As the term 'intelligence' is used in 'artificial intelligence', it is perhaps worth asking, what kind of intelligence do AI systems represent? Confident and detail focused, but naïve, easily misled and lacking in common sense, worldliness, situational awareness, fairness, imagination, empathy, emotional intelligence and social intelligence 🤔

@kevlin

Christine Lemmer-Webber (@cwebber) described ChatGPT as Mansplaining As A Service, and honestly I can’t think of a better description. A service that instantly generates vaguely plausible sounding yet totally fabricated and baseless lectures in an instant with unflagging confidence in its own correctness on any topic, without concern, regard or even awareness of the level of expertise of its audience.

@andrewfeeney @kevlin @cwebber At least it only does so when *asked*!

@patrizia @andrewfeeney @kevlin @cwebber and has no ego if you tell it it's wrong, and it can't fire you.

I kinda love it. It's like, we all hate having someone yell at us and boss us around, but we also *pay* personal trainers to do exactly that.

As long as we're in control, and we decide whether to follow the advice, #chatGPT is a fantastic tool.

I *do* worry about having its outputs emitted willy-nilly into the world as if they came from a human, or trusted as such. That's some scary shit.

@pbrane @patrizia @andrewfeeney @kevlin @cwebber

It definitely gives the impression of an ego if you tell it that it's wrong. It tends to stick to its guns in a passive aggressive style: "sorry if I was wrong and new information may come to light but there's no evidence for X" when you just told it it's wrong about that.

@kevlin @andrewfeeney @patrizia @pbrane @faassen @cwebber At least when I give it programming challenges, it is often quite responsive to my corrections. I use it for Unity (game) code sometimes and it has a tendency to make up functions that don’t exist. If you tell it that, it will handle that sensibly, though it can be a cat-and-mouse game if it then makes up another function that doesn’t exist!
@edwin @andrewfeeney @patrizia @pbrane @faassen @[email protected] In other words, ChatGPT offers a way of automatically generating legacy code 🤔 Every piece of code generated by ChatGPT is, effectively, someone else's code, and needs to be understood anew.
@cwebber @andrewfeeney @faassen @patrizia @kevlin @pbrane Yes, the way I see it is that it’s a bit like getting someone junior on my team to write code - I’m going to have to review it carefully and give feedback. But it is helpful with simple, well defined problems where the correct solution can be reached with a bit of back-and-forth.

@edwin @cwebber @andrewfeeney @patrizia @kevlin @pbrane

Github copilot functions as a kind of savant junior pair programmer who is very aware of patterns and idioms. It helps speed up dull stuff but also regularly introduces me to new idioms and APIs