Sense from confusion

Written by Alec Fearon on 15 June 2025 in Anapoly Diary
Transparency label: Human-only
<--- The concept
---> First lab note published

Early in the process of developing Anapoly Online, our website, I asked ChatGPT to help me create a diary dashboard: a page acting as a central point for diary posts. Amongst other things, I wanted the page to let us select a tag and see only the posts thus tagged. I was unsure how to implement the filltering control this needed, so asked ChatGPT for a step by step guide. The AI confidently produced a procedure, and I put it into action. It soon became clear, however, that the procedure did not reflect the reality of the software I was using. ChatGPT tried to correct things in response to my complaints, but things simply became more confused.

When all else fails, I said to myself, read the documentation.

The software’s documentation proved to be like the curate’s egg: good in parts. Soon, I was as muddled as ChatGPT had been, and it took me some trial and much error to work out the correct procedure for what I wanted to do.

Conclusion: current AI can’t create sense out of confusion. That’s still a task for humans.