Like a lot of people, I’ve been dabbling with OpenAI’s ChatGPT with varying seriousness for about 12 months.
“Make me a 12-week marathon training plan”, “Create me a six-week marathon training plan”, “Make a photo of me as the next Pope”, “Is it possible to run a marathon without any training?”
When the platform went kaput this month, I was midway through writing an application for a voluntary role with an academic magazine. I’ve scoffed at accounts of students using artificial intelligence to get through college, deriding them for only cheating themselves. In my own much superior and honest scholarly pursuits, I only ever used it to source articles . . . or plan . . . and sometimes reference . . . or clean up those long sentences that don’t really go anywhere, nor make the point you want to make, but roll on and on for far too long, eating up word count.
As a result of the blackout, however, I ended up with two very different halves of an application. The first, produced with ChatGPT’s help, sounded like something I’d written, if you ignored a few of the more exotic word choices and overlooked the box-ticking style of the answers. It did everything the question had asked of it, and it wasn’t necessarily a fabrication.
The second wasn’t as polished. Pulitzer-worthy accounts of my leadership and prowess in adversity made way for honest accounts of my achievements. Sentences were clipped and to the point. At the end, I realised there were a few ideas that I’d missed but just couldn’t shoehorn them in. But it was definitely me talking about me.
An obsession with performance is continuously being maximised, from schools to the workplace to public services. But at what cost? Tim Harford’s Undercover Economist column “Shared values over profit” (Spectrum, June 7) and his account of Alasdair MacIntyre’s “tale of two fishing crews”, illustrated the perils of this fascination excellently. The first crew is driven by nothing but profit. The second allows time for the cultivation of character and human connection within the team, yet often comes out on top.
ChatGPT’s outage opened my own eyes to how I’d sleepwalked, slowly but surely, into believing maximum utility was somehow better than sticking to my values. This dilemma isn’t just an issue for business; it’s a challenge for individuals too.
Rowan Hill
Hazel Grove, Cheshire, UK