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Comment by caskstrength

2 years ago

Yeah, but you are paying 20$ per-month subscription _and also have to sweet-talk the stochastic parrot into giving you the result you want_ while it keeps lecturing you in condescending tone.

It's not human, why are you offended by how it talks to you? It's a tool. Many tools need some adjustment before they can be useful for what you do. You surely won't be viscerally upset if you pay $20 for a tool that occasionally spills oil on you if you hold it wrong. You'd still think the tool is crap because its designers made an UX decision you hate, but you surely would not throw away the tool out of principle, right?

  • It's the same frustration I'd have with other badly designed tools: "I shouldn't have to do this"

  • I absolutely would refuse to buy tools from a manufacturer that makes user hostile UX decisions on purpose.

    • That rule seems like it would lock you out of pretty much all modern technology pretty quickly, to be honest. What do you use for daily computer/mobile use? What white goods manufacturers do you go for? A company will make user-hostile decisions the second it knows (or thinks) it can get away with it with a profit - fully featured, long lasting, sensibly built hardware is, sadly, not actually good for business.

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    • It's not precisely user hostility. You're talking about the difference between a hole hog and a DeWalt. ChatGPT is trying to be a DeWalt: It works while also trying to backstop unexpected bad interaction so you don't unexpectedly torque your wrist past its breaking point because you jammed the bit into the wrong piece of wood (to pull the analogy back around: You don't inadvertently get porn or gore or defamatory copy because you asked the wrong query).

      Flipping the question on its head, there's going to be a category of user who's asking "Why am I paying 20 bucks a month so this thing can give me answers I can't publish?"

Not exactly. There's a "custom instructions" area in the Settings that allows you to give the bot permanent instructions that apply to all chats. So you do it once and never have to do it again.

And the new "My GPTs" things allows you to give super-lengthy and detailed instructions, and train the bot on custom works, which is even more powerful.