this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
988 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
59555 readers
3436 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I remember when it first came out I asked it to help me write a MapperConfig custom strategy and the answer it gave me was so fantastically wrong - even with prompting - that I lost an afternoon. Honestly the only useful thing I've found for it is getting it to find potential syntax errors in terraform code that the plan might miss. It doesn't even complement my programming skills like a traditional search engine can do; instead it assumes a solution that is usually wrong and you are left to try to build your house on the boilercode sand it spits out at you.
I've found the free one can sometimes answer tip of my tongue questions but yeah anything even remotely obscure it will just lie and say that doesn't exist, especially if you stray a little too close to the puritanical guard rails. One time I was going down a rabbit hole researching human sex organ variations and it flat out told me the people in South America who grow a penis at 12 don't exist until I found the name guevedoces on my own, and wouldn't you know it then it knew what I was talking about.
Have you used copilot? I find it to be fantastically useful.
I also have tried to use it to help with programming problems, and it is confidently incorrect a high percentage (50%) of the time. It will fabricate package names, functions, and more. When you ask it to correct itself, it will give another confidently incorrect answer. Do this a few more times and you could end up with it suggesting the first incorrect answer it gave you and then you realize it is literally leading you in circles.
It's definitely a nice option to check something quickly, and it has given me some good information, but you really can't blindly trust its output.
At least with programming, you can validate fairly quickly that it is giving bad information. With other real-life applications, using it for cooking/baking, or trip planning, the consequences of bad information could be quite a bit worse.