ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

These “AI is a gimmick that does nothing” articles mostly just communicate to me that most people lack imagination. I have gotten so much value out of AI (specifically ChatGPT and Midjourney) that it’s hard to imagine that a few years ago this was not even remotely possible.

The difference, it seems, is that I’ve been looking at these tools and thinking how I can use them in creative ways to accomplish a goal - and not just treating it like a magic button that solves all problems without fine-tuning.

To give you a few examples:

- There is something called the Picture Superiority Effect, which states that humans remember images better than merely words. I have been interested in applying this to language learning – imagine a unique image for each word you’re learning in German, for example. A few years ago I was about to hire an illustrator to make these images for me, but now with Midjourney or other image creators, I can functionally make unlimited unique images for $30 a month. This is a massive new development that wasn’t possible before.

- I have been working on a list of AI tools that would be useful for “thinking” or analyzing a piece of writing. Things like: analyze the assumptions in this piece; find related concepts with genealogical links; check if this idea is original or not; rephrase this argument as a series of Socratic dialogues. And so on. This kind of thing has been immensely helpful in evaluating my own personal essays and ideas, and prior to AI tools it, again, was not really possible unless I hired someone to critique my work.

The key for both of these example use cases is that I have absolutely no expectation of perfection. I don’t expect the AI images or text to be free of errors. The point is to use them as messy, creative tools that open up possibilities and unconsidered angles, not to do all the work for you.

It is refreshing to see I am not the only person who cannot get LLMs to say anything valuable. I have tried several times, but the cycle "You're right to question this. I actually didn't do anything you asked for. Here is some more garbage!" gets really old really fast.

It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.

I personally feel like some of the AI hype is driven by it's ability to create flashy demos which become dead end projects.

It's so easy to spin up an example "write me a sample chat app" or whatever and be amazed how quickly and fully it realizes this idea, but it does kinda beg the question, now what?

I think in the same way that image generation is akin to clipart (wildly useful, but lacking in depth and meaning) the AI code generation projects are akin to webpage templates. They can help get you started, and take you further than you could on your own, but ultimately you have to decide "now what" after you take that first (AI) step.

AI is gimmick, smartphones are gimmick, computers are gimmick, automation is gimmick, books are gimmick, only %MY_ENLIGHTMENT% is not.

Seriously, I understand saying something lime this about crypto or whatever meme of the day, but even current LLMs are literal magic. Instead of reading 10 pages of empty water and wasting my time, ChatGPT can summarize this as

> Malesic argues that AI hype—especially in education—is a shallow gimmick: it overpromises revolutionary change but delivers banal, low-value outputs. True teaching thrives on slow, sacrificial human labor and deep discussion, which no AI shortcut can replicate.

Hardly any revolutionary thought.

> “Human interaction is not as important to today’s students,” Latham claims

Goodness that's depressing. Is this going to crank individualism up to 11?

I remember hating having to do group projects in school. Most often, 3/5 of the group would contribute jack shit, while the remaining people had to pick up the slack. But even with lazy gits, the interactions were what made it valuable.

Maybe human/-I cooperation is an important skill for people to learn, but it shouldn't come at the cost of losing even more human-human cooperation and interaction.

For me the usefulness of LLMs is proportional to how shitty google has become. When searching for something you get a bunch of blog spam or other SSO optimised shit results to pages that open dozens of popups asking you to subscribe or make an account. ChatGPT gives you the answer immediately and I must say I find it helpful 90% of the time.

For simple coding questions it is also very good because it takes your current context into account. It is basically a smarter "copy paste from stack overflow".

At least for now LLMs do not replace any meaningful work for me, but they replace google more and more.

One of the realisations I've had recently is that the AI hype feels like another level from what's come before because AI itself is creating the "hype" content fed to me (and my bosses and colleagues) all over social media.

The FOMO tech people are having with AI is out of control - everyone assumes that everyone else is having way more success with it than they are.

I used AI to summarize this whole article and give me takeaways - it already saved me like 0.5h of reading something that in the end I would disagree with since the article is IMHO to harsh on AI.

I found AI extremely useful and easy sell for me to spend $20/m even if not used professionally for coding and I'm the person who avoid any type of subscription as a plague.

Even in educational setting that this article mostly focus about it can be super useful. Not everyone has access to mentors and scholars. I saved a lot of time helping family with typical tech questions and troubleshooting by teaching them how to use it and trying to solve their tech problem themselves.

I always found myself to be very good at Googling/Searching. Or asking: like emailing an expert or colleague. I'm good at condensing what I'm trying to ask and good at knowing what they could be misunderstanding, or what follow up questions they might have, to save some back- and forth. The corresponding thing on google is predicting what I might see, and adding negative search terms for them.

BUT, and this is I think why some of us feel ChatGPT is poor: asking in this way that guides a human or a search engine, makes ChatGPT produce worse answers(!).

If you say "What can be wrong with X? I'm pretty sure it's not Y or Z which I ruled out, could it be Q or perhaps W"? Then ChatGPT and other language models quickly reinforce your belief instead of challenging them. It would rather give you an incorrect reason why you are right, than provide you an additional problem, or challenge your assumptions. If LLMs could get over the bullshit problem, it would be so much better. Having a confidence and being able to express it is invaluable. But somehow I doubt it's possible - if it was, then they would be doing it already as it's a killer feature. So I fear that it's somehow not achievable with LLMs? In which case the title is correct.

I think it's in human nature to force any topic to be all "good" or "bad". I agree with most criticisms this author has about the performance of AI -- it _is_ very bad at writing essays, and dare I say most things (including code), based on a single prompt. But to say it is a gimmick and compare it with technologies that died or are dying seems to me like a visceral response, perhaps after experiencing the overflow of AI-generated homework (a use of AI that ultimately just wastes everyone's time).

I think most people in here know at least a few ways they can use AI that is genuinely useful to them. I suppose if you're _very_ positive about AI, then it's good to have a polarized negative article to make us remember all the ways AI is being overpromised. I'm definitely very excited about finding new ways to apply AI, and that explorative phase can come off as trying to sell snake oil. We have to be realistic and acknowledge this is a technology that can produce content faster than we can consume it. Content that takes effort to distinguish useful vs. not.

All that said I disagree with the idea that the only way "to help students break out of their prisons, at least for an hour, so they can see and enhance the beauty of their own minds" is via teaching and not via technologies such as AI. The education system certainly failed me and I found a lot of joy in technology instead. For me it was the start of the internet, but I can only imagine for many today it will be the start of AI.

> The claim of inevitability is crucial to technology hype cycles, from the railroad to television to AI.

Well. You know. We still have plenty of railroad, and television has had a pretty good run too. So if that are the models to compare AI to, then I have bad news for how 'hype cycle' AI is going to be.

About 60% of my job is writing. Writing slack, writing code, writing design docs, writing strategies, writing calibrations.

ChatGPT has allowed me to write 50%+ faster with 50%+ better quality. It’s been one of the largest productivity boosts in the last 10+ years.