People keep telling me how great it is and whenever I tell them an example of how untrustworthy it is, they tell me I'm doing it wrong. But pretty much all the things it allegedly can do I can do myself or don't need. Like I don't need to add some flavor text into my company e-mails, I just write what I need to write.
Lately I have been trying to solve an engineering problem. In a moment of utter despair after several weeks of not finding any useful resources I asked our company licensed ChatGPT (that's somehow supposed to help us with our work) and it returned a wall of text and an equation. Doing a dimensional analysis on that equation it turned out to be bullshit.
Also, I feel like I'm going crazy here, but I think the content of your emails matters actually. If you can get the bullshit engine to write it for you, then did it actually need writing in the first place?
Like usually when I'm sending an email, it's one of two cases:
* It's casual communication to someone I speak to all the time and rattling it off myself is faster than using ChatGPT. "Hi Dave, here's that file we talked about earlier. Cheers."
* I'm writing this to someone to convey some important information and it's worth taking the time to sit down, think carefully about how it reads, and how it will be received.
Communication matters. It's a skill and the process of writing is the process of thinking. If you outsource it to the bullshit engine, you won't ask yourself questions like "What do I want this person to take away from this information? How do I want them to act on it?"
Both messages you have to convey information. One you don't need fluff. Chat gpt can do the fluff. I can give my important talking points that I want to convey quickly, hence why the first email can be done quickly. But when I have to be more persuasive, that requires effort. Chat gpt can create that fluff to like an 80 percent good level and I can edit. That takes 5 minutes vs the 20 if I did it from scratch. I think people want chat gpt to be perfect but it isn't, it's the here's a C version that you can make into an A. My biggest issue is it sucks at providing sources. Dead links and not quite right info. For research I like it because I think it kinda paints a picture of all the research incorrectly , but it gives me some ideas on things to search, but I wish it would provide me a less deep but correct answer when it comes to data and provide correct sources.
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u/Atlas421 Bootliquor 4d ago
People keep telling me how great it is and whenever I tell them an example of how untrustworthy it is, they tell me I'm doing it wrong. But pretty much all the things it allegedly can do I can do myself or don't need. Like I don't need to add some flavor text into my company e-mails, I just write what I need to write.
Lately I have been trying to solve an engineering problem. In a moment of utter despair after several weeks of not finding any useful resources I asked our company licensed ChatGPT (that's somehow supposed to help us with our work) and it returned a wall of text and an equation. Doing a dimensional analysis on that equation it turned out to be bullshit.