Christopher Mims
I spent the past two weeks using generative AI in every aspect of my life, both personal and professional.
At the end of my total immersion, here's my verdict:
The last time I had an experience this eye-opening and transformative was when I bought my first smartphone.
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Warner Crocker
@mimsical Terrific piece.
John Socks
@Jfrites @mimsical @tchambers Right, and the people who do not carefully judge the results of the AI, but slam it out there, will obviously win on volume. They will be "more productive."
This is not a theoretical risk, it's something that's happening already.
https://www.popsci.com/technology/ai-generated-text-scientific-journals/
Jfrites
@mimsical @tchambers I use it daily for my contracting work as a tool.
I think what most people don’t get is the effort you have to put into it to make it useful to you.
Yes you can ask it to do ‘something’ and it will spit out an answer, but that answer normally sucks.
You need to reason, train, and provide information to get you to the destination.
Christopher Mims
Something real is going on here and it will profoundly alter the landscape of employment for millions of people -- there are 100 million 'knowledge workers' in the U.S. alone!
The only way to fully understand what's coming is to play with these AIs yourself. There's both less here than the zealots would have you believe, and way more than the critics argue.
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Christopher Mims
At the other end of the spectrum, knowledge workers who perform a large number of tasks that can't be automated, are still going to be using all kinds of AI assistants in the not too distant future. (Plenty of them already are.)
Today's GPTs are way more capable at some things than is immediately apparent. They are starting to become plain-language programming environments.
Hence all the custom GPTs in the OpenAI GPT Store.
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Christopher Mims
This is not to say that today's GPTs think, or reason, or any of that nonsense.
But their everyday utility gets lost in all the noise about turning them into AGI, or a future in which everyone's on UBI because the machines took over, or whatever.
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Christopher Mims
Here's the thing about ChatGPT and the like: The reason it has close to 200 million users is that there are tons of people -- freelancers, small businesses -- who find it genuinely useful.
You're doing your own marketing in your spare time and you need tools to make it much easier to get your message out? This is the way.
Wordsmiths (like me) and artists might not like it, but this is the future of a lot of tossed off but important "content"
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Christopher Mims
@WarnerCrocker thanks Warner!
Warner Crocker
@mimsical 👍🏻
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