Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Seriously, don’t publish that raw ChatGPT’d thinkfluencer piece as your own. Nobody’s falling for it, everybody’s doing it, and you’re cheating yourself.

It is mid-December of 2024 and I’m in Nepal. I’ve been spending the past few weeks in the temperate Sun of Kathmandu’s winter. Few days ago I got tea with a friend at Le Sherpa cafe, the more expensive Nepali restaurant I’ve been to. We got to talking about how important writing and communicating your experiences to potential employers is.

I told him the story of this blog. I’d been writing for 6 months– without publishing – when I discovered chatGPT¹. It wrote everything better than I did! So I fed it my essays, hoping it’d edit them and make them sound more professional. I posted the lightly-edited output on this blog. It took me a few weeks to post the articles. It’s taken me a year (and ongoing) to edit out that slop, and get my voice back.

My friend nodded vigorously. He had a similar experience. He took time to write detailed analysis pieces on his industry, and posted them on LinkedIn. But that took lots of time to research, write, and organize. When he had a general idea and not a detailed concept, he started running it through chatGPT, created an outline, and posted it.

“I can tell the difference between the pieces I’ve put more effort into, and the other pieces,” he shared with me. He soon discovered that quite a few people on his LinkedIn feed were already posting similarly half-assed chatGPT-gen’d pieces! And some read quite close to those he had generated! “That was it. It was the signal that anybody posting ai slop is only hurting themselves,” he told me.

It’s clear now that posting such pieces only reflects poorly on the poster, and bring them absolutely no respect. If anybody can do it in fifteen seconds with zero effort, it doesn’t showcase critical thinking or knowledge. It’s a clear sign of laziness, a lack of effort, and unawareness of the expectations of our times.

But more importantly, doing so hurts us more much deeper in a different way.

By putting our names on pieces which – lets be honest here – we had very little ‘hand’ in creating, we’re taking away our perspective. We’re losing our voice, our creativity, our writing skills, and handing it over to the AI. We’re not growing. Not as writers, neither as editors, and definitely not as thinkers. The choice we’re making is not one of ‘saying something’, it’s ‘agreeing or disagreeing’ with something that’s been said by somebody else. Instead of copy-pasting the essays from chatGPT, we might as well post a link to the ai-generated webpage, with a comment below that says “I agree.” If we’re going to outsource the thinking and learning to computers, what does remain?

Another midday tea meeting, on a Kathmandu Java coffee rooftop, a week before Christmas. A friend related the experience of a close relative of his. The job they were in was unsatisfying, and involved writing lots of reports. The reports wouldn’t be read by (m)any, but it involved collating data, and proposing course of action. It was the only stimulating part of the job. After the arrival of chatGPT, they automated most of the report-creation part using it. And now the only intellectually rewarding part of the job was gone. They were merely the person who copied from chatGPT, created a pdf, and emailed it. A very well-paid job, but they were on the verge of quitting.

Thing is, chatGPT is at the very best, mediocre at thinking and expressing. We’re impressed because we’ve seen the jump from random babble to something with potential insight. Our grandparents gorged on post-war diet of fats and sugars because it was so abundant. Might we be doing the same for information, and now, thinking? It adds bulk, but does it nurture, does it help us grow?