ChatGPT Versus Human Talent

I feel like this is perhaps a controversial topic. But hear me out and let’s unpack some of my thoughts on this. Let me start off by accepting the efficiency that ChatGPT or for that matter any generative AI can provide. Hell, I was stubborn for months that come what may, I would never give in. But in the end, the inevitable happened, and I gave in.

I have used ChatGPT on several occasions for a few different things. Most of them stemmed from having writer’s block. It started off as a, "let me just give it some instructions, surely, I will not use it". Boy, was I wrong? It became addictive, not just for writing content for marketing, or to provide a perspective when I couldn’t quite put the words together. Suddenly, writing a blog that would normally take me anywhere between 4-5 hours to say, a day or two, depending on the topic, was simply done within an hour, and most of that time was spent putting the instructions together. I can confirm this blog has been written purely by me and not ChatGPT.

It was all sunshine and rainbows for a few uses, after which reality came crashing down. ChatGPT had produced content that was quite clearly plagiarised. There was no way I could use what it had generated. I tried re-writing my instructions to see if that helped generate a different response. Alas, it produced the same result – word-for-word, despite my new set of instructions being altered. I’m not sure why I did not think that ChatGPT was essentially scouring the internet through different resources to generate information based on the blurb provided. It is a Machine Learning tool after all and all it’s doing is providing you with the answer that you’ve asked based on what is available easily, just at an exponentially faster speed than any human can. It’s the reader who is then using this information for whatever their purpose is.

This got me thinking about a few things. I write a lot of different content, whether it be travel blogs, content blogs, conference outlines, and/or other short content for social media. A lot of my style of writing comes from lived experience, and especially when writing travel blogs, it is important for me to be able to convey emotion. Sure, ChatGPT can put a blog together about my travel to Seattle to meet my baby niece for the first time, but can it really convey the emotions that I felt when I first saw her? Or when she first held my hand? Or the first time I made her smile? What about the time I went to New York City and went on one of the most beautiful sunset cruises, that my heart felt so full, and all my worries, stress and fears had drowned in the Hudson River?

Conveying your emotions comes from your ‘voice’. Every organisation has a brand voice. The way they communicate on emails, marketing channels, and other avenues, always has a voice. So, how do you provide instructions to ChatGPT to make it sound just like your voice? Believe it or not, your ‘voice’ changes with every piece of content you write. If you read some of my earlier blogs on my website Mili’s Corner, and compare it with some of the more recent ones, you’ll notice a vast difference. The voice might still be the same, but my style of writing has evolved since I first started. So, how can you get ChatGPT to capture all of this?

Let’s move away from personal blogs and talk about ChatGPT in a work environment. Workload has tripled and there just aren’t enough people out there to deliver all the projects on time. This is a constant echo from any business leader you hear in interviews, conferences, articles, and other media.

How can you balance human and technological resources? For a very long time, the narrative has been, that robots are taking over, and whilst yes, this is changing, let’s put it in the forefront, what tasks can technological resources take to improve efficiency amongst the human resources in an organisation? There is a trend in people travelling for an extended period of time as the world has opened up and is more accessible. Or they are gravitating towards contract roles to combat burnout and the added stress they experienced during lockdown. More importantly, there are people who are just taking a well-deserved break after pushing through the challenges of COVID.

Perhaps another lens, which I’ve recently heard is, what roles are perhaps being created because of technological disruption, that can be filled with other talent. This is perhaps a poor example but conveys the message. As an example, if a tool such as ChatGPT is being used to create a job advertisement that outlines your company’s purpose, vision, and what the role entails, thus freeing up at least 5-10hours of a recruiter’s time in a week, for them to focus on actual interviews or prep for these interviews, can there be someone who does a sense check on the advertisement to ensure nothing has gone awry? And if there isn’t, and all the recruiter has to do, is do a sense check on the copy, then that is perhaps at max a two-hour task. So, we have gone from taking a task that would have normally been 5-10 hours followed by some back and forth for reviews and then by the end of the week finalised for release, to a maximum of a day.

If organisations are actively using ChatGPT to automate any tasks, what does this look like? If they have faced plagiarism in some of their copy, what has been the solution to this? How do you get your brand’s voice or tone through some of the content that is being produced via ChatGPT. Or is this in turn adding to the workload of someone having to sift through articles and re-write copy so it aligns with your organisation? Is it creating more roles for which you can hire other specialised talents? Organisations that have banned or are in the process of banning the use of generativeAI, what are the other driving factors behind this other than plagiarism?

These are just some of my observations and I would love to hear more from others. I’m not a technologist, nor do I work in that industry. I have had the pleasure of producing many tech-focused events over the years, and work with some of the tech leaders as speakers. So, some of this is just what I’ve picked up along the way.