Asklemmy

High school history teacher here. It’s changed how I do assessments. I’ve used it to rewrite all of the multiple choice/short answer assessments that I do. Being able to quickly create different versions of an assessment has helped me limit instances of cheating, but also to quickly create modified versions for students who require that (due to IEPs or whatever).

The cool thing that I’ve been using it for is to create different types of assessments that I simply didn’t have the time or resources to create myself. For instance, I’ll have it generate a writing passage making a historical argument, but I’ll have AI make the argument inaccurate or incorrectly use evidence, etc. The students have to refute, support, or modify the passage.

Due to the risk of inaccuracies and hallucination I always 100% verify any AI generated piece that I use in class. But it’s been a game changer for me in education.

I don't have any bosses, but as a consultant, I use it a lot. Still gotta charge for the years of experience it takes to understand the output and tweak things, not the hours it takes to do the work.

A junior team member sent me an AI-generated sick note a few weeks ago. It was many, many neat and equally-sized paragraphs of badly written excuses. I would have accepted "I can't come in to work today because I feel unwell" but now I can't take this person quite so seriously any more.

I had a coworker come to me with an "issue" he learned about. It was wrong and it wasn't really an issue and the it came out that he got it from ChatGPT and didn't really know what he was talking about, nor could he cite an actual source.

I've also played around with it and it's given me straight up wrong answers. I don't think it's really worth it.

It's just predictive text, it's not really AI.

I've played around with it for personal amusement, but the output is straight up garbage for my purposes. I'd never use it for work. Anyone entering proprietary company information into it should get a verbal shakedown by their company's information security officer, because anything you input automatically joins their training database, and you're exposing your company to liability when, not if, OpenAI suffers another data breach.

I've been using it a little to automate really stupid simple programming tasks. I've found it's really bad at producing feasible code for anything beyond the grasp of a first-year CS student, but there's an awful lot of dumb code that needs to be written and it's certainly easier than doing it by hand.

As long as you're very precise about what you want, you don't expect too much, and you check its work, it's a pretty useful tool.

not chatGPT - but I tried using copilot for a month or two to speed up my work (backend engineer). Wound up unsubscribing and removing the plugin after not too long, because I found it had the opposite effect.

Basically instead of speeding my coding up, it slowed it down, because instead of my thought process being

1. Think about the requirements
2. Work out how best to achieve those requirements within the code I'm working on
3. Write the code

It would be

1. Think about the requirements
2. Work out how best to achieve those requirements within the code I'm working on
3. Start writing the code and wait for the auto complete
4. Read the auto complete and decide if it does exactly what I want
5. Do one of the following depending on 4 5a. Use the autocomplete as-is 5b. Use the autocomplete then modify to fix a few issues or account for a requirement it missed 5c. Ignore the autocomplete and write the code yourself

idk about you, but the first set of steps just seems like a whole lot less hassle then the second set of steps, especially since for anything that involved any business logic or internal libraries, I found myself using 5c far more often than the other two. And as a bonus, I actually fully understand all the code committed under my username, on account of actually having wrote it.

I will say though in the interest of fairness, there were a few instances where I was blown away with copilot's ability to figure out what I was trying to do and give a solution for it. Most of these times were when I was writing semi-complex DB queries (via Django's ORM), so if you're just writing a dead simple CRUD API without much complex business logic, you may find value in it, but for the most part, I found that it just increased cognitive overhead and time spent on my tickets

EDIT: I did use chatGPT for my peer reviews this year though and thought it worked really well for that sort of thing. I just put in what I liked about my coworkers and where I thought they could improve in simple english and it spat out very professional peer reviews in the format expected by the review form

A lot of people are going to get fucked if they are...

It's using the "startup method" where they gave away a good service for free, but they already cut back on resources when it got popular. So what you read about it being able to do six months ago, it can't do today.

Eventually they'll introduce a paid version that might be able to do what the free one did.

But if you're just blindly trusting it, you might have months of low quality work and haven't noticed.

Like the lawyers recently finding out it would just make up caselaw and reference cases. We're going to see that happen more and more as resources are cut back.

Some of my co-workers use it, and it's fairly obvious, usually because they are putting out even more inaccurate info than normal.

Why should anyone care? I don't go around telling people every time I use stack overflow. Gotta keep in mind gpt makes shit up half the time so I of course test and cross reference everything but it's great for narrowing your search space.

I've done so on rare occasion, but every time it made stuff up. Wanted terraform examples for specific things... and it completely invented resource types that don't exist.

Not sure how it could help me solder or find faults on PCBs.

I use it to write performance reviews because in reality HR has already decided the results before the evaluations.

I'm not wasting my valuable time writing text that is then ignored. If you want a promotion, get a new job.

To be clear: I don't support this but it's the reality I live in.

Only used it a couple of times for work when researching some broad topics like data governance concepts.

It’s a good tool for learning because you can ask it about a subject and then ask it to explain the subject “as a metaphor to improve comprehension” and it does a pretty good job. Just make sure you use some outside resources to ensure you’e not being hallucinated all over.

My bosses use it to write their emails (ESL).

When I'm pissed off I use it to make my emails sound friendly.

My supervisor uses ChatGPT to write emails to higher ups and it's kinda embarrassing lol. One email he's not even capitalizing or spell checking, and the next he has these emails are are over explaining simple things and are half irrelevant.

I've used it a couple times when I can't fully put into words that I'm trying to say, but I use it more for inspiration than anything. I've also used it once or twice in my personal life for translating.

Yes, although there's been a huge spike in cancer diagnosis I've been giving out since doing so. Whoops!

I'm a DM using ChatGPT to help me build things for my DnD campaign/world and not telling my players. Does that count? I still do most of the heavy lifting but it's nice to be able to brainstorm and get ideas bounced back. I don't exactly have friends to do that with.

As a language model, I have neither boss nor co-workers.

Not at all. Had a few experiments, then we had a talk about it at work, decided fuck we're not giving these people our source code, and left it at that.

I mean in the end, all ChatGPT could reliably do was scavenge man-pages for me. Which is neat, but also a rather benign trick tbh.

I find it helpful to translate medical abbreviations to English. Our doctors tend to go overboard with abbreviations, there are lots I know but there are always a few that leave me scratching my head. ChatGPT seems really good at guessing what they mean! There are other tools I can use, but ChatGPT is faster and more convenient - I can give it context and that makes it more accurate.

There was some issue that came up relating to network shares on a Windows domain that didn't make sense to me and a colleague. I asked GPT to describe why we were seeing whatever behavior and it defined the scope of the feature in a way that completely demystified my coworker. I'm a Mac and Linux guy, so while I could loosely grasp it, it was gone from my mind shortly after. Windows domains and file sharing has always been bizarre to me.

Anyway, we didn't hide it. He gave it credit when explaining the answer to the rest of the team in a meeting. This was around the end of last year. The company since had layoffs and I'm looking for a new job, but I did have it reformat my resume and it did a great job. I've never been great at page-layout stuff, as I'm a plain text warrior.

My whole team was playing around with it and for a few weeks it was working pretty well for a coupl3 of things. Until the answers started to become incorrect and not useful.

I have very few writing tasks that don't require careful consideration, so it's not super useful in my day to day. But it can be helpful to get the ball rolling on an outline or first draft so I'm not staring at a blank sheet of paper.

A friend of mine just used it to write a script for an Amazing Race application video. It was quite good.

How the heck did it access enough source material to be able to imitate something that specific and do it well? Are we humans that predictable?

I use it for help with formal language sometimes, but I do not trust it and would never try to pass off a whole generated text as mine. I always review it and try to make it sound my own.

Yesterday I was working on a training PowerPoint and it occurred to me that I should probably simplify the language. Had GPT convert it to 3rd-grade language, and it worked pretty well. Not perfect, but it helped.

I'm also writing an app as a hobby and, although GPT goes batshit crazy from time to time, overall it has done most of the coding grunt-work pretty well.