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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2638 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 31, 2024

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  1. How often do you use generative AI, and is it for leisure or work?
  2. How are you using it, and how deep down the prompt engineering rabbit hole have you gone?
  3. What is your favorite model?

Sadly, in my workplace, use cases in descending order of frequency are: Generating funny images for powerpoint slides > generating funny names for things > asking scientific questions. I subscribed to Chatgpt4 and have been using it a fair amount over the last several months, and while it is quite helpful, it's far from accelerating my work in a largely meaningful way. I'm curious whether people have any recommendations for other models or specific prompts beyond 'take a deep breath and answer step by step' or 'my grandmother will die if I get this wrong.'

I use it every day, mostly for work. I don't do much prompt engineering. I don't usually find it necessary and it's very difficult to get it to to do what you want anyway. For example, no matter how much I insist I don't like lists, ChatGPT insists on explaining things with lists. I use it mostly for finding bugs in code and for telling me how to do something simple that I don't know or don't remember how to do. I also sometimes ask it to do things that are a little complicated that I am not sure how to do. This is very hit or miss, but might give me an idea for a better way to do it. Anything too complex, it can't handle.

Less often, I use it as a better Google search. There are certain kinds of things it is way better at getting information on. I also use it to take pictures of things and tell me what they are or to ask questions about it.

People are work use it to write emails for them, but I don't do this because it takes me just as long to write the email myself as it does to explain to ChatGPT what to write, and I'll do a better job anyway.

My favourite model is ChatGPT-4, because it is the only advanced LLM I can use in Canada.

I certainly use GPT-4 for impromptu medical lessons and debates, and to sometimes have a intelligent bouncing board for my ideas. It's also great for just asking random questions on topics that would otherwise take far more effort or reliance on the kindness of strangers.

I use image generation mostly to create art I enjoy, to illustrate hilarious visuals from Xianxia or to create pieces for my own work.

Sadly (or happily), it doesn't augment my productivity in my day job particularly much, but that'll inevitably change.

If you're looking for fiction, Claude Opus is great. It convincingly manages to emulate my own style from short excerpts, and does a good job at writing overall. Far less LLM-y when it comes to tone too. I suspect it can do more, but I'm not paying $24 a month to find out, when GPT-4 via Bing is free.

I suspect that most of the image generation capacity is being used by turboautists making 100+ pictures of the same thing in slightly different variations every single day. Not that I'd know anything about that of course.

I have co-workers who rave about ChatGPT, but I don't think it's all that useful. I will occasionally get desperate and ask it something, but most of the time it just makes shit up. That said, there are a couple of use cases that it actually handles well.

  1. When I need to knock out a quick script for something, but I don't want to spend time looking up the APIs to do what I want (or in the case of bash scripts, I can't be arsed to learn the syntax). Easy enough to check its work and it's usually correct.
  2. When I need to find documentation for something, but the documentation is poorly organized (looking at you, AWS). ChatGPT generally gets this right as well and again, it's easy enough to check.

So overall, it is a nice laziness aid in some situations but mostly is pretty useless. I really can't understand the hype around it.

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