Once you start using ChatGPT, you’ll find yourself reaching for it more and more often. At first, you might use it for trivial tasks like solving math problems or finding recipes, but as you become more familiar with its capabilities and limitations, you’ll begin to think of it as a valuable tool and workhorse rather than a gimmick. It has the potential to become indispensable, and it’s already changing the way I do my job. In fact, I’ve only experienced this feeling a few times in my life with groundbreaking technologies such as the iPhone, Google search, and the internet itself.
Despite being far from perfect, ChatGPT has already become a part of the daily workflow of doctors, software engineers, fiction writers, stay-at-home parents, journalists, and people from all walks of life. As chatbots and artificial intelligence become more prevalent and powerful, their potential for changing how we work and interact with the world is both exciting and daunting.
I’ve gained valuable insights from using ChatGPT in my work. Here are some ways that I’ve been using it:
Wordfinding. By simply plugging text into ChatGPT, it can provide suggestions for alternative words, which has been extremely helpful in improving my writing.
Getting unstuck. ChatGPT can help with difficult transitions by proposing new ideas, or serve as an “always available, spitballing friend.”
Summarizing. ChatGPT can quickly pull out big themes from long documents, making it ideal for summarizing complex news stories.
However, there are valid concerns about using ChatGPT, as it is known to make errors and its biases and motivations are not always clear. Some publications and organizations are putting guidelines and working groups in place to mitigate these risks. As chatbots become more prevalent and powerful, we need to tread cautiously and be vigilant about verifying and fact-checking their output.
Despite these concerns, I think ChatGPT and other AI technologies will become an essential part of many professions, including journalism. Editors could use it for generating headlines, audio producers could ask it for interview questions for podcasts, and reporters could use it to find new sources or quickly get up to speed on a new topic. But it’s important to remember that these technologies should be treated as semi-reliable sources, and their output should always be carefully checked and verified.
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