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Because it’s like a search box you can explain a problem to and get a bunch of words related to it without having to wade through blogspam, 10 year old Reddit posts, and snippy stackoverflow replies. You don’t have to post on discord and wait a day or two hoping someone will maybe come and help. Sure it is frequently wrong, but it’s often a good first step.

And no I’m not an AI bro at all, I frequently have coworkers dump AI slop in my inbox and ask me to take it seriously and I fucking hate it.

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Mondez@lemdro.id ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
But once you have it’s output, unless you already know enough to judge if it’s correct or not you have to fall back to doing all those things you used the AI to avoid in order to verify what it told you.

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- traches@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Sure, but you at least have something to work with rather than whatever you know off the top of your head
  
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non_burglar@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It is not a search box. It generates words we know are confidently wrong quite often.

“Asking” gpt is like asking a magic 8 ball; it’s fun, but it has zero meaning.

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- traches@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Well that’s just blatantly false. They’re extremely useful for the initial stage of research when you’re not really sure where to begin or what to even look for. When you don’t know what you should read or even what the correct terminology is surrounding your problem. They’re “Language models”, which mean they’re halfway decent at working with language.
  
  They’re noisy, lying plaigarism machines that have created a whole pandora’s box full of problems and are being shoved in many places where they don’t belong. That doesn’t make them useless in all circumstances.
  
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  - non_burglar@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Not false, and shame on you for suggesting it.
    
    I not only disagree, but sincerely hope you aren’t encouraging anyone to look up information using an LLM.
    
    LLMs are toys right now.
    
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    traches@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    The part I’m calling out as untrue is the „magic 8 ball” comment, because it directly contradicts my own personal lived experience. Yes it’s a lying, noisy, plagiarism machine, but its accuracy for certain kinds of questions is better than a coin flip and the wrong answers can be useful as well.
    
    Some recent examples
    
    I had it write an excel formula that I didn’t know how to write, but could sanity check and test.
    
    Worked through some simple, testable questions about setting up project references in a typescript project
    
    I want to implement URL previews in a web project but I didn’t know what the standard for that is called. Every web search I could think of related to „url previews” is full of SEO garbage I don’t care about, but ChatGPT immediately gave me the correct answer (Open Graph meta tags), easily verified by searching for that and reading the public documentation.
    
    Naming things is a famously hard problem in programming and LLMs are pretty good at „what’s another way to say” and „what’s it called when” type questions.
    
    Just because you don’t have the problems that LLMs solve doesn’t mean that nobody else does. And also, dude, don’t scold people on the internet. The fediverse has a reputation and it’s not entirely a good one.
    
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