Interesting, im vaguely interested in this too. i have half of a world written that i want to turn into a game maybe (probably not but, amhaving fun) I have the hardware to turn what i have into an embedding for an open model, and the hardware to run it. So that’s the way i would go about it, though i can’t advocate for how helpful it would be (yet)

ChatGPT is overly safe in terms of personality and the worldview it presents when asked. it’s a great tool to learn, more so than a teacher because you can freely ask it very specific questions in your own words and it will give an understandable answer. I think it’s actually a perfect tool for someone that age. Once the topics get too advanced, the results become less reliable though.

It doesnt make things up anymore as much as it used to. It still does sometimes with topics that are less commonly discussed in the dataset it’s trained on (this is similar with websearch). It will however confidently claim that it’s answer is correct sometimes. As long as you understand that it’s not always correct and have the sense to verify things that seem off, you’ll be fine.

You’ll get the best results from the paid GPT4 subscription (20 dollars a month), which i would recommend.

The only real risk i see is overreliance on it. I notice this in myself too, it’s almost like i forgot googling things is an option, so when i’m stuck rather than trying another approaxh, i just keep throwing prompts at GPT-4 until i give up and find the solution elsewhere, often within minutes. The way things are going, classic web search is becoming obsolete (unreliable result because of AI written content and fake news) while AI actively tries to be unbiased.

tldr: Yes, it’s extremely useful, make sure they don’t forget how to do things without chatgpt too.

It depends what you want it to do. For basic stuff, linux desktop works fine. If you need specific software i’d look into if it’s doable and how hard it is first.

Linux by default runs fine and without issues, if you pick a distro with stable releases. If you go with something like Arch, you likely will run into issues. If you want to do heavy modifications or run fancy software, you tend to run into issues. Thing about the fancy software is, it tenda to only work properly on linux, hence the issues being linux related.

If you’re a gamer, just don’t. A lot of people here will say you can run almost any game easily, but you usually need to do some fancy commands per specific game to get it to run properly. Which is fine if you just play one game occasionally, but if you hop between games or like buying the latest games, don’t.

If you have a specific preference for desktop environment, make sure it comes with the distro and is well supported by it. You can install whatever you want on any distro, but you have more chance to break shit.

I’d go with Mint or Ubuntu for your first try.

I would look into NovelAI for writing, it’s quite specifically for that. It’s a paid servicd similar to chatgpt, but it’s uncensored and private.

You can run your own lightweight LLM on a laptop but the output will be useless. Good output requires big boy compute.

If you do want to run it on your own hardware, look into Ollama. There’s also options to run your own LLM in the cloud with a not too difficult process for non-techies.

Frankly, id find the right LLM for your needs and just pay for it per month, maybe novelai, maybe something else, but chatgpt is not great for creative fiction.