Est. Read Time: 5 minutes. Read Time brought to you once again by the Ashburton Energy + Hair Logistics Group, in association with the Bradley Hills Bureau of Corrections + Housing.
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Shows:
Saturday, October 28th: Third Wheel (tickets to come!)
Friday, November 10th: The Hollywood Comedy (tickets to come!)
Saturday, December 16th: DENVER
Hello Sternal Journalists!
Quick one this week:
I used Chat-GPT to do my taxes today. Here are what three friends said about that:
The Lawyer:
The comedian:
The rationalist:
And I understand the skepticism. Reputationally, Chat-GPT has never quite recovered from when that lawyer just let it make up a bunch of cases for it and didn’t double check a thing.
But for those still tinkering with it, the service has gotten a little better. You can now show it images, and talk to it, and it can talk back. This is very Black Mirror-y and scary and consensus seems to be that people will absolutely fall in love with it a la Spike Jonze’s Her.
And part of me wants to keep tabs just in case things get really scary, but a bigger part of me still finds it to be useful.
To be clear, I am not solely using Chat-GPT. I filed my taxes using FreeTaxUSA, which is a legitimate TurboTax competitor, despite having a name that would make any Russian phishing scam be like, “Tone it down, comrade!”
I’m just using Chat-GPT whenever I get confused. When I ask a question, it gives me a direct answer. Google doesn’t do that. And while Google makes it much easier to tell where the information is coming from, that’s not what I need.
I just need a direct answer. Once I have the direct answer, it’s very easy to verify with a quick Google. In this way, I’ve zeroed in on what I think the best comp for Chat-GPT is.
Chapt-GPT is UrbanDictionary… for everything.
I remember the first time I used UrbanDictionary. It was probably 2001 or so, and I had seen someone use the word “dome” in an AOL chat room. I didn’t recognize this use of the word dome, and IM’d my friend Paul to ask what the heck they were talking about.
He—and this was extremely cool for a middle schooler—sent me the link to urbandictionary.com along with the message, “Never ask again.”
To this day, I always catch myself thinking that “Never ask again” was the tagline of UrbanDictionary and then realize, “No, that’s just some cold-ass shit Paul said as a damn twelve year old.”
Because that was the beauty of Urban Dictionary. This was a fully crowd-sourced website with entries for words you couldn’t find in the OED or Merriam-Webster. No, those dictionaries were a little to… suburban.
And that was a new thing! Before UrbanDictionary, you did sort of have to ask someone else what words like that meant. Now we didn’t! It even got to the point where when you did ask someone to tell you about something illicit or raunch or just plain new, you might be dismissed with “it’s probably on UrbanDictionary.”
The downside to UrbanDictionary was that, because it was crowdsourced, it was overrun with useless noise. Sometimes, this was a hyper regional usage of a word or more often, a prank entry. Something like, “Dingleberry. noun. what Julian Stern likes to eat.” You know. Fun stuff.
So you went to UrbanDictionary because it was the most direct place to get an answer to whatever you were looking for, but because of all the noise on the site, you knew you should double check elsewhere on the internet or god forbid in the real world before you fully let the word into your vocabulary.
And that’s exactly how I use Chat-GPT. A friend who most of the time knows what he’s talking about and will give me a direct answer, but I’m not going to fully trust him unless I can double check his answer elsewhere or in the real world (but still—his direct and mostly correct answers make the process of finding the truth go a lot quicker).
OR I’ll be audited! We’ll see!
Recommendations
The Fond Du Lac Apartment Mystery. Podcast Episode. In this episode of the podcast Search Engine, host PJ Vogt explores the paradoxical hoops of the Housing Choice Voucher Program (better known as Section 8 vouchers) through the experience of one person trying to navigate the system, and also how the system got so broken, and how it could be better. Great engaging but fairly entry level listening for anyone interested in the housing crisis.
Reality. Film. This movie portrays the home interrogation of Reality Winner, who in 2017 was arrested for leaking an intelligence report about Russian interference into the 2016 election. The hook of this movie is that the entire thing is scripted directly from the transcript of the interrogation. I was worried it would be gimmicky and stilted for the first ten minutes, but then I was hooked. Thrilling and gut-wrenching stuff, especially for one location and the mundanity of transcript-y conversation.
Duolingo. App. We all probably know about this language learning app, but I had fallen off the wagon and just returned this week. They’ve made a lot of improvements to the app and je suis havin’ a great time with it. If you’re thinking about it, I think it’s fun!
Roadhouse Bar. Sketch. SNL was off to a comforting start this week, and while people will likely talk about “I’m Just Pete” and “Princes of Comedy” (which gets an honorable mention from me) and Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, this sketch was insane and bare bones and everything a last sketch of the night should be. I have a feeling it’ll be more fun upon rewatch. (One more honorably mention goes to the Bowen Yang in the Star Trek “I used to work here” parody).
Alrighty, y’all! Sending lots and lots of love.
Best,
Julian