See, this is the sort of thing that makes me suspicious about the current AI hype (well, that, plus it’s largely the same people who were going on about cryptocurrency changing the world a few years ago); this stuff just isn’t very _useful_. Like, if writing plausible lies is the 2020s AI boom’s killer app, well, that’s not great, really.
And yet... I'm finding ChatGPT and the like wildly useful on a personal level.
I think they're deceptively hard to use: you have to put in effort to learn them, and to learn how to avoid the many traps they set for you.
But once you've done that you can get very real productivity boosts from them. I use ChatGPT a dozen or so times a day, and I would be very sad to not have access to it any more.
Current AI is very useful in cases where the truth isn't very important. It's amazing for things like fantasy stories, video games. It also works in cases where existing tools can validate the bullshit AI generates (i.e. Copilot).
In cases where facts and sources are important, AI cannot be trusted. You can use it as long as you validate every single word it outputs, but at that point I do wonder what the point of using AI was in the first place.
It's also good at taking other existing work and creating new work out of it; not just for smart autocomplete tools like GPTs, but also for things like Stable Diffusion. Again, AI is incapable of attribution of sources, so that comes with obvious downsides, but in cases where the creator of the model have the necessary rights so they don't _need_ attribution to sell work (i.e. stock photo companies), it can be quite useful for generating things like filler images.
AI is definitely useful for creative fields. Take a look at the recent "generative fill" feature from Adobe, just watch that video. AI is also super useful for math and programming - because it gives ideas. They may be flawed a bit, they may miss crucial details, but sometimes that creative hallucinating perspective is all you need to get the job done.
IMHO, like many brand new technologies, the I hype is overhyped, but will still reduce to many useful things when the dust will have settled down.
Just like we had no free ambient electricity in 1890, no flying cars in 1950, and not talking robots in 1980, we still have a very robust electricity network, a car per household, and automated assembly lines.
