The first thing I would like for everyone to do is stop using terms like “hallucinating” or “thinking” to describe what ChatGPT is doing. The anthropomorphic language used to describe computers is misleading at best. Instead of “hallucinating” you can say “producing random words” or “gibberish.” For “thinking,” you can say “crunching numbers.” Please?
I have a vested interest in keeping up with AI so as to predict the demise of my business.
The demise that has been predicted since the 1940s, and they tell me every day that it is just around the corner. It keeps me up at night, along with doom scrolling. Thank you AI.
Don’t get me wrong, I love ChatGPT.
Don’t get me wrong, I love ChatGPT. How could this friendly, tirelessly helpful, bot-thing possibly do me, or you, any harm? It’s just unfathomable. And yet, day after day, the digital media channels keep singing the same song.
Mind you now, I use AI of some sort every day, and the results are spectacular and at the same time mediocre. Spectacular because they are grammatically correct, but mediocre when the algorithms that are supposed to learn my musical preferences and then somehow give me more of what I love, end up giving me the same thing. Admittedly, my musical preferences are limited to clavicord players of the 17th century born on March 31, 1685, so there really isn’t a lot that AI could do for me here.
Alright, my griping time is over.
AI is great and all that stuff, but still, in every endeavor it is the basics that win.
AI can generate mountains of glowing prose for your newsletter, but what people want is sincerity and authenticity. AI does not have that.
People want to connect to other people, AI does not do that.
This applies to programmers and other IT professionals as well. ChatGPT is a great tool, but the results will be different depending on who uses it. The masters know the basics, and that is what makes them masters.
The basics may not be sexy, but they are effective, which is why they are “the basics.”
Good things take time, effort, and skill, and though people are constantly looking for a shortcut, they always end up back at the basics. Let’s just keep that in mind.