Do you remember when GPT came out to the public? Besides the strange name, it did something most of us had never experienced before: a chatbot that gave tailored replies to user input. Not the standard replies the 'old chatbots' were spitting out. No, GPT gave real answers that felt awkwardly human.
If you are like me, you probably tried to make a chatbot before, and all it did was try to hold a standard back-and-forth conversation, with an occasional scan for keywords to make it 'less' obvious. Or you built an endless tree of conversation branches with standard questions and answers.

A chatbot on steriods
But GPT was something different. It "understood" you. It answered like a human. It was surely not sentient, but I'm sure you asked a similar question too. And I was giving it questions or tasks I was sure nobody had tried before. And it did what I asked. Weird. I loved it.

Everyone aboard the hype train?
Now, years later, the world has changed and is still changing. At least digitally, for sure. Everyone is talking about it, everybody is using it (freely or forced) and everyone has an opinion about it. And for good reason. News about environmental impact, billion dollar investments, jobs it's creating, jobs it's killing, diseases it found cures for, people it has killed in war, disruption it makes in the electronics market, etc, etc. It cannot be ignored without having some sort of opinion about it. And I hate most of it.

Not slowing down, are we?
With time passing, most of us know more and more about it. The underlying technique is better understood and the implications become, sometimes, clearer. It is a massively powerful tool that has real impact in real situations. I'm an engineer and I have been developing for almost 30 years. And this tool, for now, is changing my workflow more than any previous tool in the field. From Notepad to Dreamweaver, from powerful IDEs to maturing programming languages, from frameworks and (open source) tools to all the software that the world runs on. The AI, well, the LLM, is writing code faster than humanly possible. And, sometimes, with great accuracy. I sometimes love that.

What I use it for
So. Let's focus on the LLM part in the industry I know best. Engineering. The development side. Especially in games, apps and websites. I can't imagine ever removing this tool from my workflows again. Not until something better flies by, or this technique destroys itself. I'm finally mastering this 'language', and besides heavily reducing tedious work for myself, I'm creating the tools and workflows for others to help them where the focus always was: putting the users first and letting the systems work for them, not the other way around. I love that.

Stop the slop, harness its power
Not to end on a negative feeling, but one thing should be clear. We do not need massive amounts of generated AI shit. We all know it, the AI slop. Stop abusing this tool to spam. We always had spam and we always fought it. And this time it is no different. This time it is even more important: use the tool for good, use it responsibly. Don't jack into human vulnerabilities and feed it garbage. Nobody wants to forcefully get in touch with it. Enable it to make tedious work obsolete while still enabling human creativity. I'm cautiously optimistic.