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With the trendy AI taking over the internet, many creatives and those who work in the digital space are asking the same question: Is Chat GPT going to take my job?
For many years, the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) seemed futuristic and unbelievable – like the idea that one day a robot could be taking your order in the McDonald’s drive-thru or the concept that you could access any information in the world with just a few clicks of a button. Oh, wait…
Suddenly, AI is taking the world by storm. It’s everywhere, popping up in industries from healthcare to finance to manufacturing and from retail to entertainment to transportation. But ChatGPT is a little bit different from the rest, and it’s causing many creators to wonder if their jobs are in jeopardy…
What Is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence language model that can communicate with humans using natural language – think chatbot. The program has been trained on massive amounts of textual data, so it can now understand language. It can answer questions generate text, translate languages, and perform other language-related tasks.
For example, I asked ChatGPT what it is best at. This is, verbatim, what it told me:
As an AI language model, ChatGPT is designed to excel in a variety of natural language processing tasks. Some of the tasks that ChatGPT is particularly well-suited for include:
Generating human-like text: ChatGPT is capable of generating coherent and grammatically correct text that sounds like it was written by a human.
Answering questions: ChatGPT can answer a wide range of questions on a variety of topics, drawing on its vast database of knowledge.
Language translation: ChatGPT can translate text from one language to another, making it a valuable tool for multilingual communication.
Sentiment analysis: ChatGPT can analyze the sentiment of text, identifying whether it expresses a positive, negative, or neutral emotion.
Text summarization: ChatGPT can summarize long blocks of text into shorter, more concise summaries.
Overall, ChatGPT's strength lies in its ability to process and understand natural language in a way that allows it to perform a wide range of tasks that would normally require human-level language skills.
You get the idea – ChatGPT excels at producing human-like language and answering questions in ways that sound like a real human generated them. So it’s no wonder that many writers, content creators, and other digital professionals are scared.
But do we need to be? Let’s explore what ChatGPT really has to offer and whether it’s truly a threat to our livelihoods.
What Does ChatGPT Offer That Humans Don’t?
Often, when it comes to the professional world, we talk about “soft skills” – the character traits and interpersonal abilities that define how (and how well) we get along with others. Soft skills are the opposite of hard skills, those essential pieces of knowledge and occupational skills that allow someone to perform their job.
It seems like ChatGPT has the hard skills largely covered. It can find information quickly, pretty much at the click of a button. It has mined fathoms of textual data, to the point that it has more knowledge than any human could ever have.
ChatGPT can conduct quick, detailed research (although it does sometimes confidently present incorrect information) and generate largely well-written material in a matter of seconds. Plus, for the time being, it’s free.
But what it doesn’t have? Soft skills. ChatGPT struggles to understand context, meaning that it sometimes gives answers that are notably far off from the intent of the original question. It does use iterative learning techniques to become better and better at understanding the nuances of human language, but I think we can all agree that ChatGPT’s absence of the “human touch” is noticeable.
Two Sides of the Same Coin: ChatGPT and IBM Watson
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Think of ChatGPT as a modern-day version of IBM Watson, the computer system designed to answer questions on the popular game show Jeopardy! In 2011, Watson competed on the show against champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, winning the first-place prize of $1 million.
But Watson has some deficiencies when compared with human Jeopardy! players – it sometimes struggles to understand the context of clues. Watson’s basic strategy is to parse the keywords in a clue while it searches for related terms that may be possible responses. While Watson, like ChatGPT, is able to read, analyze, and learn from natural human language, giving it the ability to make human-like decisions, it misses context.
For example, take this instance that occurred during the Final Jeopardy! round of Watson’s first match. Watson was the only one of the three contestants that missed the clue. The category was “U.S. Cities” and the clue was “Its largest airport was named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle.”
Watson answered “Toronto” (not a U.S. city, by the way). The real answer? Chicago. Engineers and other people on IBM’s team postulated a number of reasons why Watson may have gotten this question wrong. One that stood out to me was that Watson may not have been able to parse the meaning of the clue due to its complex construction involving a semicolon and an incomplete second clause.
The moral of this story is that even though Watson has access to plenty of information, it was not always able to answer questions perfectly or understand the context of certain clues. ChatGPT faces the same limitations.
The Human Touch
Humans, on the other hand, are experts at understanding context. We bring soft skills, those irrevocable interpersonal habits, to the table. We’re far more interesting to work with than computers. But more than that, we innovate. We are both creative and generative – ChatGPT is only the latter.
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ChatGPT does not create new information, per se, although it may be able to combine existing information in new ways. It is not able to have brand-new ideas; it can only pull from a library of textual data that already exists. ChatGPT is not going to be the mind behind the next great technological venture, a design revolution, or a world-changing enterprise.
There are qualities and skills that only humans can bring to the table. On the macro- scale, those characteristics include creativity, innovativeness, entrepreneurship, and ingenuity. On the micro- scale, those skills include editing, proofreading, modifying, honing, and reworking the text that ChatGPT creates.
Plus, the future of AI-written text is up in the air. There’s the chance that Google will alter its algorithm to deprioritize text that has AI markers (in other words, text that looks like it might have come from ChatGPT or its competitors). If you create a portfolio of work or a plethora of blog posts using content created entirely through AI, your search results presence could be seriously negatively affected should this change come about.
To break it down, the future of AI is uncertain. But what is certain is that it’s never going to entirely replace humans. There’s plenty that we’re still good for – and plenty that we’re still the best at.
Here’s our verdict: You don’t need to fear for your job (yet).
Using ChatGPT to Your Advantage
But at the same time, it might not be time to shun ChatGPT just yet. There’s plenty that it is good at. Instead of rejecting ChatGPT right off the bat because you’re worried it might come to replace you, learn to leverage it as a tool to improve your workflows, efficiency, and day-to-day productivity.
When you allow ChatGPT to take care of mundane or boring tasks, you can refocus your energy on more complex problems or critical thinking puzzles that are beyond the scope of ChatGPT’s abilities. You can also use it as a jumping-off point for many projects.
For example, you could ask ChatGPT to brainstorm suggested topics for articles on the topic of civil engineering. Then, rather than having ChatGPT write the articles, you could write them yourself. You could also ask ChatGPT to make an outline for an op-ed on remote work and America’s job climate. Then you could fill in the blanks. As you’re writing, you might ask ChatGPT to find some statistics about career satisfaction. The list goes on…
Clearly, there are many productive ways to make use of ChatGPT in the workplace. While it’s not a replacement for sentient manpower, it can certainly be a productive addition that can boost efficiency for your business.
The New World of AI
When new technology comes along, people are often reluctant to adopt it at first. But those who take the plunge and commit to their own continued learning are often those who end up on top. For example, think of everyone who learned to code early in the dot-com and computer revolution. Those people brought in hefty paychecks and had extremely marketable skills in a competitive labor market.
Don’t close the door on ChatGPT – instead, invite the program into your company and train your content team and other employees on what it can offer. ChatGPT is not a replacement for human employees, but it has plenty of benefits when it comes to bolstering productivity.
Whether or not ChatGPT remains the internet’s trendiest chatbot remains to be seen – but regardless, AI is certainly here to stay. By training yourself to utilize these new tools and thrive in today’s digital environment, you’ll set yourself up for job security for years to come.
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