misunderstood

gpt-me

surprisingly¹, i have more or less ignored the hype around gpt-4 and other llms. they’re objectively useful, and so-called “prompt engineers” are making more than i am (despite the fact that i’m actually working). without too much effort, i could set up some ai pair programming… but i just don’t care enough to.

i think part of the reason is because i actually genuinely like to write the code myself, so my motivation to set it up is low. another part is because i’m not convinced that it would actually save me time. lastly (and maybe most significantly), i’m just a stubborn piece of shit.

ubiquitous

it happens far too often that i’m sitting in a cafe and i see someone (usually working in sales/marketing) unironically generating emails/product outlines/etc. using chat gpt, and it hurts my soul. but it shouldn’t. i think i need to reframe my perspective on what valid use cases of tools like chat gpt are.

indeed it’s not just “cheating” or “laziness” that makes people lean on ai content generation. i think it it can actually be a valuable way to increase productivity and bolster creativity.

admittedly, my resistance to use it may just be because i don’t know how to very well. before i sat down to write this, i tried to feed chat gpt a few of my notes and get it to do my work for me. i found that my craftsmanship is either not easily forged, or i just don’t know how to get the ai gods to respect me.

ai overlord

i promise i’ll actually give it a shot. i do really think it can be quite impressive. just look at this ascii art of a dog it made for me…

make me ascii art of a dog

 / \__
(    @\___
 /         O
/   (_____/
/_____/   U

i may not understand it, and it may not fully understand me either, but it does seem to have a good sense of the world. although i know it doesn’t have a brain or true synapses, it really seems like it does.

make me ascii art of a brain

   _____
  /      \
 |        |
  \______/

wait, that’s not a brain

Apologies for that. Here's an ASCII art representation of a brain:
   _-~~-,
 _-~ _-~-_
:   /     \ :
|  |       |  |
:  |       |  :
 \  |     |
  ~-|     |
    |    |
    |    |

well, not always.