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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.

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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'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.

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