this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Programming
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ChatGPT is a language model, it's not intended for code and you're using it "off label" at your own risk. It can produce working code, which is impressive in itself, but in order to know if it's decent code you still need to be competent with that language. I had someone run a few prompts for me a while back, it ignored central parts of the query, and its output was basically like a very junior developer - fair enough, but not great or even that good.
Potentially useful, but if you expect it to be more than one part of the "process", you might be setting yourself up for trouble.
Edit: just like it's not a coder, it's not a search engine or knowledge base, either. It just knows language and what seems like it ought to follow a given phrase. Be very aware of this difference, because sometimes it spits out 100% falsehoods with the same level of confidence and authority as the true stuff.
I think it's important for people to also truly understand that generative machine learning models like ChatGPT also only "know" what they've seen before. There's no interpretation or synthesis. It merely regurgitates what it's seen, with some sampling from a probability distribution.
This means, if you're asking for something niche, and it's only seen what you're prompting it for once (or, really, the same text repeatedly across multiple websites) , there's a very good chance that it will just recreate that artifact wholesale.
Which means you need to be cognizant of what the license for that material is before you use it in a product!