Is ChatGPT better at my job than I am?

And other disconcerting thoughts from my sickbed

So the lurgy caught me. I thought I was away scot free this festive period as everyone keeled over with their colds, sore throats and possible Covid all around me and I remained in defiant good health but no, it has come for me.

Accurate depiction of what I’ve looked like the last two days

Do you have any rituals for when you get sick? Here are mine. When I can feel it coming over me - those awful hot and cold shivers - I go out to buy my bits while I still feel in the land of the living.

On the shopping list is: some sort of medicine (for me, that’s lemsip), honey to shovel into said lemsip, lemons to squeeze in because I feel sure fresh lemon juice must do something immune boosting for your insides, a box of tissues because there’s something so depressing about blowing a sore nose on loo roll, and flowers because they give me something beautiful to look at while I’m rolling around my sick bed.

Then I retreat to bed, laden up with two rugs, a pile of books, a laptop and wait it out. I’ve done a day and a half in bed now and I think I’ve just about seen it off. Tomorrow I will go out for a walk to blow the cobwebs away - which is what my mother always prescribed - and then I expect I’ll be over it.

I’m sure so much of our sickness rituals must come from childhood. Lemsips were definitely a feature of my childhood and I remember my mum bringing a vase full of pink tulips into my room when I was sick so I’d have something “hopeful to look at”.

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Is Chat GPT better at my job than I am? was one of the disquieting thoughts I had this week.

So, I have a friend who is very hot on Artificial Intelligence and I occasionally ask him what’s going on in that world and what it might mean in my rather more mundane one and then I get knock-kneed at his pronouncements.

In our most recent conversation, he was trying to explain to me just how seismic the advent of AI would be. I came up with an analogy that I thought nailed it: AI would be to our generation what the internet was to our parents’. Wrong! My friend gently explained that, actually, and I quote: “It’s the most seismic thing ever invented. There is nothing in history that compares, even the creation of fire.”

As my friend explained it, AI has the potential to achieve incredible things by applying a superhuman intelligence to solve our petty human problems like cancers and climate change and all the rest of it. Of course, there are possible downsides such as AI taking all of our jobs.

I can’t really weigh in on all the potential goods and bads of AI - that’s what I’d call above my pay grade - but I did resolve to try to use Chat GPT in my work a bit more.

In the past I’ve been a bit squeamish about it - there’s something about writing in collaboration with a machine which makes me feel a bit icky - but I also don’t want to be like those people who steadfastly ignored the arrival of the computer or the internet and then in a few years found themselves obsolete.

So here’s what I’ve been using Chat GPT with - and where I’ve found it helpful.

Chat GPT is more encouraging and supportive than my editors lol

I have used it to help me plan interview questions. I tell it who I’m interviewing and why I’m interviewing them and what kind of piece I’m going to write and then, in a second or two, it comes out with all of these interview questions which - though I hate to say it - often touch upon interesting topics I hadn’t thought to dig into and are annoyingly better expressed than my own questions.

I would say Chat GPT still requires an editor. Quite a few of the questions it came up with I didn’t include because I just knew they weren’t particularly relevant. It also can’t do certain things - yet.

I had written one piece but wanted to put a juicy opener on it. I gave Chat GPT the copy and asked it to suggest some top lines. The ones that came back were not usable. What I had wanted it to do was pick up something particularly interesting in the copy, summarise it differently and in a way that piqued curiosity. Instead, it just tried to sum up the piece in a cumbersome line that read more like the opener to a university essay than a piece you’d read in a newspaper. (This may be more down to my prompts than Chat GPT’s ability, admittedly.)

Part of my job is approaching people to ask if they would be open to an interview. I decided this could be a task for Chat GPT and told it who I wanted to interview, what the piece would be about and, hey presto, out came a perfectly usable email. I didn’t think it was better than one I would write and edited out a line about “exploring nuances” but I sent it off to the person I wanted to interview.

I was, I have to admit, a bit horrified when this person agreed to the interview, seemingly because they had so liked the Chat GPT-generated email. “Your premise sounds rather fun”, the person wrote to me. And it was then that the frankly frightening thought swum into my mind: is Chat GPT better at my job than I am?

Probably. (I suspect Chat GPT wouldn’t interview someone for over an hour, taping the interview on its phone only to find that it didn’t actually record because it had allowed the damn phone to run out of storage, as I did this week.)

What really struck me was how Chat GPT could help you bypass the years required to become good at a job. Doing countless interviews and writing countless stories teaches you the questions to ask - but Chat GPT can trot them out in an instant. I also asked it for some ideas on how to structure a feature and it came out with a standard formula - open with a vivid scene, bring in data to prove this is a thing happening, go into your interviews etc. It took me years to learn the structure of a feature and now fledgling writers can just ask Chat GPT to do it for them.

At the end of all these experiments, I was keen to learn if my friends were using Chat GPT too.

I have a feeling everyone is using it but no one is talking about it. My aforementioned friend told me that he used it all the time for brainstorming and explaining technical stuff but would never copy and paste it into a document as it felt like a victimless form of plagiarism. Another friend told me that she used it sometimes when a particular sentence didn’t feel as elegant as she wanted it to be and added that someone else she knew ran features she had written through Chat GPT asking it to rewrite them in the style of a famous American journalist.

The words of one friend, endearingly resistant to new technology, who asked me if she required a ‘membership’ to use Chat GPT

I am going to keep noodling about with it. I suppose, in my small sphere of experience, I’d like to use Chat GPT to make my work better and faster.

(I promise Chat GPT has been uninvolved in the creation of this Substack… so far.)

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I finally watched the Martha Stewart Netflix documentary that everyone has been talking about from my sickbed. And it is so good and so enraging.

It focuses on the Queen of American Domesticity, the OG influencer, the woman who built an empire so that Goop and co could follow in her footsteps.

The film shows how Stewart took an undeniable domestic talent, combined it with a love of teaching and the sharpest business acumen to become the first self-made female billionaire. The first self-made female billionaire!

Which makes what happened to her all the more galling. She was done for insider trading - or rather, lying to the feds about insider trading - which everyone seems pretty clear she didn’t actually do and instead she was taken down by a fiercely ambitious prosecutor named James Comey (who’d later throw his weight against another powerful woman, Hilary Clinton) who saw Stewart as the perfect trophy to advance his career.

She spent five months in prison but the much worse punishment was that she lost her business - it all revolved around the lifestyle, talent and reputation of its eponymous founder which doesn’t really work when that founder becomes a convicted felon.

She clawed her way back to success - but she shouldn’t have had to! The film shows how she was humiliated - the delight late-night hosts took in cracking jokes about her downfall and a horrid roast where these comedians made nasty sex jokes about her and called her old - for the crime she committed: of being a super successful woman who had the audacity to be a shark.

Because that’s another part of this documentary. Stewart is monstrous . She is imperious, an unforgiving and exacting boss, casually rude to her underlings, one of whom gave crucial evidence in the case that put her away. But, as is pointed out throughout this film, she was no worse than the typical Wall Street head honcho (probably a lot less worse, let’s admit it).

But really it is her demented quest for perfection that is its own punishment. That’s how I felt as I watched her patrol her gorgeous New York estate. How unrelenting and lonely it must be to live with that standard.

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You know when you put off some simple task for so long and then you do it and it’s so easy and makes such a difference that you have no idea why you didn’t do it sooner?

For me, that’s hanging pictures. I took them all out of my sitting room when I painted it pink in the summer and just, errr, never got around to hanging them again (I’m no Martha Stewart).

Finally on Monday night I was filled with home making fervour and hung them up. Plus, my dearest friend Lorenzo is an incredible photographer and I printed out two of my favourite of his pictures and framed them and hung them too.

Wish I could get a picture without the reflection but here they are - such gorgeous images

I cannot tell you the difference it makes looking at a wall with pictures on it.

Oooh, and these dinky lampshades I ordered from Etsy finally arrived. (I did not realise the seller lived in Hong Kong when I ordered them). Don’t they look adorable?! I got the lamps for a song (£14 for the pair) in a Hove charity shop and I love them. How have I lived in this flat for over a year and just now got lamps for beside the sofa? (And still have no curtains or blinds in my living room or bedroom or a proper wardrobe. Furnishing a flat takes sooooo long.)

Feel like the living room is slowly coming together but now I’ve discovered a damp patch in the bedroom - yippee!

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Books-wise this week I read (well I have 20 pages left to go) Luster by Raven Leilani and, guys, I didn’t like it! I thought I would - Zadie Smith raved about, so did most of the critics and people I know etc, but nope, while she’s obviously a v talented writer, I cannot say I’ve enjoyed it and my main issue is I simply cannot get over the preposterous plot - a wife invites her husband’s mistress to stay in the family home. Insert head exploding emoji here. More thoughts to come in a monthly round up of books.

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Finally, a little sadness, my family dog, dear Sadie passed away last week.

She really was the most perfect hound you could ever imagine. I always said she had the best character of any dog, and it was true. She was such a gentle, loving, patient, affectionate thing, always ready to leap into your lap and lick your face.

We had a joke that if you let Sadie sleep in your bed, she’d get between the sheets and burrow into your nightdress given half the chance. She once won third place in a competition for the most beautiful eyes at a dog show once and for that, I say, she was robbed! I’ve never seen a more gorgeous dog, with those deep brown eyes, the white spot under her chin, her curly coat - we called her hearthrug when it got too long - her surprisingly large, springy paws, her long strokeable nose. She deserved first place in every category going.

It’s always horrid when a pet dies but Sadie had such a lovely life. She was ever so loved and I suspect she knew it.

Dear Sadie, Lady Sadie, Sadie Sue, forever and always, the best of friends.

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That’s it, you guys. Please let me know any tips or tricks you may have for Chat GPT usage. I hope you are well and lurgy-free. See you next time xxx