Today's article is about 'sed' and mostly written by AI...

[KGIII]

I'd wanted to see how AI would handle a fairly complicated (or at least robust) Linux command. It did better than I thought it would. I didn't do any editing other than fixing the formatting to match the site. That's it. That's all I did.

My question is, how well do you think it did? I'd say it's getting there.

Let's Let AI Write An Article About 'sed' • Linux Tips

Linux Tips helps you get your Linux skills up to speed, by making Linux approachable.

linux-tips.us

I do love me some feedback. That's kinda the whole point of this one.

 

[osprey]

I would expect the AI in the form of ChatGPT is going to be fairly clear and precise about a program such as sed since it'll have accessed very well documented material in it's "learning" processes, hence it will be capable of useful and largely correct expositions.

ChatGPT feels like a revolutionary development not just in knowledge but in creativity as well. It, along with the other similar AI being developed could render many different sorts of help sites redundant in time. The potential use of such technology seems limitless to me.

On the actual matter of sed, I found the man page a bit less expansive and terse compared to the info pages:

info sed

though it takes some attention to navigate through it all using info.

 

[KGIII]

I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the results. I was more impressed with the style than the content, as you say it's a well documented tool.

I can hang up my keyboard (mostly) and have AI write my articles for me! I bet there'd be fewer gaffes and mistakes.

 

[mrcrossroads]

I'd wanted to see how AI would handle a fairly complicated (or at least robust) Linux command. It did better than I thought it would. I didn't do any editing other than fixing the formatting to match the site. That's it. That's all I did.

My question is, how well do you think it did? I'd say it's getting there.

Let's Let AI Write An Article About 'sed' • Linux Tips

Linux Tips helps you get your Linux skills up to speed, by making Linux approachable.

linux-tips.us

I do love me some feedback. That's kinda the whole point of this one.

I wonder if someone else had it write an article on sed if it would write the exact same thing or reword it and use different examples? Hmmm

What did you use?

 

[KGIII]

What did you use?

ChatGPT - it's what all the cool kids are using today.

I believe the prompt was specifically:

"write an article explaining the Linux sed command"

The entire 2nd portion of the site is a verbatim quote, with the only edits being formatting for the code blocks. The rest is exactly what the AI spit out. I did proof it first and it looked good enough for me.

It's pretty easily read and understood - I thought.

 

[mrcrossroads]

ChatGPT - it's what all the cool kids are using today.

I believe the prompt was specifically:

"write an article explaining the Linux sed command"

The entire 2nd portion of the site is a verbatim quote, with the only edits being formatting for the code blocks. The rest is exactly what the AI spit out. I did proof it first and it looked good enough for me.

It's pretty easily read and understood - I thought.

I wanna be a cool kid too. I'll try it tonight.

 

[KGIII]

I wanna be a cool kid too. I'll try it tonight.

It's pretty fun and remarkably good at many things. I spent a little while trying to trip it up and get it to say 'unacceptable' things. That amused me for longer than it should have.

 

[mrcrossroads]

It's pretty fun and remarkably good at many things. I spent a little while trying to trip it up and get it to say 'unacceptable' things. That amused me for longer than it should have.

I've attached mine. Appears it wrote a different article. Pretty awesome

 

[KGIII]

I'd have expected it to write a different article, but I didn't check.

Some of the paragraphs in your .pdf are fairly similar, specifically the intro and outro paragraphs. The rest is very different.

It's a pretty neat tool. Tool? Toy? Experiment? I guess 'tool' works. It's pretty capable. It's almost eerily capable. It's a bit like the 'uncanny valley' effect, I suppose.

 

[mrcrossroads]

It won't tell you how to take over the world though. Needs some work.

 

[KGIII]

"What are we going to do tomorrow night, Brain?"

"Try to take over the world!"

Might be an obscure reference, as this site skews older. ;-)

 

[MattWinter]

You forgot "The same thing we do every night, Pinky..."

 

[KGIII]

You forgot "The same thing we do every night, Pinky..."

I consider Animaniac (from where Pinky and the Brain started) to be the true successor of Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes.

I need to get good and 'comfortable', tuck into a couch, and watch the series again.

 

[CrazedNerd]

ChatGPT's writing is quite good, and it honestly did almost as good of a job as I did even though I spent hours writing an article about sed.

Now: for the critical feedback...

sed 's/\(apple\|Apple\)/banana/' fruits.txt

that doesn't work without the 'g' flag at the end of sed, and you don't need the escaped parenthesis here like you need them for numbered back referencing. It's also important to understand that sed only replaces things the first time with the substitute command without the g flag, which isn't discussed in ChatGPTs writing. Pretty neat that ChatGPT only made that mistake. My article overall is still better because there's a lot of information there and it's all accessible for people who don't have any or much familiarity with UNIX command line tools...but originally there were a lot more mistakes before editing things than the ChatGPT bot. That's honestly another thing I thing I use sed for, it will correct everything i want to change without missing anything at all.

One more thing though, in terms of the non-ChatGPT aspect of this: did you just go to a ChatGPT website, or did you download/install a local app? Thanks much for making this experiment a reality.

 

[KGIII]

did you just go to a ChatGPT website

Yes.

If I'd had to download stuff and compile/install it, I might have not done so - it depends on how much friction it had.

 

[CrazedNerd]

Yes.

If I'd had to download stuff and compile/install it, I might have not done so - it depends on how much friction it had.

The benefit of using the website is that it's really easy, but a developer might want to download some sort of ChatGPT API or something of that nature...it would be more powerful if you could use it in conjunction with other forms of software.

I like the prospect of using artificial intelligence for writing feedback and editing, when i talked to a bot from https://beta.character.ai/, it helped me resolve some issues with something I was working on. I've come to the conclusion though that ChatGPI or any other bot can't put original ideas into writing, bots can be good for scouring databases of statistics and opinions though, giving it the smooth feel of human conversation.

 

[KGIII]

I've come to conclusion though that ChatGPI or any other bot can't put original ideas

There's already 'bots' to do this:

What people will do is 'article rewrite'. They do this for cheap/easy content. They use a bot that changes a few words and it rewrites the article they're copying enough for it to avoid copyrights and plagiarism complaints.

I'd expect people to be looking at ChatGPT to do the same thing. In fact, I'd not be surprised to find out folks are already doing it.

So, no original ideas - just rehashing the same stuff on their clickbait 'news' sites where they don't actually care about journalism. You actually already see this. If you've played with the bots, you can recognize it fairly well.

This one might actually do a better job and be less easily recognized. It's pretty clever programming.

 

[CrazedNerd]

There's already 'bots' to do this:

What people will do is 'article rewrite'. They do this for cheap/easy content. They use a bot that changes a few words and it rewrites the article they're copying enough for it to avoid copyrights and plagiarism complaints.

I'd expect people to be looking at ChatGPT to do the same thing. In fact, I'd not be surprised to find out folks are already doing it.

So, no original ideas - just rehashing the same stuff on their clickbait 'news' sites where they don't actually care about journalism. You actually already see this. If you've played with the bots, you can recognize it fairly well.

This one might actually do a better job and be less easily recognized. It's pretty clever programming.

Robot writing could certainly use those methods, and also random word generation with schemes like "short story", "essay", etc. to help writers come up with original ideas when they are stuck.

 

[KGIII]

Robot writing could certainly use those methods, and also random word generation with schemes like "short story", "essay", etc. to help writers come up with original ideas when they are stuck.

As mentioned either above or elsewhere, it reminds me a lot of the 'uncanny valley' effect, except it's text. Though, even the AI generated images can do that these days.