I am not a Luddite. I don’t dislike technology – in fact, almost every dollar I have earned since 2003 or so has been made possible by the Internet, and you glorious people who inhabit it.
I have a Google Pixel phone. A Lenovo ThinkPad. Fiber Internet service. I manage several websites. I have a newsletter that goes out by email to three continents.
I am not afraid of technology.
But I absolutely hate Chat GPT and it’s ilk. It’s not intelligent – it’s a search engine in a trenchcoat, but without the attribution. It’s a job thief. It’s a plagiarism machine.
I was in a meeting the other day, and the need for a communication plan for this organization came up. They’ve needed one for quite a while, but they don’t have a communication person, so since nobody was responsible for it, nobody had done it.
“We don’t have to pay anyone for that,” one of their officers said. “ChatGPT can write one for us in 30 seconds.”
Then, to prove his point, a minute later he dropped the results in the meeting chat.
How successful would such a plan be? How much thought went into it, how much concern for the recipients? How much empathy was involved for the audience? How aligned with the mission of this organization could this robot* possibly be?
And how invested can the organization be in the outcome?
And how many people did not earn a living because of the seconds spent creating a “marketing plan” this way? What is the environmental cost of that computation? What harm to the thinking processes of the person entering it into the robot?
And perhaps most critically to the organization- if it is really that easy, why did nobody do that before?
“My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays