My colleague @Ian Crocombe posted one of my blogs on LinkedIn and then challenged the reader to see if they could spot that there was “more than meets the eye” about it.
Now you’ve heard this one before….”I went on this course, and I learned all about….”
Well, I did go on a course a couple of months ago as I am a firm believer in continuous improvement of my own skills and for so many years, I was a luddite when it came to computers and the digital world. I still don’t profess to be particularly skilled in the area but I’m trying to improve and one of the presentations was about the wonderful world of A.I.
Imagine my shock when using A.I. the speaker produced a website there and then in front of us using A.I. Now it was a rubbish website and was just a landing page with some words and pictures, but it was real, and a computer had done it all!
We were then introduced to ChatGPT and that woke me up to all the possibilities. We are now apparently on ChatGPT 5 which had just been issued the previous day but having seen what it could do I thought I would try it out. My first attempt was using it as a search engine as I thought it could improve my access to more relevant information. However, all it did was refer me to a particular database which I have no trouble in accessing directly so that was a bit of a bust.
Undaunted I thought I would have a go at using it to draft a blog and so I put in various parameters and lo and behold the first draft of what you saw was created in essentially a minute. I say first draft because it was nothing like my style and was frankly wooden! Now my regular readers may thing my prose is always wooden but even by my standards it was solid oak!!
But the basis of a decent article was there and having played around with it, changed some of the language and the order, what you saw posted last week was the result. So, what are some of the lessons?
1. If you are expecting to use it for a factual article, then think again because it is not up to date so check the facts before you publish.
2. It writes like a machine not as a person and you can see that clearly when you use it.
3. It won’t necessarily contain all that you expect as it is based on the parameters you set.
4. It won’t at this stage save you a great deal of time as you will need to edit it significantly, in which case you might as well write it from scratch.
Actually, there was something in there that would not have been in my immediate outline so in reality it acted as a useful prompt to expand on my thinking.
Is it a useful tool? At the moment in a limited way but rest assured the technology will improve and the product also so for now. It may be a bit of a toy but soon it will be part and parcel of our lives so watch this space but meanwhile…”I am not a robot”
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