ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time
I can&#x27;t tell what is worse now: the sycophantic ChatGPT hype guys&#x2F;gals who write articles &quot;it&#x27;s coming for all of our jerbs!&quot;, or articles like this one that deliberately misuse ChatGPT and then say &quot;it&#x27;s overhyped&quot;.<p>They&#x27;re both missing the point.<p>Yes, ChatGPT can be tricked, confidently give wrong answers, but it is still ludicrously useful.<p>It is basically like having an incredibly smart engineer&#x2F;scientists&#x2F;philosopher&#x2F;etc that can explain things quite well, but for pretty much every field. Does this &quot;person&quot; make mistakes? Can&#x27;t cite their sources? Yeah this definitely happens (especially the sources thing), but when you&#x27;re trying to understand something new and complex and you can&#x27;t get the &quot;gist&quot; of it, ChatGPT does surprisingly well.<p>I&#x27;ve had it debug broken configs on my server and router (and explain to me why they were broken), help me practice a foreign language I&#x27;ve slowly been forgetting (hint: &quot;I would like to practice $language, so let&#x27;s have a conversation in $language where you only use very simple words.&quot; -&gt; ChatGPT will obey), and help me understand how to use obscure software libraries that don&#x27;t have much documentation online (e.g. Boost Yap, useful but with a dearth of blog &#x2F; reddit posts about it).<p>Does it sometimes goof up? Yep, but it is <i>such an incredibly useful tool</i> nonetheless for the messy process of learning something new.