I’m using GPT-4 to help write an ESL textbook, which is probably taking longer than if I just did it by myself. However, because I’m relying on AI for the graphics and audio files for conversations, it’s really forcing me to learn basic Python script debugging and troubleshooting for ChatGPT. The most frustrating things about this experience so far are:
- ChatGPT forgets stuff all the time. If I ask it to compile a Word file, it will leave out parts that we finalized together. And sometimes, it can’t create download links for the file, or so it says.
- It sometimes changes finalized content unless it’s explicitly told to leave it alone.
- It is often not aware of what it can and cannot do. It specifically told me one night that it wasn’t technically capable of producing a certain kind of file, so instead it walked me through doing it in Python. The next day, I asked to do the same thing for another chapter, and it just instantly generated the correct file for me – kind of. I was still better off doing it myself, but still, it was a matter of where I wanted to focus my efforts – learning to do stuff myself, or coaxing the AI into giving me the desired results.
- Using Dall-E to generate something useful is like trying to have a serious conversation with someone tripping on acid.
I have to get back to the textbook, but I leave you with these absolute gems of what AI thinks Bingo cards look like:
According to the file name, the prompt was: “A 4×4 Holiday Bingo sheet with a clean, minimalistic design suitable for embedding in a Word document. Each cell contains one of the following…”
When I pointed out that the grid wasn’t 4×4 (although that would be just Bing, not Bingo) and that there were duplicate entries as well as weird text and spelling mistakes, it popped out this:
“A correct 4×4 Holiday Bingo sheet in a minimalistic design. Each of the 16 cells contains one unique activity from the following list_ ‘Go to the beac…”
My way of dealing with is to change the activity completely, but I really hope image generation, of text in particular, improves quickly. GLAY SiOMIE PLAY SOMIES GAE SHOPPING.
I feel like those generations got the spirit pretty nailed, and if only it could just filter out the nonsense. But the those two elements are hard to separate, resisting iterative attempts to dial in on steady, constant progress. The striped pyramid has some pretty interesting gibberish. It’s like a wordy Rorschach inkblot test.