(a new golden age for emacs) chatgpt wins the race for a tutorial on emacs. please endorse it it is quite helpful... i learned in days what took years because of it

Be careful - it doesn't actually _know_ things, it's still just putting words together. It may make bad assumptions and throw out wildly inaccurate information.

Well, that's actually impressive. That a program could figure out on his own how Emacs works and not only explaining how you could fiddle to your taste, but also explaining how you could do that in a different way according to every Emacs distribution. I see many impressive examples with ChatGPT everywhere which makes me to wonder where we might be later in some years with AI.

Even with that, I find it pretty good to distinct that you can't do everything with Xemacs like you can do with Emacs: https://i.imgur.com/8oneerg.png

Surely this will reduce the number of lazy support requests! (if they're able to read through all of the output)

Nah because it does not actually know things. So it can give false information with a high degree of confidence.

In my experience, this isn’t better than the answers you get in here or on Emacs Exchange. And the answers you get in these forums have the advantage of having real people behind them. Among other benefits, people are context-aware and less likely to give answers that “sound” correct while being wrong: unlike ChatGPT, most people don’t provide answers unless they are fairly certain. I just skimmed at the responses and already noticed some wrong parts: according to the [Telegram git repo](https://github.com/zevlg/telega.el), Telegram supports version of Emacs 26.1+, there is really no need to “make sure you have the latest version of Emacs installed on your system” These answers are pretty much at the level you can already get by pasting these questions into a search engine and opening the first couple of results

It probably can't detect sarcasm, either.

I heard someone describe chatGPT as "knowing the what, but not knowing the why." AI chats from the late 90's were much the same. There is plenty of great Emacs tutorials out there. ChatGPT is not special. It likely learned the what from us anyway!

Just like most people on the internet!!!

2shay

I understand that that is why i use it with the original documentation... and it is awesome even though i hate ai, my love for emacs compelled me to tell you about my story ... i just hope emacs beat vscode

I want fast response when i ask and it allowed me to do that

True but when i feel inspired to learn more in emacs i want to ask questions with fast responses not wait days for them ... but i like the community here and it feels lonely talking with an ai

Yeah that's a fair point. Just be careful because fast but inaccurate/incomplete answers aren't a good way to learn, so always try to gain a full understanding. When fast answers are needed, do you think the AI is much better than a search engine? Genuinely curious because I haven't used it much for this purpose. But from your screenshots it seems like it just picks the first couple search-engine results and lightly edits them: [on spacemacs](https://search.brave.com/search?q=how+to+customize+spacemacs), [on telegram](https://search.brave.com/search?q=emacs+install+telegram). (Which, since it was trained on the internet as its corpus, is a very rough/generalized description of how it actually operates). I doubt that the AI-filtered version of the spacemacs documentation is much better than the real thing. But again, I don't have much experience with either spacemacs or using ChatGPT in this way: let me know if I'm missing something.

[deleted]

Well if you don't care about the accuracy, go for it, but you're going to eventually end up either here or in a forum complaining that the advice you took from a bot isn't working

This is not dissimilar from copy-pasting the first or second most appealing stack overflow response. Probably worse

Yah a mixture is better