a healthy discussion.
As a child of the sixties [no, that does NOT mean my parents were hippies], and, more importantly, as a teenager of the 70's,
who did his first computer programming in 1975, I have what some folk would call a very stuffy view of what computers ARE for,
and what they are NOT for.
[To qualify this I should perhaps point out that I am a complete hypocrite insofar as I use computers for ALL the things I believe
they are NOT for.]
I was led to believe (i.e. not much thinking going on there on my half) that computers were things that would do an awful lot
of Mathematical 'heavy lifting' on our behalf.
At that time if anyone had suggested to me, my teachers, and, possibly more importantly, my cousin, Stephen Mathewson
who ran the computer at Imperial College,
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-mathewson-1941876/
where we sent our Hollerith cards, that computers would be used:
1. As communication devices.
2. As a way to play highly complex games.
3. As a way to listen to Music.
4. As a way to watch Films.
And so on, I believe that most of us would have just looked blank, except, possibly, for Stephen.
[I am reliably informed that one of the forces that drive the development of fancy graphic cards
is the porn industry - We have a tenant in our flat who is a 'level developer' for an online porn
game - I must have a go some time and see if I can 'Trump' another player, LOL.]
AND "what has that got to do with the price of fish?"
A couple of days ago someone 'appeared' on the Forums stating:
and, that, as such, comes across as rather fun.I'm making a dice game
But what followed made my toes curl up something rotten:
(emphasis is mine.)this is a script made by chatGPT
but did not work.
Some one wiser than me (as I was wrestling to think of a way of saying what I wanted to say without
being mind-bogglingly rude) replied:
Anyway, to cut a short story long, I ran up 2 components for the sort of game that was described in a grand totalI would learn LiveCode before I started trying to let ChatGPT do my work.
of 30 minutes (half of which was spent mucking around sourcing attractive images): this should in no way whatsoever
be seen as me swanking about my vast programming skills, because my programming skills are not vast, and, when
push comes to shove, fairly basic.
So, my question is this:
Presumably ChatGPT and BARD have both involved an awful lot of man hours and work by very, very intelligent, skilled
programmers.
To what end? To help people who, honestly, cannot be bothered to learn a few basic steps in a programming language
(I have had 9 year olds making race games after about 3 hours of instruction) to make 'baby games'?
ALL this shows me is that Douglas Adams wrote about 'Deep Thought' BEFORE the proles got hold of
computers and reduced them to the level of the plastic duck I have on the side of my bath.
----
I hope this will precipitate some sort of relatively lively discussion on what
ChatGPT, BARD, and, presumably, a slew of other A.I. things should/could/ought to be be used for.