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Evan Nicks's avatar

Thanks for sharing this article! I’ve been using chatGPT rather a lot the last few months, even using it in writing articles for planet nude (there’s a blurb about this on our about page). I’m reminded of the Steve Jobs quote about a computer being a bicycle for the mind. ChatGPT can not do to the work for you--it is a very bad writer--but it can enable you to better grasp, explore, and go further to present an idea. It cannot replace the writer, but it can empower a good writer. I still have to go over every sentence and rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. I have to fall back on my own writerly skills and voice, and make sure that everything I put out there is entirely my own words, but it makes the process easier and faster. I’ve also used it in my job, helping to format tonally challenging emails to clients overdue on payment. I’ve used it in my volunteering on AANR committees, even once writing a PR guideline to present, which our committee was struggling to pull together. To the point of Charles’ original post, what it helped assemble was mostly common sense. Our committee would have eventually written the same thing. But it saved us hours and hours of endless back and forth, and enabled us to have some new discussion and get more done. I think many people still don’t quite understand how to use the technology... I see people treat it like google, asking it questions to answer like a parlor trick. It’s not meant for that, and lacking a resource to answer a question, chatGPT will bullshit its way through an answer, even making facts up. Instead I think of it more like a processor. I feed it information, starting with an idea, pasting in facts, dates, my own writing, other relevant articles and text, then prompt it to help me format it back the way I envision it so that I can take it into a word processor and rewrite it all over again. There are many ethical questions it presents which are also fascinating. It can enable one person to do dramatically more work in the day. Will this result in workforce reductions by large firms? Inevitably. Will it also empower small businesses and individuals in new ways? Yes. AI is already changing the world, and will continue to... beyond chatGPT I’ve also begun using AI in other applications of my work. When I record a podcast, I use AI to transcribe it and then I edit the transcription. I’ve even begun using one AI tool which has learned my voice and can replicate it to match based on a text prompt. So if I flub a line in a recorded podcast, I can actually fix it without having to re-record. I’ve also used AI to upscale images to make thumbnail photos for the blog or podcast (some here might have seen a recent post about Doris Wishman-- the image in use was very pixelated and low resolution before AI helped me blow it up.) These tools are becoming more and more ubiquitous, and can both compete with and empower the creative artist depending on their use. All in all, I find the whole thing pretty interesting, scary and exciting!

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Charles Daney's avatar

True. Digital zoom isn't the same as optical zoom. When cameras were new things 150 years ago, they didn't take very good pictures either.

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