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ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

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Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s already getting that way with things like grammarly. It makes me sad. I know my colleagues who speak English as an additional language use it and find it helpful, but I much prefer whatever English they speak with be the same when they write. It makes engagement more interesting

Grammarly is very limited in what it allows you stylistically. I tried it for a few months but it didn't let me express all of my thoughts. However muddled and confused, those are my muddled thoughts, damnit.

I never cared for Grammerly and the like. I felt like they wanted to homogenize your voice and often dumb down your language. Google Docs' blue underlines, on the other hand, usually do point to an actual error of some sort.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#272
post #252

ChatGPT has been incredibly helpful in getting the skeleton of a text down on paper - a task that can often be tedious and time-consuming. Once the skeleton is in place, I am able to embellish it with my own flair, fix any factual errors, and make real progress. I'm not alone in my assessment of ChatGPT's potential. Many experts believe that the tool has the potential to significantly improve the productivity of writ…

Funny, I felt this was GPT written as I read. The tells: appeal to "experts" (in 2023 people don't write this way and I think the very nature of "expert" has been degraded in public's eyes) and the sort of perfunctory "however"

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#273
post #245
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also have to consider the kicking of the ladder away. Nobody gets to excellent without passing through the lower stages. Hard to stay motivated if it'll be 5 years just to see if maybe you have something a computer can't offer. Not impossible, but definitely a raising of the bar.

Reminds me of the guy who built his own os but took 17 years so the UI is terrible but a few years ago he finally finished. Someone will but that person isn't following a typical or even sane life and the results will be brilliant messes.

Yeah but Terry had manic-depression, schizophrenia, and possibly God, on his side.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society was awash in music for centuries before recording and radio.

If by "awash" you mean "significantly less present in regular people's life by orders of magnitude", then yes. Not to mention the degree of control over what music is actually being played.

[deleted]

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#275
I disagree but it's more nuanced. The issue with chatgpt is the same issue that lies at the heart of most problems in modern day society: the consolidation of power and wealth in private hands.

These tools are being used in the name of productivity, which isn't a bad thing in itself, but when it's used to make a small number of people more wealthy and put a large number of people out of work, then it's an issue.

I would venture to say the obsession with standardized tests sucking the fun out of school stems from the same problem. Namely, the commodification of our education system in service of our larger economic system.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#276

I'm less worried about stuff like ChatGPT killing things off, but more about just making everything noticeably a bit worse. To take an analogy: bad voice recognition software abounds everywhere, not because it is better than what it replaced in terms of UX, but because it works just enough and allows massive cost-savings on hiring people to do customer service jobs. A world where most marketing copy is written by med…

Also, how do you continue to train a model like this when everywhere you look is just output from the same model? Like, at some point, the real conversations and text gets overwhelmed by the fake stuff. Where does the model pull more training data from?

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#277
post #171

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> Trading quality for price Means that many, many more people can have something of passable quality. For example: > not that long ago all clothes you wore were custom made by a tailor If you could afford a tailor; otherwise you had to make do with homemade rags that constantly needed mending and looked terrible. > all the music you listened to was played live by musicians If you could afford to go to concerts. > all…

> > not that long ago all clothes you wore were custom made by a tailor > If you could afford a tailor; otherwise you had to make do with homemade rags that constantly needed mending and looked terrible. Or you bought clothes infrequently and maintained them, and they lasted longer because the quality was much better. People are so used to fast fashion these days that they assume that the poor in previous eras suffer…

Clothing today is low quality? I literally have jeans and shirts I bought from Walmart ten years ago in my rotation today. I would have more if my wife didn't keep getting rid of them...

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bad voice recognition software abounds everywhere, not because it is better than what it replaced in terms of UX, but because it works just enough and allows massive cost-savings on hiring people to do customer service jobs. This one really puzzles me. Voice recognition replaced phone trees. And from what I can tell, it's just worse. In this particular use case I don't think it really replaced tier 1 support. Eithe…

I just keep pressing 0 until a live person answers.

Some months ago I was trying to setup a medical appointment for my dad when the robo-voice picked up I got frustrated and shouted "kurwa" (an universal swearword in Polish). The automaton responded "I understand, connecting you to our consultants".

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > not that long ago all clothes you wore were custom made by a tailor > If you could afford a tailor; otherwise you had to make do with homemade rags that constantly needed mending and looked terrible. Or you bought clothes infrequently and maintained them, and they lasted longer because the quality was much better. People are so used to fast fashion these days that they assume that the poor in previous eras suffer…

People still have high quality clothing available, but when given the option they choose to buy cheaper clothing more frequently rather than mend high quality ones. This is a preference that has been demonstrated time and again throughout the world as it became an option. So no, I don't believe it is clear at all how this is to the detriment of the average person.

> People still have high quality clothing available, but when given the option they choose to buy cheaper clothing more frequently rather than mend high quality ones. This is a preference that has been demonstrated time and again throughout the world as it became an option.

This is extremely incorrect. First of all, fast fashion isn't actually necessarily cheaper. The real difference is that fast fashion exists in an industry that has gutted the entire infrastructure for alternatives, so people actually don't have the alternative options anymore.

It's like saying that "people prefer to drive cars, which is evident if you look anywhere in the US". Sure, almost everyone drives cars, but that's because the previous rail infrastructure was literally ripped up and destroyed by the auto industry, so now there's no alternative.

If you look at the developing world, it's very clear how incorrect your statement is, because there, fast fashion is more expensive, and other forms of clothing are far cheaper, far better quality, and far more common.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It exists to hide the fact that companies took a page out of Google's book and forewent customer service altogether.

This is more befuddling - they are replacing one automated system (button driven) with a worse automated system (voice driven). No one wins unless you still have a rotary phone.

The secret here is that for the majority of companies, the goal is not to support you as a customer effectively, but to rather minimize the amount of time spent organization wide supporting ALL customers. So to that end the automated systems are about frustrating customers to the point that they'll just "Go away" and the voice based systems are more frustrating than the button based ones, and infinitely more frustrating than actually talking to a human being who can actually help you, so it's a win for the majority of companies that just view customer service as a cost centre to be minimized, and it's a win for the SAAS companies that sell these useless, irritating and anti-consumer systems.
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