Comment by simonw
2 days ago
Yeah, the "generative" in "generative AI" gives a little bit of a false impression. I like Laurie Voss's take on this: https://seldo.com/posts/what-ive-learned-about-writing-ai-ap...
> Is what you're doing taking a large amount of text and asking the LLM to convert it into a smaller amount of text? Then it's probably going to be great at it. If you're asking it to convert into a roughly equal amount of text it will be so-so. If you're asking it to create more text than you gave it, forget about it.
This quote sounds clever, but is very different than my experience.
I have been very pleased with responses to things like: "explain x", "summarize y", "make up a parody dog about A to the tune of B", "create a single page app that does abc".
The response is 1000x more text than the prompt.
I've had coworkers tell me it works Copilot works well for refactoring code, which also makes sense in the same vein.
Its like they wouldn't be so controversial if they didn't decide to market it as "generative" or "AI"...I assume fund raising valuations would move inline with the level of controversy though.