Comment by jdietrich

ChatGPT has achieved the performance of a mediocre human at a very large subset of practical writing tasks. Given a prompt like "Write a grant proposal for the following research project:" or "Explain the opportunities and threats posed by the following business scenario:", it'll give a response that is essentially indistinguishable from the writing of a reasonably competent administrator or middle-manager.

ChatGPT is a bullshit artist with no real understanding of what it's writing about, but so are an awful lot of white-collar workers. It reliably emulates the shibboleths that indicate membership of the professional middle class. It isn't particularly creative or interesting, but it wasn't trained to do that - it was trained to produce maximally safe, inoffensive output. If people don't see ChatGPT as being massively disruptive, then I think they have failed to recognise the sheer proportion of working hours that are spent writing quite mundane letters and reports. Anyone who spends most of their working day in Outlook and Word should be extremely nervous about the medium-term implications of LLMs.