If you want to reduce ChatGPT mediocrity, do it promptly

The article describes how the author's son received a ChatGPT-generated letter of recommendation that the author found to be superficial and lacking in personal detail, despite the family friend's approval. The author argues that while AI has useful applications, it fails at tasks requiring genuine personal insight, such as writing meaningful reference letters. The core issue is attributed to the limitations of machine learning language models.

My son Cole, pictured here as a goofy kid many years ago, is now six feet six inches tall and in college. Cole needed a letter of recommendation recently so he turned to an old family friend who, in turn, used ChatGPT to generate the letter, which he thought was remarkably good. As a guy who pretends to write for a living, I read it differently. ChatGPT’s letter was facile but empty, the type of letter you would write for someone you’d never met. It said almost nothing about Cole other than that he’s a good kid. Artificial Intelligence is good for certain things, but blind letters of reference aren’t among them. The key problem here has to do with Machine Learning. ChatGPT’s language model … The post If you want to reduce ChatGPT mediocrity, do it promptly first appeared on I, Cringely.