I talked to a computer for six hours
OpenAI released a chatbot on Wednesday. ChatGPT. Everyone at work has been playing with it for three days, so tonight I finally tried it.
It's 2am. I started at eight.
It wrote me a Python script, explained a Kubernetes error better than the docs, and wrote a poem about my radiator in the style of Rilke. I pasted in a paragraph from the building's WhatsApp group about modernization law and it explained it very clearly, quoting a section of the German Civil Code that, I checked later, does not exist. Then, obviously, I asked it about Band II.
It knew everything. Publication year 1964, 100,000 digits, "generated using a mechanical lottery drum at the Humboldt University," "notable for its use in early Soviet bloc Monte Carlo simulations," "a copy is held at the Saxon State Library in Dresden."
None of that is true. Not one sentence. It just made a book up, confidently, with footnotes, because I asked.
I laughed out loud alone in my flat. Then I asked it where it got that, and it apologized and invented a different source.
It's a great toy. It'll also happily make things up if you ask it the right way.