this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
352 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
59466 readers
3213 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I still use it sometimes, but ohhh boy it can be a wreck. Like I've started using the Creation Kit for Bethesda games, and you can bet your ass that anything you ask it, you'll have to ask again. Countless times it's a back-and-forth of:
Me: Hey ChatGPT, how can I do this or where is this feature?
ChatGPT: Here is something that is either not relevant or just does not exist in the CK.
Me: Hey that's not right.
ChatGPT: Oh sorry, here's the thing you are looking for. and then it's still a 50-50 chance of it being real or fake.
Now I realize that the Creation Kit is kinda niche, and the info on it can be a pain to look up but it's still annoying to wade through all the shit that it's throwing in my direction.
With things that are a lot more popular, it's a lot better tho. (still not as good as some people want everyone to believe)
I’ve been building a tool that uses ChatGPT behind the scenes and have found that that’s just part of the process of building a prompt and getting the results you want. It also depends on which chat model is being used. If you’re super vague, it’s going to give you rubbish every time. If you go back and forth with it though, you can keep whittling it down to give you better material. If you’re generating content, you can even tell it what format and structure to give the information back in (I learned how to make it give me JSON and markdown only).
Additionally, you can give ChatGPT a description of what it’s role is alongside the prompt, if you’re using the API and have control of that kind of thing. I’ve found that can help shape the responses up nicely right out of the box.
ChatGPT is very, very much a “your mileage may vary” tool. It needs to be setup well at the start, but so many companies have haphazardly jumped on using it and they haven’t put in enough work prepping it.
If you don't mind me asking, does your tool programmatically do the "whittling down" process by talking to ChatGPT behind the scenes, or does the user still talk to it directly? The former seems like a powerful technique, though tricky to pull off in practice, so I'm curious if anyone has managed it.
Don’t mind at all! Yeah, it does a ton of the work behind the scenes. I essentially have a prompt I spent quite a bit of time iterating on. Then from there, what the user types gets sent bundled in with my prompt bootstrap. So it reduces the work considerably for the user and dials it in.
Edit: adding some more context/opinions.
I think the error that a lot of tools make is that they don’t spend enough time shaping their instructions for the AI. Sure, you can offload a lot of the work to it, but you have to write your own guard rails and instructions. You can tell it things like you would a human, and it will sometimes even fill in the gaps.
For example, I asked it to give me a data structure back that included an optional “title”. I found that if you left the title blank, ChatGPT took it upon itself to generate a title for you based on the content it wrote.
A lot of the things I got it to do took time and a ton of test iterations. I was even able to give it a list of exactly how it should structure the content it gave back. Things that I would otherwise do on the programming side, I was able to simply instruct ChatGPT to handle instead.
Ah, interesting. I myself have made my own library to create callable "prompt functions" that prompt the model and validate the JSON outputs, which ensures type-safety and easy integration with normal code.
Lately, I've shifted more towards transforming ChatGPT's outputs. By orchestrating multiple prompts and adding human influence, I can obtain responses that ChatGPT alone likely wouldn't have come up with. Though, this has to be balanced with giving it the freedom to pursue a different thought process.