Call me old fashioned, but I have spent upwards of an hour crafting some of the responses that I post here. And I do it because I want to respect the time of everyone who reads what I post (even if they do not agree with what I say) and make them feel like it’s been worth it. And I don’t feel like it’s work.
Perhaps that’s the difference between posting on Macrumours on a topic I happen to feel passionately about, vs clearing emails at work which can be described as tedious at best and soul-crushing at worst. In this context, I can understand the desire to automate the process so as to spend less time on it overall (which in turn frees up your time for other tasks).
I may have been too hasty in passing judgement earlier.
For me, my school’s management hierarchy is more flat, and I am just as comfortable walking over to my colleague’s cubicle (even to my principal’s) or texting / calling them as I am to respond via email. So email is still fairly manageable.
I also recently had a similar encounter at work where I was tasked with vetting a colleague’s write up for our yearbook. One look and I felt it was written by chatGPT (it felt repetitive and rambling), and she also admitted to it later. I did spend a fair bit of time editing it in the process. Mine isn’t exactly original, in that I do refer to samples online for inspiration before re-writing in my own words, and this does make me wonder if my end product is really all that different from something produced by chatGPT, and in less time as well.
For what it’s worth, the person reviewing my write-up did feed back that there were fewer edits overall.
And I am about to get started on writing class remakes for my students, and I know of a few of my colleagues who are exploring the use of chatGPT to streamline the process, and I guess my feelings on this remain mixed. On one hand, yes, it’s a tedious task. We have to be mindful of the language we use, to the point where they sometimes come across as rather generic. The idea that I could feed a few prompts into a browser and be done in an afternoon is very tempting, and I suppose I really don’t know anymore.
Like how would you feel if you realised the testimonial written for you by your form teacher was AI generated? There is this sense of pride when I finish said tasks. Don’t know if I will still feel the same with something churned out by chatGPT, because can it even be considered my work anymore?
Like even if nobody else knew, I still would.
Maybe I am old-fashioned in this regard.