I was talking to one of our accountants today. And it occurred to me that I was feeling as frustrated as when I talk to ChatGPT. We spent 10 minutes discussing about how to update over a 100 invoices to be VAT-compliant, only to discover that Portugal does not accept international invoices for VAT (obvious you might be thinking) – so our discussion was effectively a waste of time.
Have you ever noticed that ChatGPT always seems to say something at the end of its response to make you feel the need to ask another question?
It may be conspiracy, but I think it is being purposefully unclear. … to keep you asking. … To keep you paying.
For example, when I ask ChatGPT about how to optimize RAM when using Python on 100s millions of records, I get into the discussion about the Multiprocessing Python library. Multiprocessing helps us to launch Python scripts in separate processes, and this helps us to recover RAM at the end of every process. So, we avoid exploding the RAM and we can continue processing an unlimited volume of data in record time with polars.
This is great. But what ChatGPT forgets to mention is that actually, it is not only the script name that we have to pass – but the script file-path. And if we are in an application that we create based on our Python code, then actually we need a module path. But what about the way that paths are written in Windows compared to Linux?
ChatGPT has this habit of telling you almost everything you need to know and just enough to hint at some other problem that you hadn’t thought of – so that you are compelled to ask more questions.
I wonder if it actually causes us to waste time, going down the wrong rabbit holes, as I did today with the accountant, rather than getting straight to the point.
In any case, we can see that without enough experience, when we take what ChatGPT says at face-value and we are not caused to ask that next question, then we will probably get to the wrong conclusion.
I could have come to the conclusion that I had to alter and file all of my company´s expense invoices to be VAT compliant. Turns out- that would have been a huge waste of time, because those invoices are not even VAT-deductible by nature.
With ChatGPT, sometimes we can also come to the wrong conclusions, when we don’t have the knowledge, experience or skills to critically think about what ChatGPT is telling us.
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