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| ChatGPT Is Already Changing How I Do My Job | ChatGPT Is Already Changing How I Do My Job |
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| Once you start using ChatGPT you pretty much can’t stop. You begin with trivial, gimmicky prompts: Do this math problem. Tell me some vegetarian recipes with broccoli and peas. What came first, the jock or the jockstrap? | Once you start using ChatGPT you pretty much can’t stop. You begin with trivial, gimmicky prompts: Do this math problem. Tell me some vegetarian recipes with broccoli and peas. What came first, the jock or the jockstrap? |
| But as the artificial intelligence chatbot easily dispatches your gimmes, you begin to take it more seriously. Over weeks and months you tinker with it, learn its capabilities and its deficiencies, imagine its possibilities for good and ill, its potential for ubiquity and for indispensability. Soon, ChatGPT starts to etch a groove into your life. Now you think of it differently — less as a dancing pony than as a workhorse. You find yourself reaching for it for big tasks and small, and though it fails often, it feels just helpful enough that you can imagine lots of people soon coming to depend on it. | But as the artificial intelligence chatbot easily dispatches your gimmes, you begin to take it more seriously. Over weeks and months you tinker with it, learn its capabilities and its deficiencies, imagine its possibilities for good and ill, its potential for ubiquity and for indispensability. Soon, ChatGPT starts to etch a groove into your life. Now you think of it differently — less as a dancing pony than as a workhorse. You find yourself reaching for it for big tasks and small, and though it fails often, it feels just helpful enough that you can imagine lots of people soon coming to depend on it. |
| Only a few times in my life have I experienced this creeping sense of possibility with a new technology. The last time was the iPhone; the others were probably Google search and the internet itself. All these were groundbreaking at the start, but none of them changed anything overnight. Instead, what was most compelling was how easy it was to imagine them becoming more and more useful to more and more people. Five years after Apple unveiled the iPhone, there seemed to be an app for everything, and nearly half of American adults owned a smartphone; five years after that, just over three-quarters did, and it was hard to think of anything smartphones hadn’t changed. | Only a few times in my life have I experienced this creeping sense of possibility with a new technology. The last time was the iPhone; the others were probably Google search and the internet itself. All these were groundbreaking at the start, but none of them changed anything overnight. Instead, what was most compelling was how easy it was to imagine them becoming more and more useful to more and more people. Five years after Apple unveiled the iPhone, there seemed to be an app for everything, and nearly half of American adults owned a smartphone; five years after that, just over three-quarters did, and it was hard to think of anything smartphones hadn’t changed. |
| ChatGPT feels similarly big. It’s been less than five months since the artificial intelligence company OpenAI released its chatbot. ChatGPT is far from perfect; OpenAI continues to refer to it as a “research preview.” Still, as my colleagues at The Upshot documented recently, doctors, software engineers, fiction writers, stay-at-home parents and many others have already begun to rely on A.I. for important tasks. | ChatGPT feels similarly big. It’s been less than five months since the artificial intelligence company OpenAI released its chatbot. ChatGPT is far from perfect; OpenAI continues to refer to it as a “research preview.” Still, as my colleagues at The Upshot documented recently, doctors, software engineers, fiction writers, stay-at-home parents and many others have already begun to rely on A.I. for important tasks. |
| These accounts echo my own experience. As I’ve come to learn what it can do and what it can’t, ChatGPT has earned a regular place in my workflow — and in my worries. I keep thinking of new tasks for it, of different ways it might alter my own job and the larger media industry, and of new ethical, legal and philosophical questions it raises for journalism and how people get the news. | |
| Other tech-friendly journalists I know have been going through something similar: Suddenly, we’ve got something like a jetpack to strap to our work. Sure, the jetpack is kinda buggy. Yes, sometimes it crashes and burns. And the rules for its use aren’t clear, so you’ve got to be super careful with it. But sometimes it soars, shrinking tasks that would have taken hours down to mere minutes, sometimes minutes to seconds. |