Yeah. Parts of that article help provide context for conversations about ChatGPT, but all of the forward-looking claims have no basis in reality. I found a few things about it comically bad. You’ll also note that the article talked at length about software that is already leveraging ChatGPT. The thing I want you to notice there is that ChatGPT did not write that software. It is a third party service that developers had to build into their platforms.
Sure, jobs can be “impacted” by powerful new tools. Many jobs are very different now than they were before Google’s search engine, or wikipedia, or videoconferencing, or any other numbers of things that have become part of our every day lives. There are risks associated with unthoughtful reliance. There are benefits associated with increasing access to information.
I’ve been hearing for my entire career that some new piece of technology was going to make my work as a developer obsolete, and yet I’ve only seen demand for my skills and experience grow over that time. With that perspective, I prefer the article The End of Front-End Development, by Josh W. Comeau.
If you’re curious about what type of conversations are being had about _using _ these tools at software companies, here’s the message that our head of engineering sent out:
There is a lot of interest currently on ChatGPT and the potential use cases of it. To help make sure that we are all approaching these new capabilities the right way, we even reached out to our colleagues in the legal team and got their input on ChatGPT and I am sharing the considerations for tooling like ChatGPT. Please read on and Happy Coding!!!
ChatGPT is an exciting new tool that has the potential to revolutionize the way we communicate and access information. As with any new tool, it is important to consider some basic rules when it comes to using external tools and services:
Like any other (free) tool or application you may find on the Internet (e.g. Google Translate, CodeShare, NextCloud … you name it), these services are typically not part of the
[Our Company's]sourced and approved services and have as such not been validated by[Our Company's]Security and Privacy. Consequently, no confidential information of[Our Company], our Customers or Partners must be disclosed to services not sourced and approved by[Our Company].Hence, we expect from every employee to preserve the confidentiality of proprietary information, including personal information of
[Our Company], Customers and Partners at all times.Nonetheless, if you like to play around with and test any such tools and services like ChatGPT because you believe they could be useful to your work and should be approved for use by
[Our Company], please adhere to the following rules:
- Do not share any confidential information of
[Our Company], Customers and Partners with such external services (no exceptions)- Do not rely on such (free) services to create critical work products (there are IP ownership implications in addition to security and privacy issues)
- Free services typically cannot be used for business purposes and such use would require a fee to be paid by the user (you may be in breach of their terms of use and create a liability for
[Our Company])In light of the above, if you desire to play with ChatGPT please consider the following:
Think about the INPUT
Any input into ChatGPT can be used by ChatGPT forever to answer queries by others, including our competitors. So ask yourself:
- Does the input into ChatGPT include Customer Data?
- Does the input into ChatGPT contain
[Company]proprietary or confidential information?- Does the input into ChatGPT contain confidential information of third parties, such as our partners?
Can the input into ChatGPT be used (e.g., by a competitor) to infer any data about[Our Company], its customers, suppliers, etc.?If your answer is “Yes”, you cannot use such information with ChatGPT. If in doubt, don’t use tools like ChatGPT.
Think about the OUTPUT
Any output by ChatGPT may be inaccurate, or even be completely made up (as it is biased towards providing an answer even when it doesn’t exist). So before using an ChatGPT output, ask yourself:
- Is the output accurate/reliable?
- Is it legal? E.g., the output may include others’ copyrighted content, or code that is subject to strict open source licenses.
- Is the output biased?
I share this to give some insight into how there are a lot of limitations in using ChatGPT, even if we assume that it is capable of giving optimal code solutions (which it often isn’t).