I am honestly struggling to figure out what to think about ChatGPT (which perhaps matters to no one but myself).

It sounds like it’s able to compile search results into any kind of tone of voice you could want. (I saw an impressive example of a prayer it composed in 16th c English language style.)

But it also sounds like it can’t be relied on for trustworthy information, or for insights or changes of mood that surprise.

Thus we still need humans to fact-check, and to curate, and to edit that text; we need ways to authenticate in some situations that a human composed it or had final approval over the message.

The concerns I see being raised are: issues around plagiarism, authorship, factual and emotional reliability of the information. (The latter I think of as the ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ problem; or, who really wrote that love letter?)

But we’ve had these problems forever.

Micro.blog folks generally have more experience with what tech can and cannot do, than most people I interact with.

So help me out.

Am I missing something here?