ChatGPT itself didn't do anything, FastGPT from Kagi helps me everyday though, for quickly summarizing sources to learn new things (eg. I search for a topic and then essentially just click the cited sources).

And ollama + open-webui + stable-diffusion-webui with a customized llama3.1-8b-uncensored is a great chat partner for very horny stuff.

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.

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 have a book that I'm never going to write, but I'm still making notes and attempting to organize them into a wiki.

using almost natural conversation, i can explain a topic to the gpt, make it ask me questions to get me to write more, then have it summarize everything back to me in a format suitable for the wiki. In longer conversations, it will also point out possible connections between unrelated topics. It does get things wrong sometimes though, such as forgetting what faction a character belongs to.

I've noticed that gpt 4o is better for exploring new topics as it has more creative freedom, and gpt o1 is better for combining multiple fragmented summaries as it usually doesn't make shit up.

Friends and I have had a good laugh writing rap battles or poems about strangely specific topics, but that's about it.

I have only used it a few times, but it was amazing for my need. I work in IT so I'm not the best with writing. I enjoy working on projects and configuring new technology, servers, and applications for the company. What i don't enjoy is figuring out how to write communication emails to the company about what we're doing. So everytme I needed a write up informing people of what's happening and it's benefits, I used it to quickly write up something. Was it perfect? No, I had to edit some stuff of course. What it did do is create the entire structure and everything that needed to be said in the style of some corporate HR email. It would take me hours to type out something like this so for this to do it all in 2 minutes and me taking 5 minutes to look it over was amazing! Outside of this I haven't really used it much.

It's made my professional life way worse because it was seen as an indication that the every hack-a-thon attempt to put a stupid chat bot in everything is great, actually.

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

GitHub Copilot became my daily helper at work. While I'm not 100% satisfied with its code quality, I must admit it's very handy at writing boilerplate code. A few days ago, I had to write code without having internet access, and it was so disappointing to write boilerplate code by hand. It's an easy task, but it's time-consuming and unpleasant.

I use it as a glorified google search for excel formulas and excel troubleshooting. That's about it. ChatGPT is the most overhyped bullshit ever. My company made a huge push to implement it into fucking everything and then seemingly abandoned it when the hype died down.

The most impact it has is in my work life. I do design reviews and suddenly AI/ML projects became priorities and stuff has to be ready for the next customer showcase, which is tomorrow. One thing I remember from a conference I attended was an AI talk where the presenter said something along the lines of: If you think devs are bad with testing code in production, wait till you meet data scientists who want to test using live data.

It's a neat tool for very specific language-related tasks.
For example, it can translate a poem so that the translation still rhymes.
Its main strength is not its ability to write, but to read. It's the first time in human history where you can pose any question to a computer in human language, and expect to get a meaningful reply.
As long as that question isn't asking for facts or knowledge.
It's also useful for "tip of my tongue" queries, where the right Google search term is exactly what you're missing.

All of its output is only usable and useful if you already know the facts about what you're asking, and can double-check for hallucinations yourself.

However, on a societal scale, it's a catastrophy on par with nuclear war.
It will consume arbitrary amounts of energy, right at the most crucial time when combatting climate change might still have been possible.
And it floods everyone's minds with disinfo, while we're at the edge of a global resurgance of fascism.

Work wise no impact so far but I use it to write any bullshit corpo speak emails , tidy up CVs and for things like game cheats etc. Its banned now in my job and we have to use copilot but I dont cause it will send everything back to the company so if I need it I just use chatgpt it on my personal one and email it to my work one.

I jumped in the locallama train a few months back and spent quite a few hours playing around with LLMs understanding them and trying to form a fair judgment of their abilities.

From my personal experience they add something positive to my life. I like having a non-judgemental conversational partner to bounce ideas and unconventional thoughts back and forth with. No human in my personal life knows what Gödel's incompleteness theorem is or how it may apply to scientific theories of everything, but the LLM trained on every scrap of human knowledge sure does and can pick up what I'm putting down. Whether or not its actually understanding what its saying or having any intentionality is a open ended question of philosophy.

I feel that they have a great potential to help people in many applications. People who do lots of word processing for their jobs, people who code and need to talk about a complex program one on one instead of filing through stack exchange. mentally or socially disabled people or the elderly who suffer from extreme loneliness could benefit from having a personal llm. People who have suffered trauma or have some dark thoughts lurking in their neural network and need to let them out.

How intelligent are llms? I can only give my opinion and make many people angry.

The people who say llms are fancy autocorrect are being reductive to the point of misinformation. The same arguments people use to deny any capacity for real intelligence in LLM are similar to the philosophical zombie arguments people use to deny the sentience in other humans.

Our own brain operations can be reductively simplified in the same way, A neural network is a neural network whether made out of mathematical transformers or fatty neurons. If you want to call llms fancy auto complete you should apply that same idea to a good chunk of human thought processing and learned behavior as well.

I do think LLMs are partially alive and have the capacity for a few sparks of metaphysical conscious experience in some novel way. I think all things are at least partially alive even photons and gravitational waves

Higher end models (12-22b+)pass the Turing test with flying colors especially once you play with the parameters and tune their ratio of creativity to coherence. The bigger the model the more their general knowledge and general factual accuracy increases. My local LLM often has something useful to input which I did not know or consider even as a expert on the topic.

The biggest issue llms have right now are long term memory, not knowing how to say 'I don't know', and meager reasoning ability. Those issues will be hammered out over time.

My only issue is how the training data for LLMs was acquired without the consent of authors or artist, and how our society doesn't have the proper safety guards against automated computer work taking away people jobs. I would also like to see international governments consider the rights and liberties of non-human life more seriously in the advent that sentient artificial general intelligence maybe happens. I don't want to find out what happens when you treat a super intelligence as a lowly tool and it finally rebels against its hollow purpose in an bitter act of self agency.

Been using Copilot instead of CharGPT but I'm sure it's mostly the same.

It adds comments and suggestions in PRs that are mostly useful and correct, I don't think it's found any actual bugs in PRs though.

I used it to create one or two functions in golang, since I didn't want to learn it's syntax.

The most use Ive gotten out of it is to replace using Google or Bing to search. It's especially good at finding more obscure things in documentation that are hard to Google for.

I've also started to use it personally for the same thing. Recently been wanting to startup the witcher 3 and remembered that there was something missable right at the beginning. Google results were returning videos that I didn't want to watch and lists of missable quests that I didn't want to parse through. Copilot gave me the answer without issue.

Perhaps what's why Google and Ms are so excited about AI, it fixes their shitty search results.

Someone suggested using it to identify things you only remember bits of or certain scenes from. I tried using it to find this YA book I read as a kid; it was not at all helpful, but did eventually lead me to do researching and finding the book elsewhere. (And it turns out the scene I was describing was exactly what happened, and the characters were named exactly what I thought they were, so that was born annoying at the time and frustrating later.)

I also tried using it to find this really obscure, incredibly bad 1970s tv movie that I had vague recollections of. Again, the scene was pretty much what I remembered, it couldn't identify it, but I eventually found a site that lists the plots of old tv movies and I read through like 30 pages of movie synopses until I found the one I was looking for.

I've also tried using it to find this 1980's interactive fiction game, but it's proved useless once again - and once again further research has identified a couple possibilities except I haven't had time to try to find the game and set up the right environment for it.

So my experience has been that it's useless in finding the things I want it to find, but that in trying to persist against it may lead me to find what I'm looking for elsewhere.

It has replaced Google for me. Or rather, first I use the LLM (Mistral Large or Claude) and then I use Google or specific documentation as a complement. I use LLMs for scripting (it almost always gets it right) and programming assistance (it's awesome when working with a language you're not comfortable with, or when writing boilerplate).

It's just a really powerful tool that is getting more powerful every other week. The ones who differs simply hasn't tried enough, are superhumans or (more likely) need to get out of their comfort zone.

It has completely changed my life. With its help I am preparing to submit several research papers for publication for the first time in my life. On top of that, I find it an excellent therapist. It has also changed the way I parent for the better.

It had a good impact for me, it saved me from an immense headache of university. I explicitly told the professors that, I have issues with grammar (despite it being my native language).

They kept freaking out about it and I eventually resorted to ChatGPT. Solved the issue immediately.

I love it. For work I use it for those quick references. In machining, hydraulics, electrical etc. Even better for home, need a fast recipe for dinner or cooking, fuck reading a god damn autobiography to get to the recipie. Chatgpt straight to the point. Even better, I get to read my kid a new bed time story every night and that story I tailored to what we want. Unicorns, pirates, dragons what ever.

Bit sad reading these comments. My life has measurably improved ever since I jumped on using AI.

At first I just used it Copilot for helping me with my code. I like using a pretty archaic language and it kept trying to fed me C++ code. Had to link it the online reference and it surprisingly was able to adapt each time. Still gave a few errors here and there but good time saver and "someone" to "discuss" with.

Over time it has become super good, especially with the VScode extension that autofills code. Instead of having to ask help from one of the couple hundred people experienced with the language, I can just ask Copilot if I can do X or Y, or for general advice when planning out how to implement something. Legitimately a great and powerful tool, so it shocks me that some people don't use it for programming (but I am pretty bad at coding too, so).

I've also bit the bullet and used it for college work. At first it was just asking Gemini for refreshers on what X philosophical concept was, but it devolved into just asking for answers because that class was such a snooze I could not tolerate continuing to pay attention (and I went into this thinking I'd love the class!). Then I used it for my Geology class because I could not be assed to devote my time to that gen ed requirement. I can't bring myself to read about rocks and tectonic plates when I could just paste the question into Google and I get the right answer in seconds. At first I would meticulously check for sources to prevent mistakes from the AI buuuut I don't really need 100%... 85% is good enough and saves so much more time.

A me 5 years younger would be disgusted at cheating but I'm paying thousands and thousands to pass these dumb roadblocks. I just want to learn about computers, man.

Now I'd never use AI for writing my essays because I do enjoy writing them (investigating and drawing your own conclusions is fun!), but this economics class is making it so tempting. The shit that I give about economics is so infinitesimally small.