NEWSLETTER
C.hatGPT has been a blessing for Joy. The New Zealand-based therapist has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and often struggles with tasks like composing difficult emails, with procrastination kicking in when she feels overwhelmed.
“Sitting down to compose a complicated email is something I absolutely hate. I would have to use a lot of strategy and responsibility to do it, and then I would feel exhausted,” says Joy, who is 30 and lives in Auckland. “But telling GPT ‘write an email apologizing for a delay on an academic manuscript, blame it on the family emergency, ask for consideration for the next issue’ feels entirely doable.”
While the copy the AI chatbot produces usually needs editing, Joy says this comes at a minor psychological cost to her. “It’s much easier to edit a draft than to start from scratch, so it helps me get past hangups at task start,” she says, adding that she has recommended using it this way to clients. “Avoid a psychological logjam for neurodiverse people. I think it could also have value for people who struggle with professional norms due to neurodivergence and are cutting.”
ChatGPT, developed by San Francisco-based OpenAI, has become a sensation since its public launch in November, reaching 100 million users in the space of two months thanks to its ability to compose essays, recipes, poems and responses. believable-sounding emails to a wide range of queries went viral. The technology behind ChatGPT has been harnessed by Microsoft, a key OpenAI backer, for its Bing search engine. Google has launched its own chatbot and has said it will integrate the technology into its search engine.
Both ChatGPT and Google’s competitor Bard rely on large language models that are fed vast amounts of text from the Internet to train them how to respond to an equally wide range of queries. According to Guardian readers among those 100 million users, the ChatGPT prototype has been used for mixed reasons and with mixed results.
Naveen Cherian, a 30-year-old publishing project manager in Bangalore, India, also started using ChatGPT for email, but soon discovered that it could be deployed to tackle repetitive tasks at work. He uses it to condense book descriptions into 140-character pitches and is pleased with the results so far: “It works brilliantly and I just need to do a sanity check after I’m done.”
This gives you time to focus on the creative aspects of your role. “I can focus on the actual content of the book and focus on how I can edit it to make it better,” she says. Cherian says that her employer knows that he uses the tool. “As long as the work is of quality and I can do more processing than before, they are happy. The concern they had was just that it shouldn’t be completely dependent on it, which it’s not.”
Like many students, Rezza, a 28-year-old from Yogyakarta, Indonesia, has been using the chatbot for academic purposes. “I have so many ideas, but only enough time to put some of them into practice because I need to write them down,” he says, adding that writing is the “most time consuming” part of his job.
He claims that he has sped up the time it takes to write an essay three times. “With the improved workflow, my hands are catching up with my brain,” she says. However, he says the chatbot’s output requires a large amount of editing and hasn’t been helpful for creating references; when he tried, he “gave non-existent academic citations.”
Rezza has not informed his university that he is using the tool. “I don’t tell my professors because there is still no clear policy on this issue at my university. I also think that it is not necessary; Using a calculator doesn’t stop you from becoming a mathematician.”
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Emma Westley, a 42-year-old marketing executive at a tech startup in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region of France, says it can be a big help in clearing up complicated technical concepts in her work. “I found ChatGPT to be instrumental in making the entire research, brainstorming, and writing process more efficient. While a fair amount of editing is still required to make the copy sound human, I’m really loving it as a brainstorming partner.”
But others have found that the bot’s limitations outweigh its benefits. Dan Atkinson, a 40-year-old software engineer, says that he has found glaring errors in the information he has provided. “I asked about the diet in 11th-century England and it apparently consisted of potatoes and other vegetables, but potatoes didn’t exist in Europe until the 16th century,” he says.
Atkinson is concerned about the “misplaced trust” the bot provides by providing factually incorrect information. These errors are known in tech jargon as “hallucinations.”
He says: “People are more willing to believe a machine, even when it is telling outright lies. This is dangerous for several reasons. For example, if you rely on something like this for basic medical advice. Or if you write code, it can give you examples that are bad practice and error prone.”
Microsoft has acknowledged potential issues with responses from its Bing service with ChatGPT. He said AI-enhanced Bing could make mistakes, saying: “AI can make mistakes… Bing will sometimes misrepresent the information it finds, and you may see answers that sound convincing but are incomplete, inaccurate, or inappropriate.”
Roger McCartney, a teacher in South Korea, also raises concerns about the chatbot’s reliability, saying it makes “the kind of mistakes a kid might pick up on,” like basic mistakes about the solar system. Although he enjoys using it to “bounce ideas around,” McCartney, 38, also wonders if he is simply acting as a mirror for his own views.
“If I think of something that I wouldn’t get an immediate answer from Google, I ask it a question and get an answer about something I didn’t know,” he says. “I tend to find this more useful than reading a lot of articles. I wonder, though, if he’s just parroting my own opinions back to me in some kind of weird echo chamber.”
Some have found more joyful uses for the software. In a sign of the times, Lachlan Robertson, a 61-year-old part-time town planner and full-time fan of Robert Burns in Wiltshire, used it to compose a “vegan haggis speech” for his family’s Burns dinner last month. past. . With lines like “Great haggis, plant-based and true/ No more must sheep chase/ Their lives, that we may dine on you”, Robertson describes the result as “excellent, though more William McGonagall than Burns”.
