I am an early adopter. At least, that’s what my wife says. I like trying new things. I’m interested in all new technologies and like to try and learn from them. AI and ChatGPT are not new anymore. Many more people have adopted these technologies than just the early adopters. At the same time, most people do not use ChatGPT to their advantage just yet.
The use of ChatGPT raises some ethical questions. How do we handle things like intellectual property and authorship? And some SEO issues. What happens to the web if people use ChatGPT to write all of their texts? Is that a good situation? Or will we just be overloaded with more of the same, often mediocre, articles? And how will Google deal with that? I don’t have answers to these questions yet.
I don’t use ChatGPT to write articles, columns, or blog posts. But I do use it for a lot of other things. ChatGPT helps me to make sense of data that is not organized. It can make tables or distillate summaries. ChatGPT helps me to come up with ideas. Just a few weeks ago, I was trying to come up with an idea for a new product name (yes, I am building something new. No, I am not telling you what it is yet). ChatGPT gave me a whole list of suggestions. One of these suggestions appealed to me, and then I asked whether he could come up with similar names for the appealing one. ChatGPT is my brainstorming partner.
In addition, I use both GitHub’s CoPilot and ChatGPT to write code. I am a developer, but ChatGPT makes me so much quicker. I know what I want to build; I even know how I want it to be built, and by putting that into words, I can make ChatGPT do the base coding for me. After that, I open the files in my development environment and CoPilot helps me finesse my newly built plugin. This is why I’ve been able to produce multiple new plugins over the last few weeks because what used to be days of work is now only a few hours of work.
For me, ChatGPT is like having a dozen interns. Interns can do research, make lists, and write summaries. They can make your work life so much easier. However, interns will only produce good work if you give them the right instructions. After all, they’ve just begun working and still have to learn a lot. And that’s the same for ChatGPT. The output of ChatGPT is only of high quality if you instruct it well. It can do practical tasks for you. It can make you quicker, more efficient. It can give you more time to spend on your creative process, because you don’t have to spend all that time “building”. But in the end, you are the one behind the steering wheel!
