AI-yi-yi

[Dr. Medulla]

Faux addendum: musk is almost certainly using AI on all of the mass layoff/terminations.

Without a doubt. What could be more efficient?

[Dr. Medulla]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... -copyright

[Mimi]

*heavy sigh*

[oliver]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... -copyright

The musicians credited as co-writers include Tori Amos, Billy Ocean, the Clash

The completists dilemma?

[Dr. Medulla]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... -copyright

The musicians credited as co-writers include Tori Amos, Billy Ocean, the Clash

The completists dilemma?

If you're a "real fan," there's no dilemma.

[Flex]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... -copyright

The musicians credited as co-writers include Tori Amos, Billy Ocean, the Clash

The completists dilemma?

If you're a "real fan," there's no dilemma.

Yeah but it every format and complain about it?

Me? I'll wait for the Marky Dread remaster.

[Silent Majority]

So, I'll admit that I recently used ChatGPT for a couple work items and the missus has used it as well for a job she's applying for. Our experiences, briefly:

-My wife is in the final stages for a new job, external from her company. It would be a promotion, which is great. She hadn't updated or worked on her resume since, well, her last job so she thought she'd give ChatGPT a try to basically give it a refresh and help align her resume, cover letter, etc. to the job she was applying for. She was able to feed the AI all of her old material, the job description, and a bunch of metrics and shit that she has from her current role and got ChatGPT to give her a very good draft of a resume and cover letter. She still had to work on it further herself, and it required feeding a LOT of info upfront to get a good draft back, but it probably saved her hours of work. So that was an interesting use case. She's continued to use it during the application process, brainstorming interview strategies and questions, stuff like that. That ALL still requires a lot of initial data input, but I can see it's value.

-I had two work use cases where I used ChatGPT. One was creating a simple comms plan for a client. Extremely small scope, just a quick draft for them to do with what they will. I spent some time providing parameters to ChatGPT - a zero draft/outline, essentially - and from that ChatGPT worked that up into a solid high-level plan which was all I was looking for. I still had to have a passthrough of it to adjust things to my liking and input some more personal knowledge/insight, but having it basically build out a plan framework and get it to a first draft probably saved me a couple hours of work. Since I wasn't be paid hourly on this: totally worth it.

-One other use I tried was doing some research for some names of folks with subject matter expertise we wanted to invite to an event for a client. Again, not a huge project for me, but I thought I'd give the research component of ChatGPT a try. Again, I spent some time carefully thinking through and setting parameters of what I was looking for and ChatGPT served me up a solid list of names in the number range I was looking for. I then went through and googled each proposed name. Almost all of them were correct in terms of background/expertise and that they'd be of interest to the client. Some I had to fill out contact information that seemed readily available but that for some reason ChatGPT said wasn't, and a few government roles had outdated people in their positions that I had to research myself and update. But it was pretty good, I definitely got some sets of names that were good value adds for the client that I wouldn't have gotten with random googling.

So, I tried another round to see if I could net out a few more names and this time every single name I got back was fake. Fake names, fake titles, fake organizations, all of it. That's sort of what I was expecting more of from the first go-round, but it's like you got one bite at the apple for good info and if you pressed, ChatGPT would just make shit up.

I'll be honest: I can see it's value as an initial-draft-generator or as a light researcher. That's not nothing, it saved me some hours of work and I got some results I probably wouldn't have otherwise, but it's also hardly revolutionary. And the key is that it still required me to have a good understanding of what I wanted to get out of it and have the expertise to review what it spit out. And my wife had a lot of data to feed in and very clear ideas of what she wanted to get out of the program. That's useful, but it doesn't feel revolutionary. And ChatGPT obviously comes with a lot of negatives that make it a tough value-proposition to be able to use ethically. But I figured I had to see what the fuss was about.

Oh yeah, there's definitely a use case. I've fed some simple but longwinded data into it at work and then double checked its conclusions. And it can help me with finding specific answers quickly for my company's products, so long as I firmly and continually press it to share its sources on any specifics. It's a nice chatbot for the internet. What's mad is the ongoing attempt to force it into everything and to replace thoughtful reasoning entirely.

[Flex]

Oh yeah, there's definitely a use case. I've fed some simple but longwinded data into it at work and then double checked its conclusions. And it can help me with finding specific answers quickly for my company's products, so long as I firmly and continually press it to share its sources on any specifics. It's a nice chatbot for the internet. What's mad is the ongoing attempt to force it into everything and to replace thoughtful reasoning entirely.

Yeah, I think if it was marketed as basically Search+ that would be fine (and if clear parameters were set up for, like, creatives to opt out of having their work scraped) - yeah, it's the attempt to replace one's reasoning and creativity that make it fucked.

On my use for doing some work research, it did occur to me that just using the Google of 10 or whatever years ago may have worked just as well, but search engines have been basically made less and less functional on purpose for the last decade so now something that can act as an excellent search tool feels like a huge relief.

[Dr. Medulla]

I haven't used it for this purpose, but I've heard that it's good for taking raw transcripts and inserting sensible punctuation (at least as an initial pass before you doing the fine tuning yourself).

[Kory]

I use it for coding work. It's helpful as long as you know what your end result needs to be. And it's infinitely better than trying to find answers to specific coding questions on something like Stack Overflow where 50% of the answers are tech assholes who delight in proving true the stereotype of Jimmy Fallon's IT guy from SNL.

[Kory]

If you value your guts don't go on Linkedin to check out what people are saying about Nvidia's sales surge today. An entire country of people sucking each other off over RECORD-BREAKING GROWTH and SMASHED EXPECTATIONS YET AGAIN

[Flex]

Lol, I tried it again to compile a list of potential events for a speaker my client is sending out to go speak at. I thought I'd cleverly tell ChatGPT to provide me the URLs of each event it finds so I can verify it. Well, it did do that. It provided me about half a dozen real events and then it proceeded to make up wholecloth another half dozen or so events complete with fake URLs (and even a couple of the real events, for some reason, it included bad URLs). Still saved me probably 30 minutes-1 hour. A pre-enshittification Google search could probably have gotten me the same info in not much more time tho.

[Kory]

Lol, I tried it again to compile a list of potential events for a speaker my client is sending out to go speak at. I thought I'd cleverly tell ChatGPT to provide me the URLs of each event it finds so I can verify it. Well, it did do that. It provided me about half a dozen real events and then it proceeded to make up wholecloth another half dozen or so events complete with fake URLs (and even a couple of the real events, for some reason, it included bad URLs). Still saved me probably 30 minutes-1 hour. A pre-enshittification Google search could probably have gotten me the same info in not much more time tho.

Is supposed to be fully able to search the web now? My understanding is that it only has as much info as its last update.

[Flex]

Is supposed to be fully able to search the web now? My understanding is that it only has as much info as its last update.

Yeah, it can. There's a web search component you can toggle. Although it's about as lazy as I am, apparently.

[Dr. Medulla]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/maga-news ... fends-kkk/

Why does this thing keep reflecting a techbro worldview?