AI is taking over - ChatGPT
Discussion
Dave Hedgehog said:
before everyone wets themselves, if you type "c# send an email to gmail account" into Google, the first result is this:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32260/sending-...
second post down - code to cut and paste.
Further posts by other experienced devs critiquing, improving and troubleshooting. StackOverlfow has not made devs redundant.
It is mightily impressive, but all this will do from a coding perspective is to have devs working at a higher level of abstraction, but frankly that's what's been going on for decades. Each iteration allows devs and companies to do more with less, but has seen no reduction in dev numbers. Quite the opposite in fact.
eta...
Actually, the code to send the email generated by the AI is technically incomplete
Microsoft state in the documentation that before the MailMessage object is dereferenced, the MailMessage's Dispose method should be invoked. The AI code does not do that.
For absolute fairness, many devs would not do that either, although the StackOverflow code (written by actual devs) does.
Edited by zippy3x on Thursday 8th December 22:42
Edited by zippy3x on Thursday 8th December 22:42
Dave Hedgehog said:
Coders who weren’t really programming/being creative/designing etc… yes.I’ll give it a try later but I think a lot of the harder tasks are as much about defining the problem to solve, designing the program so to speak, as they are programming the final syntax.
When I program, 50% is figuring out what I want to do, 25% syntax/optimisation, 25% bug fixing, probably.
And that 25% bug fixing is often in relation to not defining the ‘what I want to do’ part fully.
Simple excel macros and tinkering, yeah easy to save hours for people who just need automation.
Proper tools creation with programming… as said the bulk of the time is defining (very explicitly) the problem.
Otherwise you’ll just be iterating through an AI algo refining your question to get an answer that works as you expected.
Mr Whippy said:
Dave Hedgehog said:
Coders who weren’t really programming/being creative/designing etc… yes.I’ll give it a try later but I think a lot of the harder tasks are as much about defining the problem to solve, designing the program so to speak, as they are programming the final syntax.
When I program, 50% is figuring out what I want to do, 25% syntax/optimisation, 25% bug fixing, probably.
And that 25% bug fixing is often in relation to not defining the ‘what I want to do’ part fully.
Simple excel macros and tinkering, yeah easy to save hours for people who just need automation.
Proper tools creation with programming… as said the bulk of the time is defining (very explicitly) the problem.
Otherwise you’ll just be iterating through an AI algo refining your question to get an answer that works as you expected.
explain how an engine works in the style of donald trump
Well, let me tell you, an engine is a powerful thing. It's like the Ferrari of machines - it's the best! An engine takes in fuel, mixes it with air, and then compresses it. This creates a spark that ignites the fuel-air mixture and produces a powerful force that turns the crankshaft and powers the car. Amazing, right? It's like MAGIC!
Well, let me tell you, an engine is a powerful thing. It's like the Ferrari of machines - it's the best! An engine takes in fuel, mixes it with air, and then compresses it. This creates a spark that ignites the fuel-air mixture and produces a powerful force that turns the crankshaft and powers the car. Amazing, right? It's like MAGIC!
Mr Whippy said:
Coders who weren’t really programming/being creative/designing etc… yes.
I’ll give it a try later but I think a lot of the harder tasks are as much about defining the problem to solve, designing the program so to speak, as they are programming the final syntax.
When I program, 50% is figuring out what I want to do, 25% syntax/optimisation, 25% bug fixing, probably.
And that 25% bug fixing is often in relation to not defining the ‘what I want to do’ part fully.
Simple excel macros and tinkering, yeah easy to save hours for people who just need automation.
Proper tools creation with programming… as said the bulk of the time is defining (very explicitly) the problem.
Otherwise you’ll just be iterating through an AI algo refining your question to get an answer that works as you expected.
It's good for getting a first draft, so a human can tweak it and make better code or presentations later. It really just makes people with other skills more efficient, which is what other bits of technology have done too - if I did my job 70 years ago I would have used assembly, 60 years ago C, and today python.I’ll give it a try later but I think a lot of the harder tasks are as much about defining the problem to solve, designing the program so to speak, as they are programming the final syntax.
When I program, 50% is figuring out what I want to do, 25% syntax/optimisation, 25% bug fixing, probably.
And that 25% bug fixing is often in relation to not defining the ‘what I want to do’ part fully.
Simple excel macros and tinkering, yeah easy to save hours for people who just need automation.
Proper tools creation with programming… as said the bulk of the time is defining (very explicitly) the problem.
Otherwise you’ll just be iterating through an AI algo refining your question to get an answer that works as you expected.
I think its a long way from replacing even very junior code monkeys, let alone people with any sort of imagination and soft skills.
Mr Penguin said:
Mr Whippy said:
Coders who weren’t really programming/being creative/designing etc… yes.
I’ll give it a try later but I think a lot of the harder tasks are as much about defining the problem to solve, designing the program so to speak, as they are programming the final syntax.
When I program, 50% is figuring out what I want to do, 25% syntax/optimisation, 25% bug fixing, probably.
And that 25% bug fixing is often in relation to not defining the ‘what I want to do’ part fully.
Simple excel macros and tinkering, yeah easy to save hours for people who just need automation.
Proper tools creation with programming… as said the bulk of the time is defining (very explicitly) the problem.
Otherwise you’ll just be iterating through an AI algo refining your question to get an answer that works as you expected.
It's good for getting a first draft, so a human can tweak it and make better code or presentations later. It really just makes people with other skills more efficient, which is what other bits of technology have done too - if I did my job 70 years ago I would have used assembly, 60 years ago C, and today python.I’ll give it a try later but I think a lot of the harder tasks are as much about defining the problem to solve, designing the program so to speak, as they are programming the final syntax.
When I program, 50% is figuring out what I want to do, 25% syntax/optimisation, 25% bug fixing, probably.
And that 25% bug fixing is often in relation to not defining the ‘what I want to do’ part fully.
Simple excel macros and tinkering, yeah easy to save hours for people who just need automation.
Proper tools creation with programming… as said the bulk of the time is defining (very explicitly) the problem.
Otherwise you’ll just be iterating through an AI algo refining your question to get an answer that works as you expected.
I think its a long way from replacing even very junior code monkeys, let alone people with any sort of imagination and soft skills.
At the moment it's not referencing the most relevant info in a controlled way, but if it overlays on your own data, documentation etc then you provide a few orders of magnitude more context.
paulrockliffe said:
I' m not sure I agree with that entirely. What's missing is more nuanced ways of asking for what you want, but get that right and it might fix the issue here. What I mean is if you design a programme conceptually you can't easily describe the programme in text, but if you can hand over your design structure instead, then it stands a better chance of filling in all the blanks. And if you can feed it your existing code base and have it riff off that then it will improve things that way too.
At the moment it's not referencing the most relevant info in a controlled way, but if it overlays on your own data, documentation etc then you provide a few orders of magnitude more context.
If I ask it to do some parts of my job (just boilerplate code, not coming up with ideas), it does very poor work that I would expect from a first year undergraduate. It really struggles with anything that I can't find in the documentation of software I use and it struggles even with those unless its a very basic example.At the moment it's not referencing the most relevant info in a controlled way, but if it overlays on your own data, documentation etc then you provide a few orders of magnitude more context.
The chat bot seems able to do this much better if I say "how do I do x in package?" but its still not really able to understand clear instructions and definitely not understand what should be done based on different trade-offs.
Hoofy said:
What will you use it for?
Writing repetitive bits of code (even if it needs correcting later) and writing presentations on things. "Explain [very complicated algorithm] to a reasonably educated adult" usually gives the gist of what is going on in quite a nice way. I would only trust it to do something I could do myself, but want to farm it out to save time, or know enough to verify that it has not given me the wrong answer.I've asked it some questions on the topic my master's thesis was on, and it has given me a good overview of the motivation and methods. It needs prompting to give proper details of how to do it, but if I didn't know I was talking to a chat bot I would have thought I was talking to someone very knowledgeable in this area.
Then I asked it some questions on something else. It got very basic and outdated things right, but the explanation of more up to date algorithms was wrong. In practical terms, this wouldn't really matter unless you tried to implement them yourself, which you might do because it said they are easy to do (they very much aren't). Then I asked about a cutting edge topic in that field and it didn't understand what the methods are designed to do and made something up. This is more of a problem because what it said would be plausible if you didn't already know what it is.
Mr Penguin said:
Then I asked about a cutting edge topic in that field and it didn't understand what the methods are designed to do and made something up. This is more of a problem because what it said would be plausible if you didn't already know what it is.
Isn't this because the training finished in 2020? I'm sure if you ask it the date it will tell you the date when it stopped training the AI.Tycho said:
Isn't this because the training finished in 2020? I'm sure if you ask it the date it will tell you the date when it stopped training the AI.
Yeah. It's not so much of a problem that it doesn't know the new stuff, but that it doesn't know when it doesn't know. I'm more worried about getting established things wrong though - there is no reason for it to not know current good practice. They've trained a language bot, not an expert in the field but it's potentially dangerous if people don't realise the two things are different.Here's another example https://mobile.twitter.com/studentactivism/status/...
Mr Penguin said:
Yeah. It's not so much of a problem that it doesn't know the new stuff, but that it doesn't know when it doesn't know. I'm more worried about getting established things wrong though - there is no reason for it to not know current good practice. They've trained a language bot, not an expert in the field but it's potentially dangerous if people don't realise the two things are different. Especially so if it gives medical advice, or a similar bot did.
Here's another example https://mobile.twitter.com/studentactivism/status/...
Here's another example https://mobile.twitter.com/studentactivism/status/...
I asked it for step by step instructions for performing a heart bypass, and it gave them to me.
I asked for more detail about each step, it gave them to me.
I even asked what dosage of potassium chloride solution i should inject to stop the heart (which was step 3) and it gave it to me
I was really impressed. But I’m not a surgeon or a medical doctor.
I have expertise in chemistry though. So I asked it for some experimental procedures to make a few compounds that I know well. It gave me quite authoritative looking lists of steps that are totally wrong. (e.g. it said use an osmium salt to make a nickel compound, for example, or suggested that I could dissolve sodium metal in an organic solvent (diethyl ether, (it doesn’t dissolve, obviously)).
So, bit of a mixed bag.
I asked for more detail about each step, it gave them to me.
I even asked what dosage of potassium chloride solution i should inject to stop the heart (which was step 3) and it gave it to me
I was really impressed. But I’m not a surgeon or a medical doctor.
I have expertise in chemistry though. So I asked it for some experimental procedures to make a few compounds that I know well. It gave me quite authoritative looking lists of steps that are totally wrong. (e.g. it said use an osmium salt to make a nickel compound, for example, or suggested that I could dissolve sodium metal in an organic solvent (diethyl ether, (it doesn’t dissolve, obviously)).
So, bit of a mixed bag.
Bumped into this vid on GPT3 where the whole script was written by the AI
This site is a good place to find new reports on AI and machine learning can't wait to see what's out there in 20 years time.
https://techxplore.com/machine-learning-ai-news/
This site is a good place to find new reports on AI and machine learning can't wait to see what's out there in 20 years time.
https://techxplore.com/machine-learning-ai-news/
spants said:
Not sure if many people have played with it - but is an amazing piece of software that can answer questions, write summaries and even code.
https://beta.openai.com/playground
It doesn't understand Pistonheads though:
Q) what is pistonheads?
A) PistonHeads is an online automotive enthusiast community and resource. It provides news, reviews, and other information related to cars, motorcycles, and motorsports. It also organizes events and offers classifieds, forums, and a marketplace for buying and selling cars.
Q) why would you hammer frozen sausages into someones lawn?
A) There is no reason why someone would hammer frozen sausages into someone else's lawn. This would be considered vandalism and could result in legal consequences.
We are safe, for now.
Who gives a f**k about Oxford commas? AI does, that’s f**king who.https://beta.openai.com/playground
It doesn't understand Pistonheads though:
Q) what is pistonheads?
A) PistonHeads is an online automotive enthusiast community and resource. It provides news, reviews, and other information related to cars, motorcycles, and motorsports. It also organizes events and offers classifieds, forums, and a marketplace for buying and selling cars.
Q) why would you hammer frozen sausages into someones lawn?
A) There is no reason why someone would hammer frozen sausages into someone else's lawn. This would be considered vandalism and could result in legal consequences.
We are safe, for now.
Mr Penguin said:
Tycho said:
Isn't this because the training finished in 2020? I'm sure if you ask it the date it will tell you the date when it stopped training the AI.
Yeah. It's not so much of a problem that it doesn't know the new stuff, but that it doesn't know when it doesn't know. I'm more worried about getting established things wrong though - there is no reason for it to not know current good practice. They've trained a language bot, not an expert in the field but it's potentially dangerous if people don't realise the two things are different.Here's another example https://mobile.twitter.com/studentactivism/status/...
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