The operative word in hype cycles is always will. Blockchains will revolutionize this, web3 will revolutionize that, stable diffusion will do this, ChatGPT will do that.
Talk to me about what it actually has changed and you may convince me.
I think you're misreading the situation with AI. It's already doing extremely useful things, and will continue to pop up all over the place, I expect.
* I already talk to my phone to type more than I actually type on it. This is finally made my phone roughly as efficient as my laptop for simply inputting English text.
* An artist named darknut worked for years in the Morrowind community to retexture Morrowind and creating a new higher resolution texture pack. ESRGAN upscaling lapped his work in a matter of weeks. I love his work, but the change in efficiency was a change in kind.
* I haven't done it myself, but I've heard countless reports of programmers simply asking for a program with a given set of specifications to be written, and having the resulting source code available seconds later.
* I wanted character sheet portraits for a role-playing scenario I was creating, and stable diffusion was able to generate half a dozen portraits in about a half an hour that were perfectly suitable. This just wasn't possible a year ago.
I never got on the web3 hype train, but I'm already finding AI useful, and I don't expect it to play a less useful role over time.
- I could use it as is for customer service chatbots if I could trust it (hard nut to crack, but I see it coming. You.com already has a nice factual chatbot that usually delivers sources to its claims.
- I use it to sum articles or rephrase silly "philosophers speak" to me
- It could easily write business email fluff for me (just don't need that too much luckily)
Non ChatGPT:
- Even plain intent detection is great to replace these "press n for X" machines on the phone
- audio clean-up is amazing ("imagines" a HQ recording from a noisy one)
- neural speech to text is amazing (the tik-talk voice is a good popular example, but there are even better ones)
I had to write 40 individualized reports this weekend. I fed my notes into GPT, along with a few directions about style, and it spit out competent reports that mostly only required tweaking. It saved me from losing my Sunday too.
I see people saying things like this online, and I have to wonder what their standards for "good" or "competent" or whatever are. I'm not going to ask you to post those reports so I can "judge" them. You shouldn't and none of us cares that deeply anyway, but I'm still waiting for a good example of actual useful work done by these things. I'm replying to you randomly, there are other posts like this in this thread.
On the art front, every single piece of art that I see is bad. Not bad like a human not being able to draw, but bad in a different but still obvious (to me, at least) way.
On a personal front, I had a lot of fun generating funny pictures based on inside jokes with my friends a few weeks ago, but lately it barely makes us smile. I think the novelty is wearing off, so even that is gone.
Ultimately, it's not going to matter what I think, enough people think this is good content that it will be flooding the internet soon. It's all so tiresome.
Automated stupid and poorly planned tasks will just ossify whatever system forced you to work a stupid and poorly planned task. All you are doing is making your future life harder.
