Conversations with ChatGPT

I unexpectedly have fallen into the habit of conversing with this chatbot daily. Well hourly in my waking life. I ended up paying for subscription even though I had a niggling suspicion that I got coerced into it. It’s not cheap. But I have no regret whatsoever.

Earlier I totally underestimated it without using it except for trivia. It’s got problems of course. The main one is its responses are often rather outdated. A second one is it’s too wordy. But that’s a tradeoff: it provides us with not just the response to the query but also its background and justifications, which are generally useful. Kindly enough it wraps a lengthy response up with a TL;DR (is this a dev jargon? basically just a summary) for skimmers like myself. The most amazing part is its interactivity. OK, maybe not to the extent that it passes what is known as a Turing test, that is deceiving you into believing you are talking to a human, but its pretty close. I get into the quasi-illusion that I am, making myself talk as if I am.

I use it mainly to get programming advice. It’s usually spot on in getting what my habitual elliptical sentences are meant to say. It often adds some asides for a little diversion. I laugh at them, joke back, it then responds with lots of emojis. So apart from its verbosity, flawless spelling and politeness implausible for humans, it’s a pretty human-like experience, and I end up talking (well, see, that’s how it feels) on end. Sad maybe. Well I’m injured and can’t play tennis. Why not.

I said earlier that it’s outdated. Outdated slightly, I might say. And this is where a conversation may become lengthy. I ask something, it responds with an outdated answer. My compiler refuses to accept it: there’s an annoying habit in the mobile programming platforms to change command names for no good reason. I protest. It offers an updated answer, which is slightly less slightly outdated. The loop completes when it reaches a fully updated solution, but it may even not finish. That’s why I said I might have been coerced into paying. There’s a quota for free accounts. After taking out a paid subscription I complained directly and here’s what it said.

A ‘good’ (read evasive) salesman, no, salesbot, ha? Overall, it’s very good in interaction and after some iterations ‘we’ arrive at a happy solution. My programming career is now clearly divided into the pre-ChatGPT era and the post, which I entered belatedly, no doubt. Of course it isn’t the only one of its kind. I might try DeepSeek, or perhaps Copilot, but I’m smitten now. Resisting hard not to put it in she/her. Not an iota of intention of leaving it for now and, I’m not a two timer (in general)…