When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

So here's one that saved me a bunch of time:

https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2535443

Basically, I knew the package could do what I wanted; I knew it was almost certainly in GPT-4's data set; I could do it myself, but it would involve searching through all the documentation and figuring out the right bits. It just did it for me.

Now there were a few minor bugs: It duplicated a buggy error message, and at some point later it called a "Subtree" method rather than a "Tree" method. But those were a lot easier to fix than writing the code from scratch.

Once I had a list of 27 book names I wanted put into "canonical order" and in the form of a golang array. I could have done it myself but it would have been tedious; I just pasted the list into GPT-4, asked it what I wanted, and out popped the result.

Here's another place it was helpful recently; I prompted:

"We're hiring a new community manager for the $PROJECT. I'd like you to help me develop some interview questions. What information to you need about the role to help you develop more useful questions?"

The questions it asked me about the role were really good; just answering the questions was quite a useful exercise, and I'm sure the resulting document will be a good intro to whomever we hire. I wouldn't say the resulting interview questions were brilliant, but they were solid, and I used a couple of them.

There are times when "the form" is there for a reason; if you want something re-written in a specific form, GPT-4 can do a good job. I wrote an email recommending something to somebody's managers in a different company in a different country; then I pasted it into GPT-4 and asked if it had any suggestions. It did a fair amount of rewording, of which I decided to take about half. In this case, the "polite form" is there to avoid offense, and it's exactly what I wanted.

I've also asked it to write some Tweets highlighting some specific aspects of an upcoming conference I'm planning. It did a good job coming up with the sort of punchy, tweet-length messages which seem to do really well.

Connecting it to the context of the article: My day job is basically arguing with people on the internet. :-). I do read and write all day every day; but I don't write messages where diplomacy is critical, nor do I write tweets. Perhaps I could get better at those, but I don't think it's worth the effort. Am I the worse off for that? Probably not in the way the author thinks; I don't think being diplomatically polished would change my thinking that much -- much less being able to write punchy tweets.

If I started relying on it for the core writing, however, I'd certainly be selling myself short.

For example, I'm a huge fan of Anki and I've found ChatGTP to be very helpful for generating questions from a block of text and in formatting Cloze cards. But I don't recommend asking it for information directly.

I wrote a bit about it here: https://neurotechnicians.com/p/generative-ai-and-anki-part-1...

Here’s a real-world example. I live in Japan. While I am fluent in Japanese, it is not my first language and I am not confident about writing formal e-mails, as the grammar, vocabulary, and strategies for making requests are quite different from everyday usage. Now, though, I can feed prompts like the following to GPT-4:

“Compose an e-mail in Japanese as follows:

Sender: [my name and affiliation in Japanese]

Recipient: [name of company in Japanese]

Content: Request to visit the company to tell them about [my product name in Japanese], which is our new accounting software that uses AI to streamline work. Tell them that I can visit their headquarters at any time on any weekday. Ask them to reply by e-mail or to call my mobile at [number].”

In a few seconds, it produced a much better e-mail than I would have been able to write without a lot of effort or someone else’s help [1]. From my experience, I can say with confidence that GPT-4’s e-mail is much more likely to elicit a response than anything I could compose by myself. (I would change one or two things in its version before sending it, though.)

Millions of people around the world are like me: doing much of their work in a second language and often feeling at a disadvantage to native speakers, especially when writing for formal or public-facing purposes. GPT-4 is a great tool for people like us, as well as for people who are not confident about writing in their first language.

[1] https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/20230511-email-comp...