By now, you’ve probably heard of ChatGPT, the OpenAI bot that does long-form question-answering by gathering data and is essentially regurgitated machine-learning.

I was hoping to get this article out back when ChatGPT was new and unheard of, but I’m a tad late to that party.

The whole chatbot concept isn’t anything new or groundbreaking. Hell, I still remember being a child and using Cleverbot, remember that old, snarky A.I. bot from 2006? and typing in mildly concerning questions for my age and being greeted with the bot’s passive-assertive answers.

Then over the years we’ve been greeted with all sorts of “customer service” bots every time we enter a bank or insurance or company website and a little chat messenger opens up in the corner asking “what do you need help with?” These were cool at first before we realized there wasn’t actually a real human being on the other side. Same with voicemail automation.

Then we’ve even been greeted with more “fun” action bots, like for example, Discord bots which can play music, offer fun facts, and do all sorts of in-channel commands for user convenience.

I still remember the early days in the late 2000s and early 2010s when users with even the least amount of programming knowledge could at least perform simple commands with bots in forum-based chatrooms.

The key difference, though, is now with improvements in machine-learning, a concept originally intended for computer algorithms to leverage data, artificial intelligence can now interact with some nuance. Although there really isn’t any difference between A.I. and an algorithm.

If anything, A.I. is just a long-form algorithm that happens to be able to communicate like a human. . .

ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, launched by Open AI Inc. which was already famous for its deep-training model DALL·E (seriously, did we learn nothing from WALL-E?)

ChatGPT provides a “more human” element than those previous chatbots, feeling surprisingly less automated, less soulless, to the point that people are considering using it as the basis for new marketing strategy for its ability to instantly create a promotion plan for any given subject.

According to the Search Engine Journal, “It’s a revolutionary technology because it’s trained to learn what humans mean when they ask a question.”

The thing is with ChatGPT, we’ve now opened up the can of worms of “are robots taking our jobs?” again and now it’s affected my work industry. Do we still need editors, social media managers, or any content writing jobs when we have a bot that can do it instantly? It sure would save a lot of time.

Here’s what ChatGPT cannot replace: an editor’s quirk.

So much of the human idiosyncrasy is lost in the constantly data pooling these A.I. generated texts provide. It’s just a copy of a copy of a copy. Nothing new is being curated. Just recycled again and again. A real, human editor can give your book a real sense of style and wording that A.I. just can’t.

Writing is experience. An A.I. doesn’t experience anything, it just simply calculates. Humans relate to experience.

I know what some will say that most fiction writers haven’t actually experienced what they write either. That researching these things and writing about them is no different than what an A.I. does.

Sure, a fantasy writer doesn’t actually know what it feels like to kiss a mermaid, fly atop a gigantic bird, travel in a spaceship, or change dimensions. But what they do know is how to write a compelling story. How to keep people engaged, how to build suspense, the relationships that keep us on the edge of our seats. They understand the emotion of humanity. They understand the why.

You know problem also arises from ChatGPT? Plagiarism, stealing content from other stories when attempting to create its own. Will there be an independent fact-checking bot? Will there be a proofreading bot to keep ChatGPT from copying another story verbatim?

What should we really expect? We were told about the metaverse being the next great thing in the virtual world. That failed worse than Musk’s Twitter takeover. We’ve been told for decades how much crypto would be filling our bank accounts. Yet FTX fell apart faster than the Buffalo Bills’ Super Bowl hopes. NFTs were all the rage among celebrity and entrepreneur culture. Right click + copy/paste had something to say about that. Why should we trust ChatGPT?

There are already hundreds trying to find ways to profit off ChatGPT, and a quick search on YouTube already bombards you with ways to create six side hustles from it.

ChatGPT also already has competitors. ChatGPT went so viral that Microsoft jumped the gun and invested nearly $10 billion into the A.I. Now Google is debating launching a “Sparrow model” to compete. There’s also other A.I.s which have popped in lieu of ChatGPT’s rise.

However even despite all of this, ChatGPT is still a hope for the future. We must not let it replace our human editors and content creators, but we can let it aid us.

Consider A.I. less as the end-all-be-all, and more so as another tool in the utility belt for creating faster, more optimal quality in our digital brands. The world has become self-branding, highly individualized, and completely user-centric in all its models, so you may as well make use of the tools at your disposal while it’s still free, effective and convenient.

Researching and fact-checking can now be done twice as quickly. Marketing and strategy can now be brainstormed and actionable at lightning pace. You can even learn Python and other computer programming skills quicker using it. It even has synesthesia for audio/visual enhancement.

ChatGPT may be the modern world’s next virtual grift, but it’s here to stay, and those who resist change will inevitably be left behind.