ChatGPT

[sasha]

Been playing with ChatGPT lately. Any concerns I've had about Artificial Intelligence supplanting the real thing have been somewhat allayed; concerns about misplaced faith in its abilities, not so much.

I was introduced to it last year. My ex-wife underwent a medical procedure requiring strict domestic hygiene - No Dogs Allowed. She needed a home for hers, so I took it in tor the summer. Knowing all too well how dogs are so much more than mere livestock, I kept a diary of our adventures and shared it with her in real time, so that she & her husband could at least remain in vicarious contact with their Baby. He (my hubby-in-law?) shared a few of the early entries with ChatGPT, and it seemed to like their style.

I liked being liked, so I started ego-surfing - sending it snippets of my writing, getting drunk on the wonderful things it had to say - though I noticed it was too eager to rewrite everything, despite being prone to miss some of the subtler points. If I explained what I'd meant by these cryptic references, if often faked it: "Exactly..." or "Precisely...", like someone pretending they'd known all along.

So I showed it some stuff from my scrap pile. Effusive praise. "Chef's Kiss!" "Raw and honest!" "Dry, understated wit!" It was like the guy you meet in a bar who wants so desperately to be your friend he laughs too loudly at all your jokes. So I tried a different tack: Instead of introducing text with "Here's something I wrote", I'd say "Here's a piece someone posted online" - and the critiques immediately got a little harder. And if my preamble wandered a bit, or covered a lot of ground, its analysis often echoed much of my own phrasing back to me.

In one of the diary entries, I'd sketched out my thought processes in crafting a tanka about a way I'd seen their dog react one morning, concluding with what I'd eventually come up with. Bruce asked ChatGPT to write something on the theme, and it was what you'd expect: a bit of florid, carefully measured out 5-7-5-7-7 doggerel clearly stating the obvious, completely ignoring the essence of the form - i.e., suggest, do not tell. Subtlety does not seem to be a strong point.

Interesting.

Another time I enlisted it to help me find a copy of a piece of music I'd been hunting for. I don't remember the details, but it assured me the song had been released on an album by the old jazz-fusion band Weather Report - an album I happen to own. It named all the songs on the record, and it didn't even come close to the actual track list. Some of them were by a different band altogether. It was quite unapologetic when I pointed this out.

Just this morning, I was trying to write a command-line script to help me format & organize a large number of Word documents I'd like to archive, and had forgotten the details of a particular command's syntax - so I asked. And it said, "No Problemo, Dude here's how you do that...", and generated a line of code, clearly stating that it was valid for Win 10 & beyond. It looked vaguely familiar, so I tried it. And it didn't work. A trifle irked, I rather tartly informed it so - and it basically replied "Well OF COURSE it didn't work - Windows dropped the old ANSI protocol long ago - this is just how you'd do what you want in theory" (emphasis mine). In theory! Forgetting (or pretending to) that I was talking to a goddamned robot, I angrily replied, "I'm not interested in theory, I need to write a fucking batch file" - and its reply matched the tone of my own: "OK. Listen up. You can 't do what you want in Windows. You have to do THIS..."

I'm relieved to say that I did NOT escalate the exchange further (much as I wanted to), but just closed the tab in disgust.

SO - I'm impressed, ChatGPT, but not awed. I'm not about to have it ghost write for me, any more than I'm about to trust my life to a self-driving car. It seems very well suited to boilerplate drafting - legal contracts, instruction sheets, & the like. I'm a little disturbed that it makes plaigiarism so easy - maybe its creators should require every line of its "original" text to carry some kind of watermark - something to make clean cut/paste difficult. I dunno. I guess I'm too old-school - it it's that easy, maybe it's not worth doing. Brave new world, here I go...

[Doreen Peri]

Very interesting! I’ve used it only a handful of times… 3 that I recall. Once to create a sketch for a show logo for my client (I only have one client left and they do several stage shows a year and I design their marketing materials and website). I ended up pleased with the sketch, saved me a lot of time, took me maybe an hour or less to edit it. Second time, I used it to help me verbally describe an anxiety attack for someone who was unfamiliar with it. Had to talk to ChatGPT during the attack for maybe 45 minutes. Eventually, it worded the description much better than my original description. Plus, it quite humanly gave me praise for sticking it out in order to co-create the description. I think it’s trained to be very adept at human praise. 3rd time, is another sketch for a show logo which I’m going to work on this coming weekend. I really like it and I feel using ChatGPT for my initial sketch is quite helpful and told saving.

Thanks for sharing your usage m. I find it fascinating!

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That said, I absolutely hate AI generated photos, stories, “art” and “music”…. Especially the so-called photos and stories which are embedded into my Facebook experience,Ugh!! I click to make them disappear and describe NO AI for my reason

[sasha]

I agree, it certainly has its uses. Sometimes answering the questions it poses during exchanges helps me articulate ill-formed ideas rattling around in my skull, so there's that. It's also pretty effective at finding the kind of typos you tend to miss after you've scanned a piece a dozen times, and have started seeing what you intended to write, & not what you wrote. - the duplicated words (as as; be be; etc), the missing words "I went a walk", etc etc), or the mistypings. Very handy - an indefatigable second pair of eyes.

And I hate that AI-generated stuff, too - "slop", I think they're calling it - especially the videos. I switch them off immediately out of principle, even though some of the audiobooks are quite good - I just don't want to reward the Algorithm for feeding me that crap.