Disclaimer
I'm going to be frank here. I'm using ChatGPT to proof read this post. I even used ChatGPT 4's DALL-E features to generate the banner.
The State Of AI
At the time of writing this, we are nearing the end of 2023 and ChatGPT has been available to the public for about a year now. GPT-4 now has a knowledge cut off date of April 2023 and browsing capabilities. Do you know what that means? It means we've hit the era of AI incest or AI echo chamber. AI has officially started learning from crappy bad misleading content produced by itself last year.
Now to be fair, people have been posting low quality garbage on the internet since its inception. But at least the garbage posters had to take time to produce garbage back then because we didn't have AI to speed-run that process for us.
I Am A Hypocrite
My journey with writing blog posts using AI assistance looks a lot like this meme template that I use way too much:
I feel guilty writing this post now because I'm guilty of running my written work through ChatGPT to a point where my own voice is lost in AI lingo. In fact, about a month ago I was ready to write a post about how to use ChatGPT to write your blog posts. This post will technically inversely answer that question.
ChatGPT Is A Tool, Not A Crutch
Just like a spell-checker is pretty useless if you feed it gibberish or nothing, ChatGPT is also useless if you ask it to come up with results without any guidance.
I use ChatGPT in my programming to save me time by writing unit tests and e2e tests for me. I sometimes also use it to build out UIs for me after feeding it the context of what I'm currently using. There have been a bunch of scenarios where I know exactly what I want to accomplish but don't feel like remembering the syntax so ChatGPT comes to the rescue. I've even used it as a sounding board for ideas at crazy hours of the night when nobody else is awake to talk to me.
In all these scenarios it helps me accomplish my goals. Sometimes it gets the job done very well, and sometimes it misses the ball completely. The problem comes in when you blindly trust it.
I used to play a game where I'd hit the autocomplete button on my phone to see what strange nonsensical string of words it would produce. The results made less sense than the drunkest text I had ever received. This autocomplete button works great to speed up typing, but unguided it becomes worthless.
The biggest problem here is that ChatGPT can "sound right", and that will mask misleading information.
The Problem With Using ChatGPT To Write For You
Writing technical blog posts has always been a great way to impart your knowledge and talk about your experiences. It is a great way to practice communication and solidify your understanding on the topic you're writing about. A big part of writing is to demonstrate your knowledge in a specific area and your ability to communicate.
This is where the issue of AI generated content crops in. People - especially developers - are lazy. When you ask AI to come up with ideas for you, you are opening yourself up to writing about concepts that you don't really understand. This means that you have no way to vet whether or not the content that you're generating is actually true or not. In the context of software development, the generated content can also point to outdated information.
Horror Story Examples
I saw a post on Dev.to the other day called "45 NPM Packages to Solve 16 React Problems". I'm not going to link to it because I hope it gets deleted. The post "sounded" legit but it was full of information that was good for a developer in 2018. The problem was that many packages on that list were linking to projects that had been abandoned. If the writer of that post had actually used those packages, they would know this. In fact, even the packages that were not out of date still linked to versions of the packages that were no longer maintained.
In another post, I read the following concluding statement about TypeScript types vs interfaces:
By applying these best practices, you can ensure that your TypeScript projects are not only efficient but also outrank others in search engine results.
This is just blatantly incorrect. If you know anything about TypeScript you would know that using a type over an interface will have absolutely no effect on your project's search engine ranking. In this case you can see that dodgy misleading information can creep in everywhere.
Conclusion
Using ChatGPT to write on your behalf is only going to hurt you in the long run. Use it as a tool, not a crutch.
Do your part in preventing the rise of low quality content by calling it out to prevent others from blindly following misleading information on the internet. And be careful yourself not to be misled by content that "sounds right" but isn't.
Oldest comments (40)
The content generated by AI will not be highly regarded
It will not indeed, and as a trusted member here I make an active member to flag posts, but I still see some posts get a lot of attention with people grateful for content thatβll lead them astray.
sounds about right...
I don't see a problem here, you see low quality content, you skip it. In the end it doesn't matter who/what generated it.
AI is generating low-quality content.
I agree, except it could be misleading for people who don't know it is low quality. In the example above with the article on npm packages, someone new to npm / JavaScript / development in general may not know it is bad to use out of date packages.
And if nothing else, it is time wasted reading an article before you realise just how low quality it is.
Well, bad is subjective.
Nonetheless, when you read articles written by strangers on the Internet, you should not be expecting scientific research, peer reviewed grade material in the first place :)
Do you think platforms like this would be better off if people who constantly regurgitating low quality posts aren't told to stop?
I do not know what better is from the platform perspective.
Essentially this is what fuels the platforms, free content generated by users, to keep their audience engaged in the comments section. From this perspective, the low quality content has lead to this article, which lead to more engagement from users.
Besides if we run out of here is how you create a div with react or do this and you will be a better developer every two weeks, the place might start to look abandoned :D
It's now easy to identify the content that is generated using AI. I skip it after reading 1-2 sentences only.
That's fine for people like you and me, but it's a big problem for people just getting started in their programming journey.
In my opinion, ChatGPT definitely helps you generate a component/function with some boiler-plate code (as you mentioned generation of e2e and unit tests). But when it comes to debugging complex bugs or generating new code to work with existing codebase, it can be misleading at times.
I would always propose to not use generative AI for skills you aim to master. This is, because mastery requires lots of repetition and failure and extensive dealing with the subject. The more we rely out skill in externals the less mastery we can achieve.
What's the conclusion of this hypothesis? Using AI as a supplement (as you described for review or generate images as your goal is to write articles and not design banners) is great.
Even greater is using AI as support towards your mastery. Prompt hot to give detailed feedback on your overall writing skills, instead of just reviewing the single stticle. Summarize them and feed it again to give you a summary of your skill development over time.
I totally agree. Even if you must use AI to generate an article, go the extra mile of reading it thoroughly, and making sure that everything it says checks out.
Also about properly guiding the AI to give you what you want.
Sometimes, you'd need to write on something but you don't know where to start or how to start. AI sort of gives you a landing pad and then, it is up to you to launch from there.
"also outrank others in search engine results" could be a tongue in cheek sense of humor by the author as well. I laughed at least :-)
My two posts on dev.to is authored by chat gpt, and I clearly state so as per dev.to's guidelines. Also, I make sure that I stand by every statement given (and ask chat gpt to edit out the points I disagree with or is wrong/outdated).
As long as I carefully monitor the output, and use my experience to make sure the content is true, and relevant, to the best of my knowledge, I see chat gpt as a wonderful tool to communicate knowledge I wouldn't have else. But of course, to just spew out it's generated mumbling without editing or proofing is deteriorating. Hopefully such accounts will stay mostly unpopular and unread.
Haha well fair enough, that's true. But I'd rather be the whistle-blower warner than the person who encourages people to keep at it ;)
Did AI generate that title for you?
Nope :)
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