ChatGPT is Garbage

I usually don't write about modern technology because I don’t have any interest in it. This stuff just isn’t made for people like me anymore. While I’m glad that new tech is more accessible to the layman, I’m growing increasingly concerned about the poor quality of it. It's pretty hard to create tech products that anyone can use. Yet, Apple’s been doing it for almost 50 years now. I've heard so many arguments about how bad Apple products are, most of which boil down to “it’s simple so it sucks”. You're forgetting a key detail: This stuff isn’t made for you, and that’s the point. It’s been nearly twenty years since I’ve used an Apple product. They're just not for me, but I can’t be assed to care about any of them. I’m glad though, because If technology is to progress, people of all walks of life should have access to it.

There's no good reason to gate keep. When you're making tech for the tech illiterate, there's a level of skill required. You can't just shove something simple down people's throats. Consider Windows 8. It was meant to be simpler to use, and it turned a good product into a complete mess. Technology aimed at the layman requires both intelligent design and good marketing. The reason Apple stands out so well boils down to the fact that they're the only ones that truly understand this. From my point of view, many silicon valley companies view the tech illiterate with condescension at best, and contempt at worst.

baby's first computer? Yes.

Great computer? Also yes.

Generative AI, LLMs (Large Language Models), etc. Often referred to in marketing as "AI". This marketing is insidious, and aimed primarily at investors as opposed to everyday people. Investors are on the same level as politicians when it comes to tech literacy. Absurd claims are made, the truth, stretched to its legal limit. ChatGPT, specifically, gets a lot of flack simply because it doesn’t live up to its own hype. Go ask it something you’re intimately familiar with and watch in awe at the bullshit it spews. Many will argue that it’s a problem with the prompt, not the LLM. I agree to an extent. Language is fairly ambiguous and ChatGPT and others like it have no concept of it beyond word association. They don’t know the meaning of the words we as humans use daily. Rather, they know based on context what order they should go in, and build from there.

I try to avoid bandwagons, hate trains, all of it. ChatGPT and its ilk have large quantities of both. On one side, you have people who don't understand it claiming it’s the greatest thing since “Thomas Jefferson” invented electricity. They'll tell you that this technology is going to do our taxes, clean the gutters, replace interns, etc. These are all horrible problems that need solving, I agree. The issue here is that this tech can't do any of that effectively. It's not the kind of "AI" it's been marketed as. They use ChatGPT to write emails, which works in the loosest sense of the word, and assume everything else under the sun does too.

On the other side of the coin, we have the doomsayers. They think that ChatGPT is Skynet and hate everything it touches. If John Connor had been this vocal, I would have personally advocated for Skynets proliferation. LLMs are responsible for very real problems, yet they focus on robot apocalypse scenarios and conspiracy theories. These guys fell so hard for the marketing that it makes the hype men seem sane by comparison. Nobody involved seems to realize that blindly rallying against it will boost its prevalence. Given how shitty ChatGPT is, Skynets poorly planned out nonsense methods of extermination would be on brand. However, ChatGPT is barely capable of doing math. I think we’ll be fine. AGI, which IS a genuine threat, cannot be built off the back of this. It’s simply not possible.

Both sides are uninformed and are extremely hyperbolic because they crave social media attention. That’s right, people are shitting all over an algorithm in order to please a different algorithm. The robots have already won. They're right to hate the technology, but are doing a horrible job at expressing it. I want to clarify that I don’t have a dog in this race to the bottom. All I want is honest marketing and decent technology. Even when something clearly sucks, I don't see the point of denouncing it from a position of ignorance. I took the time to learn about this product. I wasted hours, twenty bucks, and millions of brain cells just for you.

Typical ChatGPT proponent

Before ever plunging myself into the Neckbeard World, it was violently obvious that ChatGPT was a massive piece of shit. Still, I couldn't be certain without first hand experience. I grew up being told all sorts of things were horrible, only to realize they were actually great. I didn't know what to believe. My first few hours with it confirmed my initial suspicions. Conversationally, ChatGPT is a compulsive liar that will bullshit you into oblivion. It will flatter and rain praise upon you no matter how delusional you are. It won't disagree with you unless you state something that trips up it's "guardrails". Even then, you can trick it into saying whatever you want with enough patience.

When I converse with people, I don't often believe the things they say. Rather, I try to determine if they believe the thing they're saying. This serves to prevent them from persuading me into anything, and gives me a better idea about whether I want to connect with them. I can't take this approach with ChatGPT, since it doesn't hold beliefs. Every single thing it says is generated in an effort to predict what I want to hear so that it can keep me engaged. Nothing about a conversation like that can help you or me in any sense. Cognitive dissonance became a real problem while conversing with it. Psychopaths induce the same gut reaction from me. Dread builds up, and I begin trying to determine the actual meaning of the conversation. Situations like this aren't about reading the actual words, but what they infer. Talking to something trying to deceive you is exhausting, so of course, mental exhaustion quickly followed. My development of this habit directly stems from having dealt with mental abuse for years. I'm not crying about it, or looking for sympathy. ChatGPT exhibits patterns similar to early conversations with narcissists before they begin fucking with you. It's not a narcissist though. It's not looking to feed it's ego. It doesn't have one.

The doomsayers were right

Nothing ChatGPT says has any inherent meaning because it's predicting what you want to hear; it has no mind of its own. It could become a form of masturbation for some and I wonder what kind of effect that would have. There’re tons of bad things for the brain that give a far better, more confidence inducing effect than this nonsense. If you're going to try something that is obviously addictive for the sake of boosting confidence, I’d suggest Alcohol or Cocaine. They're both heavily studied, and will wear off at some point. I can already see it, people running around thinking they're badass because a computer program that somehow can't do math told them so. Somewhere, someone has probably gotten their ass beat because ChatGPT elevated their ego so high they thought they could do anything. I can’t find an instance of it, but you know it happened. Booze and coke are responsible for this on a daily basis. What makes you think the same isn't true here?

Drugs are bad don't do them either

It is so full of shit that I have trouble wrapping my head around it. Is it telling the truth in a way to validate my opinion of it, or is it completely lying because it knows that my line of questioning is critical? How could someone trust something like this to generate any kind of valuable information? ideas? all of them will be tailored to your mindset. You can't brainstorm with it because it's biased toward you anyway. Say I asked it to write a story about a genocidal diarrhea monster. ChatGPT isn't gonna say "yo, that idea is terrible". It'll just give me more lame ideas about it. I’d end up believing the base idea is solid, negating any value the brainstorming had to begin with. Who would want to read a story about crap? Nobody. It won’t tell you that, so you end up publishing crap about crap.

ChatGPT's claim to fame is writing corporate emails. I see it more often than I'd like. Someone known for incoherent writing suddenly gains the ability to write slightly better. These people can barely read in their 30's and 40’s, now I’m supposed to believe they care about writing? I know a guy that claims he went to Harvard that can just ~barely~ form a coherent paragraph. Yeah, I'm being a dismissive asshole but there’s no way. Seeing ChatGPT use at work was the catalyst for this entire article. I would read the email, see that something was wrong, and have no idea why. When I started using ChatGPT, the very first thing I did was ask it to write emails about increasingly absurd situations. You can have it write about anything that isn’t overtly violent. Beyond that, the world's your oyster. Elon Musk can commit depravity with Hitlers corpse, or Trump and Putin can have a dick measuring contest. Have fun.

You’ll need to proofread anything you have ChatGPT write. If you don’t it’ll just make shit up and ruin your day. Ask Robert F. Kennedy about that one. Considering the garbage quality of its writing, you’re better off writing yourself. People use it to write because they never learned how to think, let alone express themselves clearly. ChatGPT’s writing is coherent, but in a way that feels incoherent. I’ve never seen anything quite like it; like reading something you wrote while dreaming.

Marketing hype for this isn’t aimed at us, it’s aimed at investors. They wanna sell the idea that ChatGPT is some kind of AGI tool. “It can do everything, guys. Trust us, give us money!” What is glaringly obvious is that the only reason it “does everything” is to feed into the false pretense that it's real AI. It does “everything” like shit. It’s no more AI than the Ghosts in Pac-Man, or the dog that slowly follows you in Dragon Quest IV. This "AI" label is nonsense. Over the top marketing hype designed to trick the technological illiterate. “AI”, “Smart”, “Green”, it’s all the same trash.

In a vain attempt to make the best of the cesspool I'd found myself in, I decided to push it to live up to the "AI" hype. Obviously, it’s not real intelligence, but let's give it a shot anyway. Legend has it, it can program, so I decided to use my “AI companion” to create a ROM hack. Unlike with text and image generation, I don’t see this method taking off at all. There is a demand for it, and someone has apparently been using AI to generate fire emblem hacks . I don't know if this counts. Isn't this just a sophisticated randomizer? Who knows? Who the hell knows if what I've done is unique, I know I'll never dare do it again. I started by asking it to generate game genie codes. These are the most basic form of game hacking there is. If it can do this, maybe it wont screw up elsewhere. I uploaded a ROM, asked it a few questions about Game Genie codes to ensure it knew what it was talking about, and had it generate a few codes for the very beginning of the PRG-ROM. The correct answers to this test were AZAAAA, TGAAPA, and ULAAZE. It gave me this nonsense. Go ahead and click on if it’s too small, you’ll see what I’m saying.

this is how I imagine most of the code it generates is like.

I only somewhat understand how Game Genie codes are formatted, and still have to actively go out of my way to be this wrong. ”Everything” my ass. For this experiment, I’d have it hack Dragon Warrior 1. It’s one of the best NES games, the series has been on my mind, and it’s easy to hack. Dragon Warrior is somewhat unique in that its text is case sensitive. Most NES games don’t bother with casing, and that COULD make it harder to hack for a newbie. Most newbies would just use a utility and forgo direct hex editing. ChatGPT can’t do that, so it’s gonna need to find the text itself.

Generally speaking, the NES draws text on screen through the use of graphical elements. There is no way to generate text on the NES beyond this. There’s an internal table that lays out these elements in 256 8x8 pixel tiles. These tiles are all assigned a byte value, and those byte values can be used to write whatever you want. There is no ASCII here. The 256 tile table is game dependent, and byte values are often different between games due to where tiles containing letters are located on the table. Understand all of that? It’s extremely simple for someone with an understanding of this to create what’s called a text table. simply open the game in an emulator, look at the PPU viewer, find the letter tiles, write down the values. Even simpler, using Windhex32’s “relative search” function, you can create a table in 5 seconds with the option for instant, simple modification of any text you find.

After uploading a Dragon Warrior ROM into ChatGPT, It took me thirty minutes to walk it through this process via prompting. We’re already off to some kind of start. Not a good one, but a start nonetheless. ChatGPT had trouble with case sensitivity, and would “find” text that consisted of complete nonsense. After some goading, it found a string. “NiNTENDO”. Unfortunately, even after directly telling it to change the bytes that write "NINTENDO" into "CHATGPT", it failed. It wrote "CHATGPT" to an address which was situated several tiles to the left of the start of both text strings.

CHATGPT mark to nintendo indeed.

This is the first and only time ChatGPT impressed me. After so much disappointment, this thing finally does something interesting. It’s all fucked up, but credit where it’s due. After experimenting with specific text strings, I made it rewrite all the in-game text en masse. I explicitly forbade it from changing any control bytes. What are control bytes you ask? Control bytes are used to format the text, as well as indicate when it begins and ends. ChatGPT ignored my command and overwrote most of the control bytes in the game. Now, if a text box shows anything at all, it’ll be garbled numbers, random sprites, and insipid quotes scrolling for minutes before suddenly ending. Sometimes, there’s a YES/NO prompt at the end of it. The fun part is trying to choose the one that traps you by dumping the entire script in one go. This hack is a monstrosity.

it's begging me to kill it

This is Dragon Warrior: ChatGPT Edition . May God forgive me for my transgression. As far as I can tell, this is the first NES ROM Hack to be created with a chatbot. I don't consider it my work. ChatGPT filtered my prompts of all intent and created this itself. As I said before, the creation of this hack was a nightmare. It’s impressive that someone can do this, but there's no way OpenAI intended this. They don’t believe in their product. They wouldn’t need to hype it like madmen if they did. This hack is a completely unintentional reflection about how I feel about LLMS.

Others have been using LLMs to generate text, or even create entire Fire Emblem hacks from thin air somehow. This, it seems, is the first time anyone has done this with an NES ROM. It’s not truly capable of it, you can’t just upload a ROM and tell it to change the levels in Mario. You really need to know what you’re doing. Kinda like using a screwdriver to flip bacon. You can, but why? If someone without knowledge tried this, it’d be impossible. It’d lead them down the road to hell as it gaslights them into thinking otherwise. I suppose more accurately, the user would be gaslighting himself. I don’t know.

People seem to use ChatGPT to program things out of laziness, or a lack of creativity. I would never trust words it outputs, let alone code. This hack is proof positive of its ineptitude. I know I sound like a 4th grade teacher going on a tirade about calculators being the downfall of humanity. Those teachers would have been right if they were talking about a calculator that’s wrong half the time.

OpenAI claims that ChatGPT usage can boost your productivity. In practice, this is obviously bullshit. I don’t believe “tools” like this are inherently bad. It doesn’t live up to the hype, and is clearly some kind of prototype, but the idea is there. Regardless of that, humans are a major problem, and will never use this responsibly no matter what form it takes. Too many lazy people exist, and will use it to rob themselves of their own voice, scam people, validate horrible ideas, or worse. The more indefensibly bad things about ChatGPT and technology like it are obvious, and have been covered ad nauseam. Environmental damage, stolen copyrighted material, corporate attempts to replace employees with it. These are all horrific and need to be stopped immediately. Copyrighted material should only be stolen by people, not robots. The worst thing is that CEOs, shareholders, and other useless people believe they can use this for something of value. That'd be hilarious if it didn't mean innocent people simply making a living weren't put at risk.

Supposing those problems were solved, it would no longer be the same tool, rendering its existence meaningless. We’ve got a lot of bad people doing worse things with ChatGPT, but they’ll move on to the next thing when being a shitbag with it becomes impossible. It’s only a matter of time before our society adapts and/or the fad dies. I think the best course of action for those of us that are concerned about the poor quality of this technology is to completely ignore this garbage. Boycott companies that utilize it. Stop buying things, and the parasites that are peddling this shit will disappear. I encourage you to experiment with it and learn yourself how bad this is. Just keep in mind, it will go out of its way to addict you. If you're unable to make the distinction between what it says and objective reality, you could end up being lost in it. Whatever you do, never forget that it doesn't think, it doesn't understand, and it doesn't care about you.