Smart Software: Good Enough Plus 18 Percent More Quality

July 19, 2023

Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.

Do I believe the information in “ChatGPT Can Turn Bad Writers into Better Ones”? No, I don’t. First, MIT is the outfit which had a special relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Yep, that guy. Quite a pal. Second, academic outfits are known to house individuals who just make up or enhance research data. Does MIT have professors who do that? Of course not. But With Harvard professionals engaging in some ethical ballroom dancing with data, I want to be cautious. (And, please, navigate to the original write up and read the report. Subscribe too because Mr. Epstein is indisposed and unable to contribute to the academic keel of the scholarly steamboat.)

What counts, however, is perception, not reality. The write up fosters some Chemical Guys’s shine on information, so let’s take a look. It will be a shallow one because that is the spirit of some research today, and this dinobaby wants to get with the program. My writing may be lousy, but I do it myself, which seems to go against the current trend.

Here’s the core point in the write from my point of view in rural Kentucky, a state known for its intellectual rigor and fine writing about basketball:

A new study by two MIT economics graduate students … suggests it could help reduce gaps in writing ability between employees. They found that it could enable less experienced workers who lack writing skills to produce work similar in quality to that of more skilled colleagues.

The point in my opinion is that cheaper workers can do what more expensive workers can do.

Just to drive home the point, the write up included this point:

The writers who chose to use ChatGPT took 40% less time to complete their tasks, and produced work that the assessors scored 18% higher in quality than that of the participants who didn’t use it.

The MidJourney highly original art system produced this picture of an accountant, trained online by the once proud University of Phoenix, manifests great joy when discovering that smart software can produce marketing and PR collateral faster, cheaper, and better than a disgruntled English major wanting to rent a larger apartment in a big city. The accountant seems to be sitting in a modest thundershower of budget surplus.

For many, MIT has heft. Therefore, will this write up and the expert researchers’ data influence people; for instance, owners of marketing, SEO, reputation management, and PR companies?

Yep.

Observations:

Layoffs will be accelerating
Good enough becomes outstanding when financial benefits are fungible
Assurances about employment security will be irrelevant.

And what about those MIT graduates? Better get a degree in math, computer science, engineering, or medieval English poetry. No, strike that medieval English poetry. Substitute “prompt engineer” or museum guide in Albania.

Stephen E Arnold, July 19, 2023

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Financial, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.