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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3601 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 4, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What are the actually useful applications of ChatGPT? I see a lot of people playing around with it and having fun, but I'm having trouble thinking of anything good this tool could actually provide to us. The downsides are quite obvious (a big one for me is that now I will always be wondering if the text I am reading was generated by a bot).

I haven't used it, but if they fed it libraries and historical documents, it could bring to light a lot of information which no-one has the time to go through. Frankly I'm more worried about the downsides for now though.

My girlfriend is a manager at big tech co. She spends hours per week agonizing over the wording on various documents that she has to submit to the corporate bureaucracy. (Yes, we both know this is pointless). I showed her chat GPT and we both agreed that it could speed up the process of producing nice-sounding boilerplate.

I write kinky transformation stories, and it's fairly competent at coming up with new plots along these lines if you prompt it with the right sort of things that don't ring any alarm bells for the content moderation of ChatGPT.

So far I've used it for:

  1. Lesson plans (mock trial of Odysseus)

  2. Supplying grant application filler

  3. Automate some accounting forensic tasks (what is this transaction)

  4. Poking around some quantum physics concepts for hard sci-fi worldbuilding

I've been using it for finishing up code that has tedious parts, but that aren't easy to automate quickly.

As well, it is reasonable competent at translating between programming languages, and I used that earlier for a case where I needed to use some API I had written a wrapper in Rust for and I needed it in JavaScript for a web-page.

It is reasonably competent at explaining various topics, at times in a better and more direct way than wikipedia or other sites (especially since a lot of sites pad their explanations).

Though, this was already available with OpenAI's other major models.

So, to me this seems like it has the potential to be an actually useful personal-assistant. Especially once people start hooking up to APIs to do stuff for you. Though, I hope they'll allow some ways of finetuning (or something similar) on content you give it, so I can specialize it for what I'm doing.

Customer support?

I jokingly asked for it to concot a recipe for a humorous inside joke dish often mentioned among friends, and am now thinking whether I should try what it gave me.

You're exactly the kind of person to let the AI out of the box.

I then asked it to create a story on the basis of another inside joke meme and it was stumped completely.

(edit: apparently this is because the word 'poop' is too naught for ChatGPT, though.)

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