I’m a writer, and when I first heard about what generative artificial intelligence (AI) can do, I thought, “Uh-oh, this could make my job obsolete.” I found out many of my writer friends are feeling the same fear: that artificial brains will replace ours.
Then I had an experience that changed my mind.
Last Fall, while I was writing for a health and fitness website, I spent an afternoon writing a 400-word piece about a complicated bodily function. Feeling good about it, I went to dinner. There I ran into a friend, Fred, a tech-savvy retired professor.
I told Fred it had taken me four hours to write the article. As I was talking, Fred was clicking his phone under the table. After a few seconds, he held it up in front of me and asked, “Is this what you were writing?”
I read it, and my heart sank. In about a minute, ChatGPT had written a 400-word article that was logical, coherent, and accurate. All the words were spelled right, the grammar and syntax were perfect. I could almost see my writing career dissolving before my eyes.
After dinner, I went home depressed. I picked up the article I had written earlier — and wow! Like the AI version, my effort was logical, coherent, and accurate — but with one major difference. My article had soul. It had life.
I took a deep breath and relaxed. AI may be able to perform almost-human feats. But it’s not human, and never will be. Its intelligence is massive, but it’s still artificial. It will not replace my human brain — at least not yet.
My advice: your brain is better in many ways than the smartest computer. Use it for what you do best, and robots will always struggle to keep up with you.
