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I had to work with a list of the 50 states abbreviations, full names, etc. Previously, I'd have found the data somewhere with Google et al and then manipulated it myself into the JSON I needed. But this time I asked GPT to not only source the data, but also return it structured to my liking—with revisions ("please include Guam and Puetro Rico")

Lots of my searches are simply I want an answer, but often times I also want to then do something with the result. This is where ChatGPT is going to eat Google's lunch, IMO.



this seems like the kind of thing that gpt would potentially hallucinate something like "East Virginia" or "Ardakota" complete with abbreviation, and maybe that's fine with 50 states but you're playing with fire if it's something you can't immediately catch the mistake

also, how hard is it to get a list of abbreviations, and wrap them all in quote and comma and brackets. with vim that's barely more work than a copy-paste


> but you're playing with fire if it's something you can't immediately catch the mistake

Agreed. I was able to manually review 52 results, but wouldn't trust it blindly.

> also, how hard is it to get a list of abbreviations, and wrap them all in quote and comma and brackets.

Not hard at all. And I may still do that, but it was pretty enjoyable to ask the machine.


with revisions ("please include Guam and Puetro Rico")

Your wrote "please" to ChatGPT?

FWIW, Miss Manners had a column a couple of weeks ago where she stated that we should not say please or thank you to machines, including Siri and Alexa.

I was surprised.


> Your wrote "please" to ChatGPT?

Yup. So when the machines take over, hopefully they'll enslave me last, or put me in a more pleasant Matrix instance compared to the average.



I did. I even asked ChatGPT if having "please" and "thank you" included in my prompts affects it in any way shape or form—it told me "No".

I still do it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


What we don't know is whether that "No" is actually a "No".




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