Joe Cooper 🇺🇦 🍉I believe I just deleted the first secretly ChatGPT-generated comment on the forum for an OSS project I maintain. It was shaped like an answer, but didn't actually answer the question. Great grammar, sounded authoritative. But, wrong. The internet is absolutely going to become gray goo, and it's going to happen so fast.
stoicmike@swelljoe AI is the new crypto.
@stoicmike I think it's more dangerous than crypto because it actually has utility. There are a lot of ways to get value out of it. Everybody understands crypto is a scam, now, but I suspect the AI curve will look different, maybe different than anything we've seen, but I don't really know what will happen. But the history of spam tells me that before long, there will be a slimy layer of LLM spam covering every surface on the internet, and search engines will become even more useless.
@swelljoe I'm more inclined to think that the products will be a disaster because they will make such bad decisions and give such poor advice. Right now they can't even do simple customer service.
@stoicmike I dunno. I've already found it useful, despite my skepticism and concerns. It has a breadth of knowledge sort of like an expert, but it never gets tired of dumb questions like an expert (and costs a lot less). It's alarmingly casual about lying (makes up scientific results, makes up features and options in software, makes up people, etc.), but, it can show me how to do stuff I've had a hard time figuring out on my own. It's tantalizingly close to being good at some niches.
@stoicmike Unsurprisingly, as with many things built by programmers the thing it seems to be best at first is helping with programming. I've said it's like "rubber ducking" where the duck can talk back, which isn't always a good thing, but "pair" programming at any time day or night and on my solo projects is pretty great. It isn't a great programmer, it doesn't write smart or concise code, but it's a programmer with broad knowledge, and I don't always write good code either.