ChatGPT Just Dropped and I Have Thoughts
okay so chatgpt is out and i've been playing with it for a week and i have many thoughts.
what happened
openai released chatgpt on november 30th. it's a chatbot. you talk to it. it talks back. sounds simple except it's actually kind of terrifying?
within five days it had a million users. within a week everyone was posting screenshots of it writing essays, explaining code, having philosophical debates.
and i'm sitting here like: what is happening.
the things it can do
i asked it to explain recursion. it gave a clear, accurate explanation with examples.
i asked it to debug my code. it found the bug. the actual bug. that i'd been looking at for an hour.
i asked it to write a poem about merge conflicts. it did. it was funny.
i asked it to explain why my ex and i broke up. it politely declined but offered to discuss healthy communication patterns.
the things it can't do (yet)
it makes stuff up. confidently. like, it'll cite a paper that doesn't exist and act like it's real.
it's bad at math sometimes (though it can explain math concepts well).
it doesn't actually know anything current. its knowledge cuts off somewhere.
it can be repetitive. everything ends with "in conclusion" or "ultimately" and it loves bullet points.
my actual reaction
honestly? i'm a little freaked out.
i'm a first-year CS student. i'm learning to do things that this AI can apparently already do. what does that mean for my career? for the next five years? for the field in general?
but also... it's a tool. it gets things wrong. it needs a human to validate its output. it can't actually build or deploy anything. it just generates text.
(for now. the "for now" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.)
the optimistic take
maybe this makes developers more productive. maybe it handles the boring stuff and we do the interesting stuff. maybe it's like how calculators didn't kill math.
the pessimistic take
maybe a lot of entry-level work goes away. maybe the bar for "useful human" gets higher. maybe everything is about to change in ways we can't predict.
the realistic take
probably it's both. probably there are opportunities and disruptions. probably some jobs change, some disappear, some emerge. probably the people who adapt fastest do best.
what i'm doing about it
learning. paying attention. not panicking (mostly). trying to understand the technology, not just fear it.
and honestly? using it. because it's here, and pretending it isn't won't help.
asked chatgpt to summarize this blog post. it did a pretty good job. not sure how i feel about that.