My Perfunctory Intern – Economist Writing Every Day
A couple years ago, my Co-blogger Mike described his productive, but novice intern. The helper could summarize expert opinion, but they had no real understanding of their own. To boot, they were fast and tireless. Of course, he was talking about ChatGPT. Joy has also written in multiple places about the errors made by ChatGPT, including fake citations.
I use ChatGPT Pro, which has Web access and my experience is that it is not so tireless. Much like Mike, I have used ChatGPT to help me write Python code. I know the basics of python, and how to read a lot of of it. However, the multitude of methods and possible arguments are not nestled firmly in my skull. I’m much faster at reading, rather than writing Python code. Therefore, ChatGPT has been amazing… Mostly.
I have found that ChatGPT is more like an intern than many suppose:
Much like an intern, I find that ChatGPT performs better if you hold its hand. It will fail to understand large chunks of code, but if walked through each line, it can do just fine. Similarly, like economists, it’s great at telling you “no”. So if you type your own version of some Python code and ask if it will do X, then it will tell you why your code won’t achieve the goal, and then provide an alternative. It’s much better at correcting you than writing its own code from scratch.
For me, ChatGPT is very much like having an intern. If I need a second set of eyes, then I have them. If I want a customized Wikipedia article about a specific feature of a particular topic, then I can have it. With the web enabled version, I can see the citations and the terminology used among specialists in order to explore more on my own. 
But if interns and AI are so similar, then why use ChatGPT? It’s the breadth and speed. For many scholars, human interns are too slow, or can only understand a subset of a prompt.  ChatGPT can handle the fire hose and the variety of targets quickly.
I can agree with all your statements! I thought it was just my experience. I use ChatGPT with Java Coding — I’m like you, much faster at reading it and knowning what it’s doing that acutally writing it. I’ll post a snippet and say “What’s wrong here?” and will usually get close to a solution. It’s more my second set of eyes since I’m the only one on the team that codes java.
LikeLike
