe 20 minutes of fiddling with regex and writing a script for.

>>somewh+(OP)
When people write stuff like this, I wonder if they've ever seriously used ChatGPT at all.

I use ChatGPT all the time in my software dev job and I find it incredibly helpful. First, it's just much faster than pouring over doc to find the answer you want when you know what you're asking for. Second, when you don't know exactly what you're asking for (i.e. "How would I accomplish X using technology Y"), it's incredibly helpful because it points you to some of the keywords that you should be searching for to find more/corroborate. Third, for some set of tasks (i.e. "write me an example of code that does this") I find it faster to ask ChatGPT to write the code for me first - note this one is the least common of the tasks I use ChatGPT for because I can usually write the code faster.

Yes, I know ChatGPT hallucinates. No, I don't just copy-and-paste the output into my code and press enter. But it saves me a ton of time in some specific areas, and I think that people that don't learn how to use generative AI tools effectively will be at a huge productivity disadvantage.