To ChatGPT or not to ChatGPT, that’s the Question!
So here I am writing a blog after ages. I have always had ideas to write about but just too lazy to put pen to paper (fingers to keys?). Though for the topic at hand, I felt like I needed to write about this.
We have seen tremendous progress in the field of Artificial Intelligence specially Conversational AI. With ChatGPT seriously being a game changer and then with GPT 4 released, a lot of high profile people have stepped up talking about how the recent spike in AI advancement needs to be controlled. I understand why this rapid advancement in AI can be dangerous and how corporate greed can lead to problems down the road, but as things stand, AI is going to continue advancing at a very high pace.
As people from different professions fear for their jobs being replaced by AI, one has to understand it’s better to adapt than to fight. Lets take the example of chatGPT, as a programmer, I recently realised how useful ChatGPT can be for me (yes I am late to the party). For me, the approach whenever I hit a roadblock was the same as it has been since I started studying Software back in 2011. Google it and hope someone has the same question on stackoverflow or reddit. If not, go through the docs of the said library. This approach so far has paid dividends, but if the problem is a bit complex and not that common, it can take a lot of time to find the right solution.
I came across a similar problem recently when I was trying to use the rpy2 library that helps you run R using python. With very little academic experience of R, and that too from 5 years ago, finding the solution was proving to be difficult. Questions on stackoverflow did not seem to cover my problem. The docs made little sense as I was not really aware of R data types. After hours spent diving deeper into the never ending pit of google search results, I decided to give chatGPt a try. I asked my question in detail and waited as the cursor prompt blinked for a few seconds and then the AI started typing the answer.
The answer started off by giving a brief description of the problem at hand and its solution. It then followed it up with an example and actual code. The answer seemed adequate so I decided to copy and paste the provided code, modify it a little to suit my requirements and run the code. To my utter astonishment, it worked just as I wanted it to. At that time I realised that if opting to ask chatGpt for help was my first approach, I could have saved a couple of hours.
Now, ChatGPT isn’t perfect for another problem I faced. ChatGPT told me to pass an argument to a function in rpy2 library, which it does not accept. So it does make mistakes but you can tell it in reply that it did not work and it needs to give you the right answer and it will try again (though it may fail again). You can always rephrase your question and hope for better answers.
Since then, I have been using ChatGPT a lot more. If I hit a problem and Googling it does not return an answer on the first few links, I jump to chatGPt and let it have a swing. More often than not, our little AI friend gets the answer right.
What I found, chatGPT being very useful for is asking niche questions which cater for a particular situation. Questions for which you may have to dig into the library’s document to see how things are actually done to have a better understanding, chatGPt can save you hours of research by giving you a very direct answer. Now granted, you should take the answers with a grain of salt since there is a possibility the answer may be wrong but in most cases, it proves to be quite accurate.
The basic idea that I am trying to share is; AI advancement at an insane pace is most probably going to continue. The fear is somewhat justified but shunning a technology out of fear of what it may impact down the road is not the right solution. One needs to adapt and use these technologies for their own benefit. If chatGPT can help me reduce my search for a solution from 30 down to 5 minutes, that is an additional 25 minutes I have in the day to be more productive. Use these technologies for your own good, utilise them to increase your efficiency and get more stuff done. We need to adapt and adopt the latest tech and utilise it for our own benefit.