Harry McCracken: How I Finally Learned to Love ChatGPT

When I struggled to come up with a brief, clear headline for last week’s newsletter, I pasted the text into the chatbot and asked for suggestions. I liked one of its ideas more than any of my own, and used it in slightly edited form.

I similarly used ChatGPT just today to create a summary of a longer article I’d written. It’s suggestion wasn’t remotely good enough, but it did give me a good idea how to summarize my 2,000 words into a few sentences. I wrote the summary myself, but having help getting started was super useful.

I know some companies have already laid off workers because they plan on having these generative tools take over that work, but I deeply believe that’s a mistake and they’ll realize it soon, if they haven’t already. Sure, maybe they can technically do it, but as the kids say, what they produce is going to be very mid at best, and embarrassing or illegal at worst.

Microsoft’s branding, Copilot, is absolutely perfect for how I’m thinking about these tools and how I expect them to be incorporated into our lives going forward. They can help, but they’re not here to do it all for us. I use ChatGPT (via Raycast) and Midjourney nearly everyday to augment my professional and creative work, and you may not have noticed because my work and my creative expression is still what you’re getting. I just had a computer help me a bit.