1 year of ChatGPT: my most eye-opening moment

Happy birthday, ChatGPT. ??

Every content creator I know has had one of three reactions to the introduction of Generative AI: excitement, terror, intense denial.

I'm extremely excited. I think the most relevant quote for this generation of tech has been "Your job will not be replaced by AI. Your job will be replaced by a human using AI."

Disruption is definitely coming... although human inertia may slow this transition down a lot longer than the AI-maximalists think. Case in point: until very recently I was still getting $500–1000 translation projects that were essentially just uploading files into DeepL and going some last-mile edits.

This was only possible because there was a 5+ year lag between when translation tools became powerful enough to use for professional work and when companies started to become aware of this fact.

The same will be true of LLM-powered platforms.

Some industrious people who stay up-to-date on the capabilties of these new tools have the opportunity to have an extremely profitable decade.

The AI wave is coming. I recommend you learn how to surf.

However, it wasn't until last week that I had the biggest jaw-dropping moment with ChatGPT — after using it almost daily for about a year.

Up until then I really only used it for work that I was already proficient in.

I'm a content writer. So I used ChatGPT like a junior copywriter.

I was looking for opportunities to sacrifice a little bit of quality for a massive amount of time saving. If I could write posts 20x faster, but their quality was only 75% of what I could produce "by hand," then that seemed like a very effective trade off.

In fact, it's a trade off that marketing teams make every single day by employing junior employees. And when you realize that ChatGPT is basically — for now — a junior employee emulator, then it becomes very understandable why so many people are terrfied of this technology. And since being terrified isn't fun, I also understand why so many are in denial as well.

But my eye-opening moment came when I used ChatGPT for work that I wasn't already proficient in.

I think knowledge workers belong to one of three tribes, depending on the digital environment that they spend all day working in. You either are a member of the glorious and enlightened word document tribe, the code-warrior living in the wild lands of the IDE, or the poor souls trapped in the spreadsheet mines.

Due to poor life decisions, I had to venture down into the hostile world of the spreadsheet tribe.

Whenever I have to use Excel or Google Sheets, I feel like a idiot. I know there are a lot of powerful things you can do there if you know the magic spells (formulas) ... but that is not my domain of expertise so I end up wasting a lot of time doing things manually.

But this time I tried something new. This time I asked ChatGPT for help. And it completely changed the way I looked at this wave of technology.

Because in this situation, I was doing work that I was NOT proficient in. And this time I was the junior employee, and ChatGPT played the role of the more-experienced manager that I could access 24/7 with all of my dumb questions for a mere $20 a month.

I wanted to do something very simple. I wanted to sort my data based on the value of a dropbox in one of the columns. I figured there was a button I could press to do this, and I simply wanted ChatGPT to tell me where to find that button.

Turns out there is no button to do that...

SO CHATGPT GENERATED COMPUTER CODE THAT I COULD UPLOAD TO GOOGLE SHEETS!

And it worked ... perfectly ... on the first try.

??

Did I know that you could even run code in Google Sheets?

? No

Have I ever coded something in my life?

? No

Do I even know which coding language it used?

? No

Did any of this matter?

?? No!

A lot of people scoff and dismiss generative AI because it can only output 75% of the quality of a trained professional. Which is already a silly point of view, and often misses how quickly improvements are being developed.

But even if ChatGPT never got any better, having access to 75% of professional output from almost any knowledge profession is freaking amazing!

Imagine the feeling you get when you run into a problem at work, but you know a more experienced friend who you can ask for pointers from. We now have a friend in almost any profession, available whenver you need, for basically free.

Those who are curious enough to experiment with these technologies are going to receive historically unprecidented superpowers.

And those who are uncurious are going to be left behind, with their only option being to beg the governments to intervene and save them from competition.

Don't get me wrong, the goverments will try. Because they too want to be protected from comptetition. ?????

But it's too late. The genie is out of the bottle.

?? So yes, the waves of change are coming. I suggest you learn how to surf before you get crushed. ??♂?

?? One great big festering neon distraction // I've a suggestion to keep you all occupied // Learn to swim, learn to swim, learn to swim // 'Cause Mom's gonna fix it all soon // Mom's comin' 'round to put it back the way it ought to be // Learn to swim, learn to swim, learn to swim ... ??