I watched the South Park episode about ChatGPT and thought it was pretty funny. I’ve been fearful of AI and its power in creating content because I fancy myself a creative. I had not tried any generative AI program before using ChatGPT but have a lot of interest in giving Stable Diffusion (image generation) a shot.

I signed up for OpenAI’s website and clicked the Try ChatGPT for Free button. It gives you a list of ideas as prompts and some notes about its capabilities and its limitations.

I really wanted to see if ChatGPT could generate code. I don’t want to learn C++ but see it as necessary. I figured that if I had ChatGPT write a program for me, it would be easy to understand and I wouldn’t have to go through the nuances of searching all the namespaces I need to <include> in my script. I prompted ChatGPT to create a C++ program that would tell the user its name and age and respond to the user’s questions. It created just that, although the only response to questions was, “I can’t tell you the answer to that question.” It didn’t take much more prompting to get it to answer to a few other questions (though it uses a lot of if else clauses to do so).

C++ program that “speaks” to the user via the console.

After asking it for programs, I chatted with the AI about anything I could think to ask to glean information on how it works. I asked if it has “memory” to see if any of my prompts or questions would be saved server-side or if it strictly uses information provided within a chat to generate responses (My specific question was, “Have you seen the South Park episode about ChatGPT?” and since it tells me it can’t analyze video/audio not publicly/freely available on the internet, I asked “Have you heard about the episode?” to see if it uses other users’ questions to inform it but it tells me that “No. I don’t record your prompts.” Sure.

I got on later to create a program for an elevator because I want to create a game in Unity about elevators (my floor only has one elevator shaft and it can be a real pain in the ass; I thought it would be fun to have a game about elevators and their programming). I prompted ChatGPT to create an elevator for me and on the very first prompt it generated a pretty good (pretty basic) elevator class.

The first elevator class ChatGPT gave me according to the prompt I gave it just above the response.

I gave it some more prompts to add speed and acceleration and to move as a function of those attributes over time. Whatever I could think of in twenty minutes, I asked ChatGPT to do. I asked it to write readable code (Specifically I said “Can you change conditions to class methods with names that reflect their purpose). It did that. It wrote a class that easily would have taken me an hour or more in 20 minutes. Now, I haven’t tested the class but it’s been an incredible experience and I’m excited to see what I can do with generative AI. I think this is going to save people a lot of time and allow for much more creation just as going from Assembler to C and on to other High Level Languages has done in programming.

You can check out the code it created on my GitHub repo for it here: