This is mad AF

I gave GPT-4 a budget of $100 and told it to make as much money as possible.

I'm acting as its human liaison, buying anything it says to.

Do you think it'll be able to make smart investments and build an online business?

Follow along 👀 pic.twitter.com/zu4nvgibiK

— Jackson Greathouse Fall (@jacksonfall) March 15, 2023

I was dubious at first but then tried it for a few things, not as a replacement for learning something but as additional and it’s been very useful!

What I don’t like is when I saw our junior team members having it as a favourite on their browser, bearing in mind these are peopl in the early stages of their careers in IT and I don’t believe there are shortcuts to learning and luckily it’s still humans that do the promoting!

I will say, a few of these users every after passing basic industry grade quals are still very poor at their job and I’m struggling to understand how! It’s like the younger generation just don’t give a toss, want more money but can’t even get the fundamentals right! Yes we have an issue! We now can’t seem to be able to promote from within to our team as the team that escalate work to us…. Are terrible at their own jobs! Sorry, this turned into a bit of a rant!!

I’ve found it incredibly useful for doing some simple tasks that would have taken me hours. For example, I needed to take a CSV full of addresses and prices, and show them all on a map using Javascript. A working solution popped out in about 5 seconds, but what really impressed me was a back-and-forth where I described something that wasn’t working as I expected, and I got a solution which wasn’t just a change of variable names or something, but the fix that I’d have done myself.

I have the advantage of a degree in Computer Science which pushed a strong practical line on software development. I recognise ChatGPT as a very useful tool to bounce ideas off and get working solutions to simple problems. For anything more complicated it can still be handy, but ultimately if you can’t hold and conceive what you want to do in your head, it’ll hit a brick wall quickly.

The other big thing is that if you write the code yourself you know how it works when you go back to make changes the next day. ChatGPT has forgotten this and so the existing code cannot be adapted or extended without an innate knowledge of what it’s doing.

So if I were a half-arsed junior developer I’d be worried. If I ran the company, I’d be overjoyed.

We’ve started to explore its capabilities at writing property generation rules and custom connectors in our identity management solution. Normally it’ll take a pretty good developer a few months to grasp the various nuances of our solution. We’ve been astonished at how quickly it can pick things up and generate really effective solutions.

I’ve not tried v4 yet, but from what I’ve heard, you can give it even more abstract concepts and it’ll churn out solutions just as efficiently. Scary stuff, but also fascinating.

Sorry, I’m very out of my depth with all of this, and have only just taken a look at the thread, so apologies if it’s not relevant, but I have a couple of queries.

The first is a ‘mortality’ issue. I would guess that a totally unfettered AI system could be employed for any number of nefarious activities. Clearly there will be checks in place to stop it being used illegally, but what about legal, but, arguably, immoral activities? There are plenty online stores and auction housing happily taking money for facilitating trade in pirated or invalidly licenced software, claiming only to be providing the marketplace. ChatGPT is a financial concern; do you think they’ll be happy monetising the use of the AI for dubious purposes (thinking the writing of dissertations that would pass the current crop of plagiarism checkers, or perhaps writing computer code that could be used for hacking or malware purposes, as examples)?

The second thought is about ownership of the ‘output’. Clearly the ChatGPT code is proprietary but the information it learns from and uses to generate output (the internet) is not it’s property and quite possibly will be owned by other parties.

Following on from recent legal action from certain news publishers demanding reimbursement when Facebook posts their stories to peoples’ feeds, could the ChatGPT owners be similarly targeted by content/data providers if their data is used to generate a commercial ChatGPT solution?

Clearly there will be checks in place to stop it being used illegally, but what about legal, but, arguably, immoral activities?

Yep, loads of potential to be used for immoral activities.

One that springs to mind is use as a political tool to generate messaging that’s based on a person’s likes/dislikes, history, prejudices etc. The ability to spam social media with highly effective and personalised messaging that’s impossible to distinguish from human interactions.

could the ChatGPT owners be similarly targeted by content/data providers if their data is used to generate a commercial ChatGPT solution?

I don’t think this will be a problem. It reinterprets and adapts from existing sources in much the same way that a human writer does. The copy it generates is designed to pass plagiarism tests.

ChatGPT will accelerate the decline of civilisation by flooding the world with bullshit to such an extent that many people will have no idea what to believe.