When people criticize AI in general and LLMs in particular, 90% of the time all I hear is “I’m bad at prompting.” Many laymen still treat ChatGPT as a glorified Google search. Custom instructions and asking directly for what you want will get you far.
Just ask. That is the simple key to a lot of good use of AI. If you don’t like the responses, be more clear about what you want. If you don’t know what to ask, just ask the AI to help with the questions or have it literally question you before answering. Easy. Make sure to give it something to work from; context is everything.
Remember back when we got flashlights in our phones? We suddenly realized how often we actually have a need for a flashlight. It feels a bit like that with AIs; you suddenly realize you have many more questions and topics to explore when you can just ask and get good answers without much friction.
While some of us find great value in AI, there is a clear and growing backlash happening, especially when it comes to visuals. We grow tired of visual gimmicks faster and faster (remember Ghibli-style and cutting up glass fruit?) AI/LLMs are not going away, but the resources needed for running all those servers are vast, and growing like crazy..
When people share long threads where they have a ‘dialogue’ with an AI, more often than not it is just as boring as hearing long and intricate stories about their dreams and nightmares. It’s too specific and personal; without the proper context, it’s close to meaningless. And did I mention it’s also boring?
IBM chairman Thomas Watson is perhaps most famous for the (false) quote I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. Some say half-jokingly; Watson was only off by four, but in an AI world, the five can be said to be the handful of frontier AI models fighting for dominion: ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Llama, Claude and perhaps a Chinese wildcard.
If a person claims they know what is going to happen with AI in the next 12-18 months, run away as fast as you can. No one knows this in any meaningful detail; a few may know the broad strokes. And those who know the most are busy building it. Far too often, the predictions remind me of the blind people and the elephant, except AI may very well be the whole room rather than just the elephant in it.
(And yeah, I made this image with ChatGPT, or just Chat as most of the younger people call it now. My guess is that OpenAI will rebrand ChatGPT to Chat later this year, they already own chat.com..)
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