Humans vs. ChatGPT

As CEO of a writing company, I am nudged almost daily lately to talk about ChatGBT, the conversational language optimizer from OpenAI.

So, for the record, my view is that it may become another tool for our collective toolbox, but is not a replacement for a writer.

Until the robots have opinions, write about new things, can be creative in presenting ideas, or showcase the benefits of products and services, a human touch will be required.

Automation is everywhere and this changes our role but does not completely erase us. (Grocery store self-checkout anyone? Grrr.)

When you really think about it, as writers, we already use many "AI" tools such as spell check, Otter.ai, Grammarly, and Dragon NaturallySpeaking, to name a few.

And I would argue that these are not truly AI tools anyway. True AI has intelligence to learn - not just mimic, copy, analyze and generate. Yes, it pulls styles and tone from existing works of literature and art. Yes, it pulls research and data from what is already published. Is this AI? Not really.

It simply does an excellent job at answering questions (we ask millions of questions daily online so plenty of material there), reviewing what has been done before, and sending us back very polished answers in immaculate sentence structure.

It's important that we differentiate AI from what is actually natural language processing (NLP), or optical character recognition (OCR). Personalization is also not AI. The tech used for ChatGPT is machine learning called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).

Grammar also has structure and rules - something computers embrace easily - a framework for language. You can even diagram grammar like code. The structures of language are formulaic in nature and ChatGBT is incredibly seamless (and scary) because it is an expert in regurgitation and sentence structure.

Actual content, creativity, thoughts and ideas are still in the human domain.

Time to watch The Terminator movie...