As it approaches its first birthday, ChatGPT may have already grown way beyond baby steps, but it still needs human supervision.
If you’ve read any of my previous articles on ChatGPT,¹ you’d know I’m not exactly a raving fan. But since penning those articles, I’ve come around. Sort of. I still stand by my original concern that ChatGPT and other AI-based writing ‘assistants’ have been unleashed on the world without sufficient time for most of us to prepare for its implications on the workforce, education, the integrity of information on the world wide web, and on society in general.
Goldman Sachs estimates that 300 million jobs could be lost or diminished by AI,² suggesting that when the AI boom’s dust settles, it will have been even more transformational than the Industrial Revolution — only this time it’s white-collar computer workers whose skills will become redundant. And since resistance to AI is apparently futile, we’re being encouraged to ‘embrace’ it (🤮) or risk being left behind. Bombarded by unrelenting hype, companies are falling over themselves to incorporate generative AI into their content-creation workflows — even if they have no idea what they’re doing. They just want to AI-up as quickly as possible so that they can at least appear to be AI-enlightened, even if in reality they’re more like deer in the AI headlights.
But despite counting myself among a shrinking minority of folks stubbornly maintaining that ChatGPT isn’t all rainbows and lollypops — not only for the copywriting profession but also for consumers of content (which is pretty much everybody) — I also acknowledge that there’s no point fighting it any longer. That ship has well and truly sailed. Instead, it’s time to milk as much assistance out of ChatGPT as possible while retaining control when it comes to critical thought, creative veto, and that all-important irreplaceable X-factor — the human touch.
Relying on ‘prompt engineers’ is pointless if they’re not qualified to assess the output
I have taken ChatGPT out for enough spins to know that the content it generates really is only…