{"id":330,"date":"2023-12-21T16:35:34","date_gmt":"2023-12-21T22:35:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beaucoupkevin.com\/blog\/?p=330"},"modified":"2024-01-10T15:34:27","modified_gmt":"2024-01-10T21:34:27","slug":"my-obligatory-post-about-chatgpt-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-use-not-love-never-love-the-plagiarism-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beaucoupkevin.com\/blog\/my-obligatory-post-about-chatgpt-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-use-not-love-never-love-the-plagiarism-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"My Obligatory Post About ChatGPT (Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Use \u2014 Not Love, Never Love \u2014 The Plagiarism Machine.)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Note: before we start, I\u2019m not touching any of the visual generation tools in this piece. The things they produce are gholas<\/em>1<\/a><\/sup>Is this my first Dune<\/em> reference on the new blog? Wow.<\/span> and I just plain hate them.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I work in SEO. More specifically, I work in content-focused SEO. I know that search engine optimization<\/em> is a forbidden phrase among people who only associate it with spam farms and bad-faith attempts to drive traffic,2<\/a><\/sup>I am not going to pretend that those things don\u2019t exist. Despite my slack-jawed appearance and habit of walking into doors, I am no fool.<\/span> but it\u2019s a discipline that I am quite happy to be employed in a lot of the time. Helping businesses and individuals drive interested parties to the right page on their website is a combination of science (how often should you use what words and where) and art (what do people actually want when they get there).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, you can imagine that my whole industry flipped out when OpenAI gave us regular folks access to ChatGPT, their Large Language Model interface that was friendly and easy to use. Finally, you could just ask this magic machine with access to a massive amount of information to do things in plain English<\/em>: list ten people who have played Hamlet in order of acclaim; describe the fundamentals of orbital mechanics in language a tenth grader could understand; recite three jokes by Mitch Hedburg. And it would do it! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kind of. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sort of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s had problems, as you probably know. It will make up facts<\/a> and it\u2019s weirdly bad at math<\/a>, which is the one thing I thought that computers were good at with no questions asked?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, of course, there\u2019s the whole \u201cwriting\u201d thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m going to get this out of the way right now: ChatGPT does not actually write. You should not use it to replace actual writers<\/a> who can provide insights or unique points of view.  It chews up a lot of other people\u2019s work and spits out something that approximates real writing. That may not be entirely<\/em> bad, as it turns out, but more on that later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, I want to address the true elephant in the room:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ChatGPT Is Not A True AI, And I Will Not Tolerate People Acting Like It Is (Same for you, Bard and Gemini. Don\u2019t think I don\u2019t see you.)<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker described ChatGPT as something that trains on content from \u201cthe darkest corners of the web\u201d and then uses \u201ca massive amount of computational power to predict what will be the next word in a sentence.\u201d This is not wrong. This is, in fact, deeply correct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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