Editor’s note: Alice Bronnert is a director of primary research at Optum Rx, United Health Group.
Almost every day I’m telling somebody – either a friend or a colleague – about ChatGPT.
“Chat what?” they say. “What is that?”
Well, I’d be happy to tell you. ChatGPT is like candy. Imagine a Twizzler. It’s super fun at first. That strawberry flavor, that stretchiness, breaking it off in your mouth and then pensively chewing. It’s great for about three of these twists. And then you get to the point where you’re not so into the Twizzlers anymore. The point at which you may want to hand them over to someone else. That point of decreasing marginal utility. It’s that, “Ugh. Feeling slightly ill. Must stop,” type of feeling.
For me, ChatGPT has been a bag of Twizzlers. In a way, it’s been great. It can be used for so many things and it’s extremely fast. Here’s just a few of the ways that I’ve employed the AI chatbot:
The thing is, none of these interactions brought me joy (okay, maybe the squid fable a little). Mostly though, I kept asking questions because ChatGPT’s responses were fast; they were complete; they were multiple, in-depth paragraphs! But here’s the thing, the tone is unmistakably automated. There’s something off-putting about having an AI language model talk to you in a very correct, bland, pedantic and even supercilious way. I’ve often ended up annoyed. These are the times when I’ve started to argue with ChatGPT about how it needs to inject more humanity and compassion into its responses (it often retorts that it is already programmed to be pleasant).
Here’s a question for us all. How about we just stop and pause before going into this AI chat model? How about we consider something revolutionary? That we actually have the resources to do this all ourselves? We can ideate, we can create, we can analyze, we can synthesize, we can do this by ourselves. By our own carbon-based l...