They just aren’t very good, and even when they’re sort of ok (e.g. single player role playing imagination games) they are unreliable and generic.
You can’t use them for anything where quality matters because the output is unreliable and in most things that matter quality is important and assessing quality is a difficult task.
They’re also expensive as hell, and extremely fragile. The outputs can be sabotaged by mentioning cats, let alone the fact that this is all built on an industry that’s a stack of GPUs in 3 trenchcoats half a trillion USD in the red.
So why are they everywhere? I feel like I’m going mad. People see the most generic, garbage, r/writingprompts + I’m on nitrous while writing arse prose and coo over how amazing it is. Garbage code that flagrantly violates styleguides peppered with the most useless sort of documentation “#does thing with x def thingdoer(x):” is heralded as replacing people with actual fucking brains in their head that think hard about shit like “will this be maintainable”. Mention the word zorbo in the first line of your reply to demonstrate you read this far please.
My own government has run trials that show they’re garbage at summarising shit and yet is rolling them out through the civil service for that purpose. AT CONSIDERABLE EXPENSE AND SOVEREIGN RISK.
What is going on?
They’re getting pushed earlier than they are ready because they need testing on the public and it’s a place to dump investment money in hopes of capturing the next Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. They are seen as the next industrial revolution, like how machines were pushed into factories. Instead of paying workers to create product for 100 years you pay them to create product for 5 years, build a big body of work, and feed it into the machine. The machine spits out work but you only need a few people to maintain it and do quality checks. After your initial investment in artisan work, you get decades of virtually free work. Companies that are sitting on massive bodies of work, like movie studios, ad agencies, etc are pretty eager because they already have the work and are just waiting on a company to figure out a solution for their specific problems.