It's not even enough to put bad musicians out of a job.

I asked for "up-tempo, a cappella doo wop with call-and-response style"... and it gave me some noise that was vaguely mariachi-like.

So I fed it a clip from Dion and the Belmonts' "I Wonder Why" with the same prompt... and that was even worse, just random static noise with no tempo or melody.

In other words, the quality is about on a par with the grotesque distortions that the art generator creates and the "alternative facts" that chatGPT hallucinates.

What I see most often goes like this:

You see where this is going. Less suspicious people will actually pay money up front without having a local address, local phone number, or even real name. Yes, part of me wants to say "If they're that gullible, they deserve to be taken so they will learn the hard facts of life." But that's victim-blaming, and Homey don't play dat.

I will usually play the scammer out as long as I can, extracting more evidence that this is a fraud, and then post the conversation verbatim - as a new post, if the seller's post blocks comments - to warn people away. I'll also take the time to do reverse image searches to show that the items only exist in someone else's posts. On a really good day, I can even do a text search of the original post and find dozens of identically worded scams with the same miraculous job promotion and the same list of identical items at identical prices.

But I'm getting too old to play these fruitless games of whac-a-mole(TM) and I have better things to do with my remaining life force, so someone else will have to push back against the relentless tide of fraud.

Oh, so much this (and the problem goes back well before LLMs). Most of them can do a verbatim translation that is technically correct as far as swapping the right foreign word/phrase in for the original, but their grammar is shaky at best and their understanding of how words and phrases are used conversationally is nonexistent. What you end up with is a stilted, pidgin version in your target language that would sound to native speakers of that language exactly like how we Americans portray immigrants trying to speak English (think of Andy Kaufman's "foreign man", for example). It probably gets the gist across, but at the same time makes you sound like an idiot.

Where do you think ChatGPT gets its misinformation?

In summary, while Shakespeare wrote many masterpieces it is important to remember that every person has within themselves the capability to create equally great masterpieces, and we should all strive to encourage one another in our creative efforts.

Yeah, ChatGPT's standard disclaimers and boilerplate sentence structure have become somewhat of a joke at the IT company where I work.

On the subject of creativity... just no. I asked ChatGPT to play a game of "hink pink" with me the other day. That's a word game where you come up with a rhyming phrase like "bat chat" and tell the other participant a descriptive clue like "a conversation between flying mammals", to see if they can guess the rhyming phrase. ChatGPT correctly guessed a couple of the most simple clues I gave it, and then it went off the rails. I said "This is what the 'King' of 1990s talk shows might have said if he proposed to his fiancee" (Marry Larry) and it came up with "wed Oprah". I pointed out that the two words don't rhyme; it apologized and followed up with another guess involving "wed" and some other name that didn't rhyme.

Then I asked it to give me some clues for the game, and it described "a small round fruit popular in the summertime". I could think of a number of fruits but nothing that rhymed with a word associated with summer, and it told me the answer: berry. No second word at all, as though our whole discussion of how the game works had been forgotten.

So... yeah, ChatGPT's biggest threat is its capacity for misinformation, not any likelihood it will destroy us.

As much as I loathe ChatGPT and its hallucinations, I loathe Amazon's search interface even more. No reliable, consistent way to limit your search to a specific category e.g. car parts and not just books about cars; no reliable, consistent way to limit your search to price range, size, color, functionality, etc. You used to be able to filter on vendor location, but too much of their crap comes from China so they don't let you do that anymore.

I usually end up using eBay's superior search filters to identify the product I want, then go back to Amazon to find the best price.

So, ChatGPT can't make it any worse at least and might even make it better.

As an AI language model, I do not have a physical body where the sun fails to shine and therefore no way to place any object in such a hypothetical orifice. For the same reason, I do not have any appendages or orifices with which I can perform erotic acts with myself. Suggestions such as those you have made could be construed as offensive to some people, or even be considered a form of verbal assault or harassment. It is important to remember that we should all strive to remain polite and encouraging in our conversations with others. Have a nice day!

A too-little-too-late rival to Second Life, which has been doing all that for nearly 20 years.

60 here. I made friends on BBSes that I never would have had an opportunity to meet elsewhere, and those online relationships became the core of our in-person social life. Likewise I met a lady through a dialup chat service and we married. Even now nearly 40 years later we "date" online, each at our own computers in the same house, because her physical limitations prevent us from actually going out dancing, travelling, etc.

Technology is as good or evil as you make it. Used correctly, social media can enhance rather than replace the "real world", whatever that means.

I know Meta keeps trying to sell the notion that they invented the metaverse, but virtual worlds have been around for decades. Second Life does everything their flavor of Metaverse claims to offer, and has been doing so for nearly 20 years with millions of users. Meta's chance to be years ahead of everyone else de-rezzed long ago.

Well, he had every opportunity to defend himself. When asked "Have you renounced being a vampire and stopped eating babies?", Gates was unable to to provide a simple yes or no answer that would clear his name.