Don't Put All Your Eggs in the ChatGPT Basket
Posted February 13, 2023
ChatGPT is smart, efficient, and learning fast. But so far, it's not intuitive.
Last week I was talking to a friend about the beautiful, unexpected, and very wet snowfall we woke up to that morning. I said it would make great snowballs — too bad we couldn't go out and play. She agreed and said it would also make a really good fence that might stop her neighbor's dog from pooping in her yard. I told her a famous poet wrote, “fences make good neighbors ...” Ultimately, our conversation inspired this post about why ChatGPT can't replace your creative team — at least not yet.
The icy perfections of ChatGPT
Disclaimer. I'm not a data scientist. Hell, I flagged the fizz-buzz test when I still had dev aspirations. That said, to me the difference between true creativity and ChatGPT is the essence of this quote:
"There is hope in honest error ...
None in the icy perfections of the mere stylist." — J. D. Sedding
This quote is often attributed to Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a Scottish architect, artist, and true Renaissance man who lived at the turn of the last century. Mackintosh would've dismissed the soullessness of ChatGPT; he also would've understood no matter how many databases you ate for breakfast, you can't buy intuition. And the best part — he would've said it with a heavy Scottish brogue.
I knew from my wet snow conversation there was an element ChatGPT lacked that I couldn't quite put my finger on. The segue from being delighted by unexpected snow to understanding snow's various qualities to contemplating a poem related to one of the uses for wet, packable snow ... What was that thing on the tip of my tongue?
Deconstructing a ChatGPT song
Eureka! I found my answer in Colin Meloy's latest Substack article. If you're not familiar with The Decemberists, Colin is their lead singer and primary writer of songs about pirates, people-eating whales, and other fantastic tales. In his online journal, he nails what ChatGPT is missing: intuition. He admits the song it wrote for him has the theme and structure of a Decemberist song, but it's just not very good, because it lacks the intuition he's acquired by being a singer/songwriter for 20-odd years.
I've read other articles that came to similar conclusions about ChatGPT-based commercials, art, and other creative endeavors. And I can't help but juxtapose them with the nonstop hype and handwringing about how ChatGPT will replace Google, Stack Overflow, and myriad other online tools and knowledge repositories. That's not even mentioning the human beings whose ideas and writing ChatGPT will supposedly render obsolete. As I said, I'm no data scientist. But I think reports that creativity is dead due to this new AI juggernaut are overblown and premature.
Humans are still evolving too
Even as I've written this post my opinion of AI's capabilities has evolved. I started at “Pffft, ChatGPT is a paper tiger” ... a few days and several articles later I've learned it can make predictions, blend styles, and learn from its mistakes. Yes, AI is powerful and evolving. But humans are too.
Look at the industries that disappeared during the pandemic. And the ones that sprung from its ashes. I'd bet the successes of the latter often relate to their founders trusting their gut. Sometimes intuition is wrong. But so is ChatGPT. Smart marketers should pay attention to AI and brainstorm ways to use it wisely. But they shouldn't bet the farm on it taking over anytime soon — not even the virtual one.