We've been playing with chat gpt and gpt-3 in recent days and weeks to refine our sales pitch, generate variations of text for our website, etc. It saves a lot of time when you can just take your rough notes and turn it into a perfectly smooth and readable paragraph instantly. It does not replace what we do but it does speed up the process enormously. We can iterate faster on our drafts, use AI generated mockups to enliven our pitch, etc. We've barely scratched the surface of what we can do with this.
There are lots of people obsessing about feeling threatened in what they do by all this. It's an understandable response but not necessarily a productive attitude. It's really just an opportunity to reconsider what it is you do exactly and become better and more efficient at that. Perhaps if you spend most of your time trying to produce slides, designs, etc., freeing up some of that time for more high value activities is not such a bad thing and something that you should have been striving to do anyway. In our case, using our refined pitch to drive sales is what we should be doing. Spending time to refine the pitch is a necessary evil and not the main thing we should do or even want to do. So, this is an enabler not a threat for us.
I'm actually a CTO; so me spending time on sales pitches is not the most obvious use of my time. But in a small startup, if something needs doing, I probably need to be involved. So, anything that makes that more efficient is more than welcome.
> Perhaps if you spend most of your time trying to produce slides, designs, etc., freeing up some of that time for more high value activities is not such a bad thing
Maybe, but if doing that was my full time job then I would instantly feel less valuable and less secure.
I just don't buy the argument that AI/automation frees up time to do more valuable work at the individual level. Sure it's great for the organization. But if your job became obsolete tonight, simultaneously with thousands of other people, what "high value activities" would you do to earn money? I'm not saying that has happened but the day may be coming for us "knowledge workers".
The trend here is that knowledge work is becoming less valuable. Not everyone will be able to rise above the machines in this category.
Luckily we can probably still clean houses for a living, since it appears that robots will be able to write good code before they can wash dishes or make a bed.
It still astonishes me how much this mindset of "everyone needs to work as much as humanly possible regardless of how much stuff actually needs to be done" is baked into our brains.
Maybe the thing start doing when new technologies come along is ask "how can we rearrange ourselves so that now everyone works less time than they did before?"
Many desired goods are scarce, people will compete for scarce goods. There is a market clearing price.
To some the price is acceptable, to others the price seems like it forces them 'to work as much as humanly possible regardless of how much stuff actually needs to be done'.
People can have different desires. Nothing confusing in there.
Not meaningfully, from both directions at the same time. Most of the of goods we consume are produced with large quantities of mechanical labour and have been since the Industrial Revolution got going; conversely, one of the biggest costs we face in the G7 is the land, and the land is mainly expensive because of the other people all bidding against each other to be in good locations.
Visited Nairobi a few years back, and one of my partner’s local friends was complaining about the rent (one year for her in Nairobi was less than one month for me in Cambridge, because it was locals bidding against other locals for rent in both cases), but that friend was still able to get a smart phone (albeit a cheaper model than most people here would be OK with).
I’m a solopreneuer and I’ve been using it for everything from Upwork job ads to creating Bootstrap templates and React functions. It’s literally like an all-knowing assistant. I’ll happily pay good money for it.
I meant quick scaffolding, not the styling (though it can probably help with that too). Say, asking chatGPT to create a bootstrap template with two columns and three cards in the main container. Or asking it to create a card component with an icon in the center and heading text.
I can find the documentation online but its just much faster to get chatGPT to do it.
I definitely agree with the sentiment about GPT. It's a really powerful tool that can produce some really impressive outputs, but of course, it does have its limitations.
One of the things I really like about it is that it's not always perfect, yet still provides some really useful texts. It usually takes me a few tries to get exactly what I'm looking for, but it's definitely worth it. I've had a lot of fun using the generator to reimagine classic stories with different characters (I loved Cindirella one in but like in Blade setting).
Even with the help of the model's statistics, I still feel like I have a lot of ownership over the text that I create with the generator. It's kind of like ordering from a fast food restaurant instead of cooking from scratch - you still have certain expectations based on the statistics, like food safety or meat content, but you don't have to worry about all the details.
Having a tool like this to assist me with my writing is really appreciated. I can be a bit chaotic when I write, so having a tool that helps me organize my thoughts is a huge help. I can't wait for the text generator to be commercialized so I don't have to worry about timeouts anymore.
The novel thing with ChatGPT (besides the language model) is the interface and how flexible the informal question answer interface is.
I’m trying to imagine what other interfaces could expose value from these existing AI tools value simply by making it easier and as low effort as possible.
Similar to how GitHub Copilot/Tabnine automatically suggests completions as unobtrusively as possible without requiring a lot of manual intervention. Just as an extension.
Once we have a google glasses type augmented reality this sort of light automated assistance can be fed automatically into our lives. Just by hearing or looking at something it could turn it into an automated prompts and be unobtrusively suggested or visually fed into our lives. Auto-translation of foreign languages is the obvious AI example with AR.
Maybe other interfaces such as direct MacOS integration the way the smart search box/Alfred style works or browser extensions.
We just use the openai freemium layer like everybody else. So, cost for this is so far zero and we are definitely saving time and effort. We'd probably end up paying for this if this starts showing up in mainstream products for creating content. Our CEO actually pays for midjourney, which he uses for mockups and other things. I expect this will start happening pretty soon as there probably are a lot of clued in business people discovering just how useful this is.
You get some free usage, and then pay per token after that. Once you've done that you can play with chatGPT for free, as of now. It does time out fairly frequently since so many people are playing with it.
There are lots of people obsessing about feeling threatened in what they do by all this. It's an understandable response but not necessarily a productive attitude. It's really just an opportunity to reconsider what it is you do exactly and become better and more efficient at that. Perhaps if you spend most of your time trying to produce slides, designs, etc., freeing up some of that time for more high value activities is not such a bad thing and something that you should have been striving to do anyway. In our case, using our refined pitch to drive sales is what we should be doing. Spending time to refine the pitch is a necessary evil and not the main thing we should do or even want to do. So, this is an enabler not a threat for us.
I'm actually a CTO; so me spending time on sales pitches is not the most obvious use of my time. But in a small startup, if something needs doing, I probably need to be involved. So, anything that makes that more efficient is more than welcome.