If you are trying to write a blog/essay/etc on a topic, it can help with “writer’s block”-you may know a lot about the topic already, but struggle with putting that understanding into words. And then it isn’t hard to filter ChatGPT’s output based on your pre-existing knowledge.
Sometimes I don’t know the answer to the specific question I am asking it, but still have enough background knowledge of the topic to pick up when it is likely to be “hallucinating”
I have tried it with:rust, dart, and swift
ChatGPT can often show you when the premise of the question is wrong or assumes things that are not true. Making it easy to search on google after.
I mean, taken to the extreme, I can probably read through the source of VLC and know that it's correct, given enough years to read it and study video compression standards etc. Does that mean I don't get use out of someone else having written VLC for me?
Knowing something is right and producing it are completely different things. You might be thinking of ChatGPT too narrowly, as a simple question-answer thing, but even now you can ask it to write code that will save you time, and scale it up by a few factors and it's doing the equivalent of writing new libraries for you. (Probably many years before it can write VLC for you, if ever.)
If you're asking ChatGPT to teach you something, you have no such easy verification you can do: you essentially need to learn the same material from another source in order to cross-check it. Obviously this is easy for small factual questions. If I ask ChatGPT the circumference of the Earth, I can quickly figure out whether it's reliable or not on that point. But at the other extreme if I ask it to do a music theory analysis of the Goldberg Variations, it's going to take me about as much work to validate the output as to have just done the analysis myself.
I mostly use it for programming type work now. Write a little snip of code (personal projects only) or tell me how to use a library. I also use it to teach me things. I find it incredibly useful for this.
ChatGPT is still free for me but it is glitchy at times. I would definitely pay the $20/ month one it is available in my region.
However, I think you are somewhat on the right track as “AI” shows us which types of work can be removed all together. I think, if “AI” can do it, it’s not necessary work to begin with. Eg. instead of “AI” doing formal correspondence for us, we could then just have an interface to exchange raw information directly, as the human element is lost anyway.
