Comment by bwooceli

The HN crowd would do well to take a step back and look at this from a little different perspective. We are able to see "AI" and machine learning as the very young and imperfect technologies that they are. That said, ChatGPT is the first time a technology like this has been even REMOTELY available to the vast majority of the public, and democratizing this capability even in the small box of a chat window is wildly disruptive. Even after explaining that it probably isn't a great idea to use it for generating 100% factually reliable content, everyone I've shown it to has come up with ways they would use it to make small-but-meaningful improvements in some area of their lives. Consider an immigrant owner of a landscaping company who isn't super confident in their English but needed to respond to a customer to clarify exactly what they need to do on a job site. Did they close the deal solely because of ChatGPT? Hard to say for sure, but it saved an hour of productive time and likely made it easier for the customer to be a reference/word-of-mouth fan.