Do you think ChatGPT is a menace when it comes to employees doing their jobs? Many think so. I hear about it often from people in senior roles – especially in creative industries that involve writing, researching, ideating and designing. So big is the lament that it is common drawing room conversation among working people close to and in their 40s Many are convinced that the quality of work coming out these days lacks finesse. However, not enough to warrant firing of the new generation employees. There is no solid evidence backing these claims.
We have entered times when the expertise in grammar, spelling and even nuanced knowledge in different writing or design styles are no longer the most important skills to have. The only ability the human brain needs proficiency in two things:
- Clarity of thought
- Ability to articulate the core structure of the desired
This shift is putting the inexperienced and the learned on a level playing field. Everyone is having to learn to hone these two skills over all the rest.
A conversation with my dad, a mechanical Engineer from IIT Madras threw up an interesting parallel. During his time, calculators had completely replaced the slide rule. If you are not an engineer and if you are born in the 80s or later, it is likely you don’t know what a slide rule is. A slide rule, my friends, is an analog calculator. When the slide rule was developed in the 17th century, it made engineering level calculations faster and less error-prone. It may not be inaccurate to say that being an engineer was predominantly about knowing the art of calculating with precision using the tedious slide rule. Enter Scientific Pocket Calculator. The scene changed completely. The skill of calculating was lifted off the hands of engineers and placed in the hands of this amazingly super fast pocket-sized device. Leaving many with the question: ‘If pocket calculators calculate, what is left for engineers to do?’
Nothing makes us understand ‘change’ like a blast from the past. Just as the slide-rule itself is not what engineering is, grammar or colour theory is not what the creative profession is about. These tools were so overwhelming to use that they hijacked the entire discipline. Like pocket calculators, chatGPT is but a tool that enables us to focus on thought and invention rather than on the mechanics of how we arrive at it. Being good at our job today means to be good at using this new tool – that happens to be infinitely quicker and easier – like the calculator is compared to the slide rule.
However, people who try using ChatGPT as a tool to escape work are caught in seconds. I myself have. About a year and a half ago, I was consulting for a creative company. One of the junior folks in the team thought it a good initiative to use ChatGPT to generate ideas for a creative brief. He flaunted the fact that all his ideas were generated by ChatGPT. Later a colleague, closer to my seniority, took me aside and suggested that I discourage the team from openly opening OpenAI. He felt it makes us look incapable of doing our job. Interestingly, I agreed with him. Not because ChatGPT was used but because ChatGPT made this young man oblivious to the shortcomings in his own acumen. He simply believed that if it came from ChatGPT, it must be right and that it was not up for questioning. Needless to say, he was questioned at every step of the way, leaving him tongue-tied for answers.
Without a clear understanding of what is needed and – most importantly – a curation of the output, we will never be able to extract worthy results, even from ChatGPT’s. You may or may not want to make use of ChatGPT and other GenAI tools, but those who choose to use it can by no means fake the acumen required for actual results.
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