The chatGPT problem
I have been using chatGPT on and off for almost a year now. I think it is great. In the last year, we have seen some truly amazing things coming along in AI and GenAI. I think that the next 3-5 years are going to be phenomenal.
It is not all good though. More and more posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Vimeo (more on this in a minute) etc are just chatGPT, 100%. The publishers have not even bothered to tweak them. The publisher will sometimes post on Twitter or some other platform how they have 10x their performance using chatGPT. Here is the thing though, a lot of these posts are just... bullshit. The other thing is that after a while it becomes easy to spot them, so I don't bother reading them because they are... complete shite or, if not complete shite, mostly shite.
You may think I'm being a bit harsh, nope I'm not. I'll get to why at the end, but before we get there a couple of caveats. First of all, I am a big fan of AI and I love it, and this is part of the reason for this post, the reason being that people are screwing it up by being lazy.
For example, I read that Amazon are restricting people to publishing 3 books a day on Kindle Direct Publishing. I'm not talking about publishing companies, I mean normal people. Now anyone who has ever written a book, or tried to, knows how much effort goes in. The only way you are writing 3 books a day is if they are completely AI generated. This would not be a complete disaster if the "publishers" went to the trouble of even trying to generate decent prompts, or even edit the output, but in many cases, they don't, so you end up with a dry piece of shit.
Earlier I mentioned Vimeo, this is because you can now get chatGPT to generate text that you can put into something like Synthesia that will generate video that you can publish straight to Vimeo. It is a relatively trivial task to automate the entire process so that you enter a prompt and get a complete video course out the other end. Except it's rubbish.
The problem for me is that you can see the lack of authenticity, the lack of originality, even the uniform structure starts to become annoying.
I read one early, that set me off on this rant. It was "10 steps to improve productivity for web developers." here are some of the items on the list that chatGPT suggests.
Set clear goals
Maintain a healthy lifestyle
Effective communication
Take Regular breaks and rest
Stay organised
Eliminate distractions
SMART goals
Prioritization techniques
etc. Each of these has a couple of little points, for example
Eliminate Distractions:
Workspace: Maintain a tidy and dedicated workspace.
Digital Cleanse: Turn off non-essential notifications and limit social media time during work hours.
Then it will finish off with something like
Remember, improving productivity is a journey, not a destination. Continuous evaluation and adjustments to one's strategies can lead to sustained improvement.
You must have read something like this over the last few months. I am a web developer and while that list might look good, and seem practical to those on the outside, I can tell you now that from a web developer's point of view, it has fuck all to do with real life. Yes, they are valid points and would help, but so what? We all know how to "eat well", but if there is a deadline closing in the last thing on your mind is whether or not the meal you're eating is "balanced". Even though, maybe, it should be. Digital Cleanse - great idea, but tell me what is a "non-essential notification". I would argue that if you want to get anything done, all notifications are non-essential.
I've started to receive emails that are obviously AI-generated and I don't know what to make of them. There seems to be a lack of "human connection" for want of a better term, it is definitely a bit weird and I can't help thinking customers are going to start picking up on this. I'm interested to see what happens.
Anyway, I better wrap this one up I have work to do. So let me bring it to a close.
I understand that people are trying to contribute and are doing their best, so I don't want to knock that, but do us all a small favour, if you have used chatGPT or some other AI tool to produce a piece of work that you are pushing to the public admit it, so that the rest of us know what we are getting into. Push it out with a title such as
"The AI Perspective: ChatGPT's Take on Modern Tech Innovations"
"Demystifying Machine Learning: A Deep Dive with ChatGPT"
"ChatGPT's Essential Guide to Digital Transformation"
"Beyond Basics: Advanced Coding Practices Explained by ChatGPT"
"ChatGPT's Framework Selection: Choosing the Right Tools for Web Development"
etc. Yes, this list, like the rest of the text in this post that is in italics, was chatGPT generated.
One final thing, you may be reading this post thinking, blimey, this dude has a "bee in His bonnet". or, maybe this guy should have parsed this with chatGPT to improve the grammar and the spelling, or just to edit out the profanity, you may well be right. You might be thinking that instead of wasting 40 minutes writing this piece of shit, he would have been better off coding and doing his day job. You may well be right. But at least you are certain that this was written by a human being... or was it?
I need a coffee.
ps. If you are reading this and think I may be right can you promote this post? I am interested to see if I am the only one thinking this, or are other early adopters starting to feel the same way. Cheers. Bryan.