chatGPT 2024

 About one year ago, I started exploring chatGPT and other chatbots. For a couple months, I accessed chatGPT daily, and identified three areas for my personal use – 1) learn established but new subjects to me, 2) improve my writings, 3) seek help to write codes. As time goes on my use of chatGPT gradually becomes less frequently - from daily to weekly, and later to monthly. 

Even at height of mass curiosity in chatGPT in Q1/Q2 2023, I found that many people who talked about chatGPT had never tried it, their talking points were from reading comments from news or commentaries. I conducted a small survey involving about 100 college educated professionals about their use and familiarity of chatGPT in May 2023. I found that 50% of surveyed had never tried chatGPT, 30% tried once due to curiosity, and 20% used chatGPT regularly from daily,  weekly to monthly. 

There are a few reasons for my usage decline – first curiosity faded away with exploration, but more importantly as a tool it did not really meet my needs. chatGPT literature search and summary functionality did not improve, and it continued to hallucinate. So, I stopped using chatGPT for literature study or summary, instead I use Google regularly as I did pre-chatGPT. Now Google provides generative AI produced summary at the top of search results, which is exactly what I like.

I continued to use chatGPT to improve the draft of English essays I wrote for a while. I found that the improvements generated by chatGPT exhibit a graceful and sophisticated style, often impressing my readers more than my original write-ups. However, in my opinion, there is a notable drawback: the improved essays frequently lack authenticity and sound somewhat artificial, using sophisticated words, expressing exaggerated feelings etc. As the initial novelty wear off, the essays improved by chatGPT lost their freshness and originality to me, chatGPT produced essays sounding stale. I still use chatGPT occasionally for writing improvement - I write the full essay first to capture my thoughts fully, and only edit my original using AI generated text as reference for word selection and styling improvement.

I rarely write codes, so the function is not that useful to me. I have not used it since my initial tries to write macros for excel spreadsheets last year.

When I realized that I did not access any chatbot for nearly two months at the beginning of 2024, I looked back to see how the decline occurred, and thus this post as a note to myself.