Mostly the same. I tried ChatGPT a few times to get it to generate some code, but mostly it produced code that didn’t even compile and when I asked it to fix it, it created code that didn’t compile in a different way. I enjoy writing code on my own a lot more than having to review some pre-generated code.

Though I use it as a glorified Google sometimes and that is not even so bad.

The LLMs for text are also based on “theft”. They’re just much better at hiding it because they have a multitude more source material. Still, it does sometimes happen that they quote a source article verbatim.

But yeah basically they’re just really good copy/paste engines that work with statistical analysis to determine the most likely answer based on what’s written in basically the whole internet :P It’s a bit hard to explain sometimes to people who think that the AI really “thinks”. I always say: If that were the case, why is the response to a really complicated question just as fast as a simple one? The wait is just based on the length of the output.

In terms of the “theft” I think it’s similar ethically to google cache though.

I despise that the artwork generators are all based on theft.

Ownership of anything is difficult to define. The internet has accelerated this loosening of definition. If I pay a subscription to use my coffee pot, do I really own it? If I take a picture of the coffee pot, do I own the picture? If I pay a photographer to take a picture of the pot do I own the picture, do I own their time?

I don’t intend on trying changing your opinion on theft, but its interesting to think about how ownership feels very different as time goes by.

I totally agree with Linus Torvalds in that AIs are just overhyped autocorrects on steroids

Did he say that? I hope he didn’t mean all kinds of AI. While “overhyped autocorrect on steroids” might be a funny way to describe sequence predictors / generators like transformer models, recurrent neural networks or some reinforcement learning type AIs, it’s not so true for classificators, like the classic feed-forward network (which are part of the building blocks of transformers, btw), or convolutional neural networks, or unsupervised learning methods like clustering algorithms or principal component analysis. Then there are evolutionary algorithms and there are reasoning AIs like bayesan nets and so much much much more different kinds of ML/AI models and algorithms.

It would just show a vast lack of understanding if someone would judge an entire discipline that simply.

I would argue they already have. Just as cars used to be slow, inefficient, and loud, compared to today. Overtime their will inevitably be improvements in how they run, but also improvements in dedicated hardware support. Timeline wise, we are enjoying the hot new Model T, knowing eventually we will get to have a modern Honda Civic.

Copying is not stealing. It’s corporate propaganda conflating the two.

This article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF, and this one by Katherine Klosek, the director of information policy and federal relations at the Association of Research Libraries are a good place to start.

Oh that reminds me of another use of it last year. I let it translate some official divorce papers from Korean to German and then let a human read through it and give it a stamp of approval. Payed $5 for the stamp instead $70 for the translation.

Naming things in programming is a solved problem now. You can just name it Thingy, and then ask Copilot Chat what it should be called when you’re done implementing it

Wait, porn?

Its also great for readmes. I have a template that I follow for that and only work on one section at a time.

Templates in sections are somewhere where it shines. I set up a template for giving information about a song – tempo, scales used and applicable overlapping ones, and other misc stuff. It’s really nice for just wanting to get going, it’s yet to be inaccurate. It’s quite nice, having a fast database that’s mostly accurate. I do scrutinize it, but honestly even if it were to be wrong one day, it’s just music and the scale being “wrong” can only be so wrong anyhow.

I use it for exactly the same thing.

I used to spend hours agonizing over documenting things because I couldn’t get the tone right, or in over explained, or some other stupid shit.

Now I give my llamafile the code, it gives me a reasonable set of documentation, I edit the documentation because the LLM isn’t perfect, and I’m done in 10 minutes.

Dito, although probably not in the same way you mean :D I’ve actually noticed that I respond stronger to erotic short stories than straight up videos or images, so I use AI for basically erotic fantasy chatting. Some of them can actually generate images to show surroundings or chars during conversations and weave them into the chat.

I’ve found it useful for TTRPGs too. Art generators are certainly helpful for character portraits, I also find ChatGPT can be useful for lots of other things. I’ve had pretty mediocre results trying to get it to generate a whole adventure but if you give it tight enough parameters then it can flesh out content for you - ranging from NPC name ideas, to ideas for custom magic items, to whole sections of dialogue.

You can give it a plot hook you have in mind and ask it to generate ideas for a three-act structure and encounter summary to go with it (helpful when brainstorming the party’s next adventure), or you can give it an overview of an encounter you have in mind and ask it to flesh out the encounter - GPT4 is reasonably good at a lot of this, I just wouldn’t ask it to go the whole way from start to finish in adventure design as it starts to introduce inconsistencies.

You also need to be ready to take what it gives you as a starting point for editing rather than a finished product. For example, if I ask it to come up with scene descriptions in D&D then it has a disproportionate tendency to come up with things that are ‘bioluminescent’ - little tells like that which show it’s AI generated.

Overall - you can use it as a tool for a busy DM that can free you up to focus on the more important aspects of designing your adventure. But you need to remember it’s just a tool, don’t think you can outsource the whole thing to it and remember it’s only as helpful as how you try to use it.

One of my favorite things to do is pass my speech into it and have it rewrite with fog index “#”. Really helps with speaking to varied audiences about the same topic.

So many times I wanted to know the name of an actor who played a character after the first episode and the top result was something like “[Character Name] (deceased)” or " Villain: [Character Name]."