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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   2531 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 6, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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whole lineup of self-described experts in the industry trying to sell it as a productivity tool

No shortage of snake oil people around, looking for the next big thing to try to sucker people into swiping the credit card.

BUT!

It is a massive productivity tool.

Can’t speak to your day to day or possible ways it can help (in short: it can), but I’ve been using it for:

  1. In-house coder in building a practical web app (I can read a decent amount of code but I’ve never written code professionally). It’s helped me get to a working prototype in roughly 8 hours of prompting/testing/fixing/retesting.
  2. Trained GPTs for some very specific writing/editing projects, which allows me to get to a very solid first draft in about 10 minutes instead of 2 hours.
  3. Analyze thousands of rows of data and give some recommended actions, likely costs, potential benefits and timeframes. (This was SEO and web analytics data.)
  4. Teaching me loads of things. NOT information. More a conversation that allows me to go deeper in my self-education on a particular topic (e.g. coding, mathematics, finance, spreadsheet functions etc etc).

A broader more philosophical question is the possible impact of all this productivity on society and individuals. Will people become less resourceful? Will society as a whole become habituated to forcefed AI-generated soulless crap? Who knows. Probably second, third and fourth order effects that can’t be predicted. But overall, if you actually work with it rather than expect it to do something for you from start to finish, and then get good at working with it, you can fast track the hell out of a lot of things.

The value it has as basically being a "really smart friend" with infinite patience and an extremely deep well of knowledge is hard to overstate.

But man, if it gets to the point where you can actually start replacing your friends with it and it can fine-tune its responses to make an idealized conversation partner... or partners, no reason it couldn't simulate multiple roles in a conversation... it seems likely to drive further atomization.

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