I’ve slowly formed my thoughts on the language model tools that have stormed into the foreground of technology over the last few months. My initial utter skepticism, largely founded on people’s misunderstanding of how these tools are designed, has morphed into an appreciation of their specific utility as a thesaurus for any kind of text available on the internet.
I thoroughly enjoyed Ted Chiang’s description of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG, and I still feel it’s the most comprehensive metaphor for the state of these tools. That being said, if you imagine a user with enough knowledge and restraint to respect the lack of trustworthiness in the answers, there’s a slightly more optimistic view of their ability to make associations and prod some new thought processes.
Over the years I’ve become better at strategically using a thesaurus. They come in several varieties, but all have the base ability to nudge a writer in a different direction, giving them options to refine their phrasing and subtly move towards clarifying their thoughts. It seems to me that the vast sources on the internet are a modern dictionary, and tools like ChatGPT are the best version of a thesaurus we currently have that can account for all that information.
While a thesaurus is specific to vocabulary and usage, tools like ChatGPT have the benefit of a wider set of text sources to pull from. They can be a thesaurus for skills and ideas. They can respond dynamically to prompts, helping you determine a new or narrower path towards to your task.
When looking up a word in a thesaurus, it’s best not to take it at face value. But, you can begin investigating that word in a dictionary, understand where and when it is used, and determine if this new word is indeed appropriate. Or maybe the word was at the tip of your tongue and the thesaurus helped you find precisely what you were looking for. Either way, there is conscious work on the user’s end to use that information.
It’s best to treat these language models in a similar way. That email it just wrote you based on a sentence of summary? That should be read and adjusted as necessary. A function it wrote in Python? The variables may be poorly named or it may have a fundamental bug in it. This tool is not magic, nor is it flawless. It is a reflection of what humans have made thus far and certainly requires our editing to optimize its usefulness. Otherwise you’re going to look like Joey Tribbiani in everything you do, not just standard writing.
I’m still pretty bad at fully utilizing thesauruses. I only use the one built into macOS, and it’s not always great. I should care about them more, learn to use them better, and appreciate their utility. I should give the same benefits to these new language tools that are readily available, find the way they work best for me, and be happy that they do have a use. That will take time, and I still have a healthy skepticism about their overall effect on human creation. But I can do very little about how others use it. I have to focus on myself.