Dealing with anything AI, particularly chatgpt has been a matter of pick your Stooge, Larry, Moe, or Curly (Joe). History lesson included.
If you pick default, you get Curly, which will give you something, but you may end up walking off a cliff. Never a good choice, but maybe low-hanging fruit.
Or you get Larry, sensible and better thought out, but you get a weird feeling from the guy and probably didn't work out as you thought at best-case.
Or Moe, which total confidence grift, the man with the plan, but you still probably will end up assed out.
ChatGPT 3.5 was Curly, 4.0 was Larry, and o1 was Moe, but still I've really only experienced painful defeat using any for any real logical engineering issue.
AI as it stands is good for people like me. I use it to aid my own memory, first and foremost. I used to have a near-perfect memory for events and speech (or snippets), songs, poems. Not photographic memory. And not quite eidetic, either. I just used copilot to remember "eidetic." AI lets me correlate an idea or a partial memory to the full thing. If i remember a line from a movie but don't remember the movie or actor, and someone tells me the name of the movie, i can play the scene in my head, and usually at least make a hilarious labeling error - "Poor man's Jeff Goldblum, what's his name?" If the entirety of text on the internet doesn't quite know what i am talking about, or gives obviously wrong suggestions, i usually rethink my priors.
Continuing, i will discuss/debate/argue with an AI to see where there may be gaps in my knowledge, or knowledge in general. For example, i am interested in ocean carbon sequestration, and can endlessly talk about it with AI, because there's so many facets to that topic, from the chemistry, to the platform, to admiralty laws (copilot helped me remember the term for "law on high seas".) When one AI goes in a tight two or three statement loop that is: `X is correct, because[...]`; `X actually is not correct. Y is correct in this case, because[...]`; `Y is not correct. X|Z is correct, here's why[...]` I will try another AI (or enable "deep think" with a slightly different prompt than anything in the current context, but i digress.)
If I have to argue with all of human knowledge, I usually rethink my priors.
But more importantly, I know what a computer can do, and how. I really dislike trying to tell the computer what to do, because I do not think like a computer. I still get bit on 0-based indexes every time I program. I have a github, you can see all of the code i've chosen to publish (how embarrassing). I actually knew FORTRAN pretty alright. I was taught by a Mr. Steele who eventually went on to work for Blizzard North. I also was semi-ace at ANSI BASIC, before that. I can usually do the first week or so of Advent of Code unassisted. I've done a few projecteuler. I've never contributed a patch (like a PR) that involved "business logic". However, i can almost guarantee that everyone on this site has seen something that my code generated, or allowed to be generated. Possibly not on github. All this to say, i'm not a developer. I'm not even a passable programmer.
But the AI knows what the computer can do and how to tell it to do that. Sometimes. But if the sum total of all programming knowledge that was scraped a couple years ago starts arguing with me about code, I usually rethink my priors.
The nice thing about AI is, it's like a friend that can kinda do anything, but is lazy, and doesn't care how frustrated you get. If it can't do it, it can't do it. It doesn't cheer me up like a friend - or even a cat! But it does improve my ability to navigate with real humans, day to day.
Now, some housekeeping. AI didn't write this. I did. I never post AI output longer than maybe a sentence. I don't get why anyone does, it's nearly universally identifiable as such. I typed all of this off the cuff. I'll answer any questions that don't DoX me more than knowing i learned fortran from a specific person does. Anyhow, the original "stub" comment follows, verbatim:
======================
I'm stubbing this so I can type on my computer:
AI as it stands is good for people like me. I use it to aid my own memory, first and foremost. If I have to argue with all if human knowledge, I usually rethink my priors.
But more importantly, I know what a computer can do, and how. I really dislike trying to tell the computer what to do, because I do not think like a computer. I still get bit on 0-based indexes every time I program.
But the AI knows what the computer can do and how to tell it to do that. Sometimes. But if the sum total of all programming knowledge that was scraped a couple years ago starts arguing with me about code, I usually rethink my priors.
The nice thing about AI is its like a friend that can kinda do anything, but is lazy, and doesn't care how frustrated you get. If it can't do it, it can't do it.
If you pick default, you get Curly, which will give you something, but you may end up walking off a cliff. Never a good choice, but maybe low-hanging fruit.
Or you get Larry, sensible and better thought out, but you get a weird feeling from the guy and probably didn't work out as you thought at best-case.
Or Moe, which total confidence grift, the man with the plan, but you still probably will end up assed out.
ChatGPT 3.5 was Curly, 4.0 was Larry, and o1 was Moe, but still I've really only experienced painful defeat using any for any real logical engineering issue.