VIRGINIA POSTREL: Routine Writing Is About to Be Free.

I know two kinds of people: those who have been obsessively playing with and discussing ChatGPT and those who have at best a hazy notion that it exists. I’m in the obsessive group, as you already know if you read the Tennyson experiment I posted earlier.

For those in the hazy group, ChatGPT is a system that uses massive amounts of text to create a predictive model that enables it to mimic human writing. The shorthand is that it’s an AI chatbot, or autofill on steroids. You type in a request and it spits out an answer. This CNET column provides a solid backgrounder:

For example, you can ask it encyclopedia questions like, “Explaining Newton’s laws of motion.” You can tell it, “Write me a poem,” and when it does, say, “Now make it more exciting.” You ask it to write a computer program that’ll show you all the different ways you can arrange the letters of a word.

Here’s the catch: ChatGPT doesn’t exactly know anything. It’s an AI that’s trained to recognize patterns in vast swaths of text harvested from the internet, then further trained with human assistance to deliver more useful, better dialog. The answers you get may sound plausible and even authoritative, but they might well be entirely wrong, as OpenAI warns.

Even in its current, relatively primitive form ChatGPT portends both huge productivity increases and major disruptions in any enterprise in which writing matters. Instead of writing boilerplate corporate memos, managers will soon assign them to bots. The run-of-the-mill college grads who get paid to flood my mailbox with press releases and promotional emails should start thinking about careers as nail techs or phlebotomists—something in the physical world. Insight and beauty are still rare, but serviceable prose isn’t.

Well, this is the 21st century you know, to coin an Insta-phrase.