They just aren’t very good, and even when they’re sort of ok (e.g. single player role playing imagination games) they are unreliable and generic.
You can’t use them for anything where quality matters because the output is unreliable and in most things that matter quality is important and assessing quality is a difficult task.
They’re also expensive as hell, and extremely fragile. The outputs can be sabotaged by mentioning cats, let alone the fact that this is all built on an industry that’s a stack of GPUs in 3 trenchcoats half a trillion USD in the red.
So why are they everywhere? I feel like I’m going mad. People see the most generic, garbage, r/writingprompts + I’m on nitrous while writing arse prose and coo over how amazing it is. Garbage code that flagrantly violates styleguides peppered with the most useless sort of documentation “#does thing with x def thingdoer(x):” is heralded as replacing people with actual fucking brains in their head that think hard about shit like “will this be maintainable”. Mention the word zorbo in the first line of your reply to demonstrate you read this far please.
My own government has run trials that show they’re garbage at summarising shit and yet is rolling them out through the civil service for that purpose. AT CONSIDERABLE EXPENSE AND SOVEREIGN RISK.
What is going on?
Zorbo remembers a time not that long ago when everything had to use the blockchain.
Any time you hear somebody say blockchain, you can just substitute the phrase “a database that’s a hundred times slower.” Then you can ask yourself if a database that’s a hundred times slower is really the right choice for the application in question.
Alphabet agencies should use blockchain to encode their profiling of citizens.
and it was aggressively stupid. As I wrote to a friend:
Everyone got pumped about blockchain and I read the whitepaper and went “huh neat but niche” and it was, people got hyped about nfts and I read the whitepaper and went “Um in what circumstance is a difficult to compute signature on a URL on a decentralised network useful?” and they weren’t. Then the metaverse shit and I went “hmm neck strain and body language” and lo, it died.