“ChatGPT solves the blank page problem,” Cody Gough, a marketing professional based outside of Chicago, told me. “The worst thing in the world is opening a blank document. ChatGPT helps you on your way.”
The limitations
As we discussed in this newsletter, AI chatbots are imperfect. They often make mistakes – like that one led to a drop of $100 billion in Google’s cumulative stock market value when it appeared in an ad.
The employees I spoke to mostly use ChatGPT as a brainstorming and writing tool. They say chatbots’ work is sometimes imprecise and often of a lower quality than they could produce themselves, but chatbots can still be useful.
Alexia Mandeville, a video game designer based in Texas, uses ChatGPT to help her brainstorm character names, come up with ideas for trailers, and produce press releases for her games. “I’m making something that doesn’t have to be factual,” said Mandeville. Because her work is fictional, she added, ChatGPT must be creative, not accurate.
The chatbot is still the tool, not the creator. It can often copy writing styles replicate our weird internet behavior, as my colleague Cade Metz wrote. ChatGPT’s output is only as good as its input, so it struggles to reason, use logic, discern the truth, and write imaginative work. It has tried and failed to write science fiction, for example. The human capacity for original thinking keeps white-collar workers working, even as AI poses a greater danger to them than previous developments did.
Free up more time
AI can’t do Snyder’s job of teaching music and gym classes. It cannot play the piano or the HORSE basketball game, and it cannot facilitate students’ social and emotional learning. But it gives Snyder more time for that work.
“Everyone is talking about how AI is going to replace us,” Snyder said. “I tend to disagree. It will free up more time at work to do other, more productive things.”