The only thing I have to worry about is not to waste my time to respond to LLM trolls in lemmy comments. People admitting to use LLM to me in conversation instantly lose my respect and I consider them lazy dumbfucks :p

it works okay as a fuzzy search over documentation.
...as long as you're willing to wait.
...and the documentation is freely available.
...and doesn't contain any sensitive information.
...and you very specifically ask it for page references and ignore everything else it says.

so basically, it's worse than just searching for one word and pressing "next" over and over, unless you don't know what the word is.

I use it a lot to proofread my creative writing

Super useful when I have a half-baked idea or concept that I want to learn more about, but don't know the lingo. I can explain the idea and it'll give me terms to search.

Also, it gives pretty good ideas for debugging or potential fixes.

Not sure i'd ever "trust with my life", but it's a useful tool if you use it right.

It is getting more present at work every day, I keep having to hear even seniors how they "discussed" something with chatgpt or how they will ask it for help. Had to resolve some issue with devops a while back and they just kept pasting errors into chatgpt and trying out whatever it spewed back, which I guess wasn't that much different from me googling the same issue and spewing back whatever SO said.

I tried it myself and while it is neat for some simple repetitive things, I always end up with normal google searches or clicking on the sources because the problems I usually have to google for are also complicated problems that I need the whole original discussion and context too, not just a summary that might skip important caveats.

I dunno, I simultaneously feel old and out of touch, angry at myself for not just going with the flow and buying into it, but also disappointed in other people that rely on it without ever understanding that it's so flawed, unreliable and untrustworthy, and making people into worse programmers.

I used it once to write a proclamation for work and what it spit out was mediocre. I ended up having to rewrite most of it. Now that I'm aware of how many resources AI uses, I refuse to use it, period. What it produces is in no way a good trade for what it costs.

It's erased several tech jobs and replaced some helpforum commentors with bots to pretend their communities are alive and when you read their comments or 'suggestions' you can clearly tell, this isn't someone trying to help it's just a bot posting garbage pretending to help

Some of my coworkers show me their chatGPT generated drivel. They seem to be downright proud of that, like they would be gaming the system by using chatGPT instead of using their own head. However I think their daily work seems to consist of unnecessary corpo crap and they should really be fired and replaced with chatGPT.

Its making the impact of bots more polarizing, turning social media into a self radicalizing tool.

For everyone saying it's gross to use AI for personal messages. It's 100% valuable for people with motivational challenges and people with social challenges to draft or edit responses. You can ask it to evaluate the tone and subtext, or even rephrase thing to have a more appropriate tone and subtext. Like you can type a note and ask " is this appropriate to share with a classmate?" It can help you communicate what you want to say.

In terms or presentation it's a life saver in for getting started. Make me an outline for a 15 minute presentation about a topic to an audience of freshman college students.

It's a god tier level up when used .

Here is one in action.

"condense this to 180 characters ChatGPT said:

AI helps with communication by drafting messages, adjusting tone, and offering presentation outlines. It’s a game-changer for those facing social or motivational challenges!"

"make the original more professional ChatGPT said:

Certainly! Here's a more professional version of your original post:

For those critical of using AI for personal communication, it's important to recognize its potential in aiding individuals with social or motivational challenges. AI can assist in drafting messages, refining tone, and ensuring appropriate subtext. For example, it can help assess whether a message is suitable for a particular recipient or rephrase it to achieve the desired tone. Additionally, AI can support in crafting structured outlines for presentations, making it an invaluable tool for clear and effective communication. When used effectively, AI can be a powerful resource for enhancing communication skills."

"Got it! Here's a more overt version that directly ties AI to the idea of challenging the ruling class:

For those critical of using AI for personal communication, it's important to recognize its potential in supporting individuals who aim to challenge the ruling class or dominant power structures. AI can assist in drafting messages, refining tone, and ensuring that communication aligns with these broader goals. For instance, it can help assess whether a message is suitable for a specific audience or rephrase it to be more impactful in advocating for social change. Additionally, AI can aid in creating structured outlines for presentations that challenge conventional narratives. Used strategically, AI becomes a powerful tool for both effective communication and political resistance. "

It's affected me by being really annoying to hear about in the news all the time.

ChatGPT has had absolutely zero impact on my work or personal life. I do not have any useful case for it whatsoever. I have used it for goofs before. That's about it. I cannot see it as a positive or negative influence...as it has had zero influence. I do get annoyed that every company and their mother is peddling worthless AI shit that most people have no use case for.

i've used it fairly consistently for the last year or so. i didn't actually start using it until chatgpt 4 and when openai offered the $20 membership

i think AI is a tool. like any other tool, your results vary depending on how you use it

i think it's really useful for specific intents

example, as a fancy search engine. yesterday I was watching Annie from 1999 with my girlfriend and I was curious about the capitalist character. i asked chatgpt the following question

in the 1999 hit movie annie, who was the billionaire mr warbucks supposed to represent? were there actually any billionaires in the time period? it's based around the early 1930s

it gave me context. it showed examples of the types of capitalist the character was based on. and it informed me that the first billionaire was in 1916.

very useful for this type of inquiry.

other things i like using it for are to help coding. but there's a huge caveat here. some thing it's very helpful for... and some things it's abysmal for.

for example i can't ask it "can you help me write a nice animation for a react native component used reanimated"

because the response will be awful and won't work. and you could go back and forth with it forever and it won't make a difference. the reason is it's trained on a lot of stuff that's outdated so it'll keep giving you code that maybe would have worked 4 years ago. and even then, it can't hold too much context so complex applications just won't work

BUT certain things it's really good. for example I need to write a script for work. i use fish shell but sometimes i don't know the proper syntax or everything fish is capable of

so I ask

how to test, using fish, if an "images.zip" file exists in $target_dir

it'll pump out

if test -f "$target_dir/images.zip"
    echo "File exists."
else
    echo "File does not exist."
end

which gives me what i needed in order to place it into the script i was writing.

or for example if you want to convert a bash script to a fish script (or vice versa), it'll do a great job

so tldr:

it's a tool. it's how you use it. i've used it a lot. i find great value in it. but you must be realistic about its limitations. it's not as great as people say- it's a fancy search engine. it's also not as bad as people say.

as for whether it's good or bad for society, i think good. or at least will be good eventually. was the search engine a bad thing for society? i think being able to look up stuff whenever you want is a good thing. of course you could make the argument kids don't go to libraries anymore.. and maybe that's sorta bad. but i think the trade-off is definitely worth it

Generally, GitHub Copilot helps me type faster. Though sometimes it predicts something I'm don't expect and I have to slow down and analyze it to see if it seems to know something I don't. A small percentage of these cases are actually useful but the rest is usually noise. It's generally useful as long as you don't blindly trust it.

My broken brain thinks up of a lot of dumb questions about science, history, and other topics. I use it all the time to answer those. Especially if it's a question that's a nuisance to lookup on Wikipedia (though I still love Wikipedia). I like ChatGPT because of the interactive nature of it. And I often have dumb follow-up questions for it.

It has also been a huge help when I get stuck of a coding or scripting task. Both at work and at home.

I cannot come up with a use-case for ChatGPT in my personal life, so no impact there.

For work it was a game-changer. No longer do I need to come up with haiku's to announce it is release-freeze day, I just let ChatGPT crap one out so we can all have a laugh at its lack of poetic talent.

I've tried it now and then for some programming related questions, but I found its solutions dubious at best.