I’m slightly amused that the AI-driven chatGPT chat bot has been banned from being used to write StackOverflow answers.
For the uninitiated, StackOverflow is a web forum where programmer and programmer-adjacent nerds like me ask questions about how to do various technical tasks so we look like we’re extremely proficient in our jobs.
chatGPT responses are prohibited on the basis that it sometimes produces answers that are surface-level plausible but in fact wrong. The problem is that it would take a human with expertise to know that the answers are wrong. Or “fluent bullshit” to quote a Verge article.
Personally I’d observe that humans on the internet are extremely not immune from producing reams of fluent bullshit, so perhaps it’s just a bad habit it picked up from us.
Other than that, chatGPT is a pretty incredible seeming system at first glance. You can sign up to try it for free here at present, which is well worth doing if you have even a slight interest. As it happens it has actually given me some useful answers to technical questions, as well as a lot of facility for wasting time.