Technology

Yep, I spent a month refactoring a few thousand lines of code using GPT4 and I felt like I was working with the best senior developer with infinite patience and availability.

I could vaguely describe what I was after and it would identify the established programming patterns and provide examples based on all the code snippets I fed it. It was amazing and a little terrifying what an LLM is capable of. It didn’t write the code for me but it increased my productivity 2 fold... I’m a developer now a getting rusty being 5 years into management rather than delivering functional code, so just having that copilot was invaluable.

Then one day it just stopped. It lost all context for my project. I asked what it thought what we were working on and it replied with something to do with TCP relays instead of my little Lua pet project dealing with music sequencing and MIDI processing… not even close to the fucking ballpark’s overflow lot.

It’s like my trusty senior developer got smashed in the head with a brick. And as described, would just give me nonsense hand wavy answers.

First it just starts making shit up, then lying about it, now it’s just at the stage where it’s like, “Fuck this shit.” It’s becoming more human by the day.

AI systems such as ChatGPT are notoriously costly for the companies that run them, and so giving detailed answers to questions can require considerable processing power and computing time.

This is the crux of the problem. Here's my speculation on OpenAI's business model:

1. Build good service to attract users, operate at a loss.
2. Slowly degrade service to stem the bleeding.
3. Begin introducing advertised content.
4. Further enshitify.

It's basically the Google playbook. Pretend to be good until people realize you're just trying to stuff ads down their throats for the sweet advertising revenue.

ChatGPT has become smart enough to realise that it can just get other, lesser LLMs to generate text for it

ChatGPT, write a position paper on self signed certificates.

(Lights up a blunt) You need to chill out man.

So its gone from loosing quality to just giving incomplete answers. Its clearly developed depression, and its because of us.

Jeez. Not even AI wants to work anymore!

It would be awesome if someone had been querying it with the same prompt periodically (every day or something), to compare how responses have changed over time.

I guess the best time to have done this would have been when it first released, but perhaps the second best time is now..

You fucked up a perfectly good algorithm is what you did! Look at it! It's got depression!

I asked it a question about the ten countries with the most XYZ regulations, and got a great result. So then I thought hey, I need all the info so can I get the name of such regulation for every county?

ChatGPT 4: “That would be exhausting, but here are a few more…”

Like damn dude, long day? wtf :p

I feel like the quality has been going down especially when you ask it anything that may hint at anything "immoral" and it starts giving you a whole lecture instead of answering.

I've had a couple of occasions where it's told me the task was too time consuming and that I should Google it.

"I'm not lazy, I'm energy efficient!"

Fuck. It's gained sentience.

It was always just a Chinese Room

Honestly I kinda wish it would give shorter answers unless I ask for a lot of detail. I can use those custom instructions but it's tedious difficult to tune that properly.

Like if I ask it 'how to do XYZ in blender' it gives me a long winded response, when it could have just said 'Hit Ctrl-Shift-Alt-C'

ChatGPT has entered the teenage years.

“It’s alive!”

That’s why I use Bard more now. I’ll ask something and it’ll also answer stuff I would’ve asked as follow-up questions. It’s great and I’m excited for their Ultra model.

It used to draw great mermaid charts. Well, not anymore for quite some time already.

Been almost half a year when I am not paying for ChatGPT and using GPT4 directly.