ChatGPT: Empowering Introverts in the World of Writing

Individuals collaborating with one another and computers.

Source: Tima Miroshnichenko/Pexels

One of my greatest sources of joy since late November 2022 has been collaborating with ChatGPT—together with my graduate business students and coaching clients—to help them land professional opportunities. How? By enhancing their writing. Also, I’ve delighted in moderating discussions about chatbots for a variety of professional and academic organizations, engaging in multiple panelists’ perspectives.

Some insist the chatbot flashfire setting the world ablaze is subsuming our ability to think critically. They protest that this conflagration is obliterating jobs, blurring the bounds of originality, and snuffing out creativity. Some express a fear of being replaced by bots, snuffing out their livelihood and career prospects.

Flickering from the firepits of the zeitgeist, questions shoot up: Are we now useless at telling the difference between what’s human versus computer generated? Is ChatGPT a multi-purpose tool like flint that you can use for good or evil? Should you be ashamed if you still haven’t even touched that tool (that some call a weapon)?

Yo, Prometheus, titan god of fire, how can I just sit by with my grad students and clients, giddily toasting marshmallows beside the blaze? As an introvert, I’m lit up by this tool that some say threatens the destruction of humanity—yet I see its potential for creation.

Artificial intelligence versus my native intelligence sparks my own shame that I’ll never know enough about what I’m talking about as my internal gag order demands my silence until I can achieve the impossible. Counterbalancing that, I purse my lips into a rumble of raspberries that fan the flames and sometimes just bask in their toastiness. Echoing that, my panels of experts insist there are no experts, since we’re all figuring this out. Yes, together(ish).

Still, I am quasi-secretly intrigued by ChatGPT as a sparring partner. It doesn’t judge me. It apologizes when it doesn’t really “get” my prompts or queries, with its expansive mega-brain that mops up all the bits of thoughts, news, and fake news out there, and spits them out, never holding back.

Individual using ChatGPT on a laptop

Matheus Bertelli / Pixels

So, here’s more of what I like about “collaborating” with chatbots:

1. Blank page terminator. Chatbots like ChatGPT can get you unstuck and give you a jump-start. Are they more of a chemical fire starter than a thinking partner? Without them, I rub two sticks together with rarely a flicker. So, even when ChatGPT generates bland ideas, it spurs my critical, competitive mind to say: “I can do better.” My clients embrace it similarly.
2. Idea generator. Writing specific, clear prompts, and then asking the chatbot to pump out a bunch of ideas, can help you by creating a smorgasbord of options. Then you pick and choose. Or tell it that you want more of this and less of that. Make it more quantitative. Pithier. Targeted at anthropologists or bankers or clowns. Whatever. The other day, it helped a client of mine, who does something that sounds dull in the financial world, spicing it up with 10 different metaphors. He picked his favorite three and we massaged the text into something that spoke to him so he can speak to the CEOs who can hire him.
3. Grammarian. This is one of the more obvious applications. I’m gobsmacked at the speed at which ChatGPT, even the free version I still use, picks out grammatical errors, listing and fixing them. Again, giving it smart prompts helps. So, rather than typing “correct all my mistakes,” I prefer to tell the bot exactly what I want it to do. I like to see what it considers errors, and then I get to adjudicate, seeing if I agree. How? Er, sometimes just Googling whether the proverbial “affect” is really an “effect.”

I love interacting with computers—at least some of the time. Same with people. Here’s what still rankles me:

1. Not trustworthy. It’s well known that you can’t fully trust the information that chatbots spit out. Collaborate smartly with chatbots by questioning and double-checking anything they provide you. Remember that they’re only as smart as the bazillion bits of data they’re aggregating.
2. Unstable, overloaded systems. I noticed that especially in the early days when ChatGPT came out, about half the time I logged in, the system was overloaded. So when I presented it to my NYU graduate students, it wasn’t working.
3. Flaky at following instructions (e.g., “eliminate redundancy”). Sometimes, ChatGPT half listens. But that’s just like most people.

So, ChatGPT: friend or foe? That was the name of one of the virtual panel events I facilitated recently. A few months beforehand, the host noticed that many other events happened to have the same title. We resolved not to ask a chatbot for a better name. No pride in that—we just used our brains (or not!).

Copyright 2023 © Nancy Ancowitz.