People (especially teachers) are freaking out about ChatGPT.
It doesn't help that David Brooks is offering negative advice, which is like reading about Hiroshima and thinking that everyone needs to invest in peace without asking what else nuclear energy can do. Even though ChatGPT and other large language models are just grammatically correct word-cloud generators, people should be rushing to use them and see what they can do.
Fabulation is a starting point
Writing for work can be tedious, so I asked ChatGPT to author a piece for me provided that educational concerns should dominate. It was all but unusable except for one sentence that had a good balance of education-space jargon and real-world concerns, which then lead to a paragraph. While it was certainly kind of a "chat", it was more like I was prompting ChatGPT to prompt me and force me to react.
The Internet is splitting into human-readable and computer-readable
Currently, about 10 pct of the articles I read require human interaction, which is a problem for me because over the years I have collected many different sources of news, which I then funnel into my email (human interaction is bad because the fewer items that are pre-processable, the more time it takes me to "get current"). Likewise, access to financial exchanges and markets like Alibaba / Amazon / Ebay is also bifurcating into bots-allowed and not. 1
Books will become more important
Human-interaction-required creates an extra step and is enough of a barrier to me that it effectively paywalls the content. Barring new content improvements, constant processing time means I will consume more books and other long-form works. While it is perhaps curmudgeonly, using technologies that help preserve concentration seems like a win relative to AI-enhanced clickbait++. 2 ,3