Debugging

This week’s prompt comes at a more or less inopportune time, since I am currently stuck with my project. It’s a relatively minor point, I’ll get it sorted out tomorrow, but I think I am starting to see the limitations of ChatGPT. To me, AI has always had a kind of dreamlike quality to it. This is most obvious with image generation tools like Midjourney. There are particularities about dream logic that shine through, its inattention to certain kinds of details like text for example. This seems true to me of chat bots too, if you talk to them long enough; they have an unstable understanding or worldview.

And that’s what I am encountering with ChatGPT as my directions become increasingly more specific, and I have to debug more complex issues. It is common for ChatGPT to forget details I’ve told it about my project and give unhelpful answers based on its understanding. I get the same sort of frustrated feeling as trying to run in dreams.

But it is helpful to talk to it a while to refine your own understanding. I never knew anything of the anatomy of any mobile apps before this project, but by using ChatGPT more as a teacher than ordering it around, it’s become easier for me to understand its directions and move my project in a better direction through our interactions. I’m able to more effectively ask it for advice as well, having learned from it the terminology and basic functions.

This has been a fun learning project but not as easy as I anticipated! For better or for worse, ChatGPT isn’t an omnipotent coder.