Been using Perplexity AI quite a bit lately for random queries, like travel suggestions.
So I started wondering what random things people are using it for to help with daily tasks. Do you use it more than Google/etc?
Also if anyone is paying for Pro versions? Thinking if it’s worth it paying for Perplexity AI Pro or not.
I think I’m using ChatGPT because that’s what Bing’s chatbot is. I’ve searched for some many dumb Python questions that it started promoting paid-for courses at one point. It gave me exactly what I was looking for the other day, but that doesn’t mean it never hallucinates answers, or provides the answer to the question it assumes I must be searching for (rather than the one I am searching for).
This is why I don’t trust LLMs for programming advice. I suck at programming and tools like ChatGPT would be great if it could actually translate what I want into something that I could just plug into my existing code and run with. Instead, I get answers to questions that reference the API of an entirely different programming language, make up fake functions, or just don’t operate the way I described, if at all.
Maybe some of my problems with AI are just “skill issue” and I need to figure out how to phrase shit correctly just like how you had to know exactly how to tickle search engines back in the day by not asking a question verbatim but plugging in keywords to have it give you what you actually wanted instead of some nonsense that it thought you wanted. We called it “Google-Fu”, but it has become less important now with SEO.
Also, I feel like LLMs are just creatively bankrupt. Case in point, I have a friend who is leaning on AI tools to help craft his next homebrew D&D campaign, and I thought that was a great use of that technology so I tried it out as well and, well… it ended up generating a lot of the same narrative that he got from it, including re-using proper nouns for places/people. Everything was just so generic fantasy and boring, even when you fed it your own ideas it just spit back out regurgitated fantasy tropes and stuff that sounds like it could have come out of a setting guide somewhere (and probably did if it was trained on that dataset).