preface
In January of 2023, I was sitting next to a couple, and they started to discuss the latest phenomenon, ChatGPT. The husband enthusiastically discussed how excited he was about the technology. He had been spending quality time with his teenagers writing a book using it—they had already written 70 pages. The wife, however, wasn’t as thrilled, more scared. She was an English teacher and was worried about how it was going to affect her students.
It was around this time the husband said something I was completely unready for: his friend had fired 100 writers at his company. My jaw dropped. His friend owned a small website where he hired freelance writers to write sarcastic, funny, and fake articles. After being shown the tool, the friend took some of his article titles and asked ChatGPT to write one. What it came up with was indistinguishable from anything else on the website! Meaningless articles that lack the necessity for veracity are LLM’s bread and butter, so it made sense. It could take him minutes to write hundreds of articles, and it was all free!