Thoughts on ChatGPT
It isn't search. Search should give you sources. The excellent elicit.org is a great application of AI to search.
That we are using it as search shows us how broken search is. At least the model that is monetized by ads. I use DEVONagent as an antidote to search in the way that presents on the world's most popular search engine.
It has limitations. “ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Fixing this issue is challenging, as: (1) during RL training, there’s currently no source of truth; (2) training the model to be more cautious causes it to decline questions that it can answer correctly; and (3) supervised training misleads the model because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows.” (source)
It can be an equalizer. We can use ChatGPT and similar applications built on helping us write to get unstuck. I use tools like these to break away from a blank page.
English teachers (my wife is one!) need to start teaching people a different kind of writing literacy based on prompts, editing, and bringing voice into our writing.
There is a quote I remember being from the Eames documentary: You can't outsource curiosity. What is it we can't outsource to ChatGPT? Curiosity and its close cousin engagement. We have to interact in a way that demonstrates we, as humans, are delivering those two things.