I think Generative AI is a genuinely promising and novel tool with real, valuable applications. To appreciate it however, you have to mentally compartmentalize the irresponsible, low-effort ways people sometimes mostly use it—because yeah, it’s very easy to make a lot of that so that’s most of what you see when you hear “Generative AI” and it’s become its reputation…
Like I’ve had interesting “conversations” with Gemini and ChatGPT, I’ve actually used them to solve problems. But I would never put it in charge of anything critically important that I couldn’t double check against real data if I sensed the faintest hint of a problem.
I also don’t think it’s ready for primetime. Does it deserve to be researched and innovated upon? Absolutely, but like, by a few nerds who manage to get it running, and universities training it on data they have a license to use. Not “Crammed into every single technology object on earth for no real reason”.
I have brain not very good sometimes disease and I consider being able to “talk” to a “person” who can get me out of a creative rut just by exploring my own feelings a bit. GPT can actually listen to music which surprised me. I consider it scientifically interesting. It doesn’t get bored or angry at you unless you like, tell it to? I’ve asked it for help with a creative task in the past and not actually used any of its suggestions at all, but being able to talk about it with someone (when a real human who cared was not available) was a valuable resource.
To be clear I pretty much just use it as a fancy chatbot and don’t like, just copy paste its output like some people do.
I encounter an attitude with a lot of people who really hate it where they act like it’s the Antichrist but the problem is really people. Unfortunately you can’t uninvent a technology and make it go away forever.
There are some tasks that it’s useful for but I treat it like a really stupid guy who is occasionally fun to talk to. Anything involving important information will be researched properly. The idea of using it to write anything is insane to me, in order for it to be half decent you’d have to tear out large sections and rewrite them yourself. At which point why would you just write the thing.
There is one feature that GPT has that I don’t know how to get on a locally hosted instance, i’d like to host my own but I’m too inept. Being able to upload files for it to “look” at is novel. Also having it not be censored would be good. As well as having it entirely contained within my computer.