Digging in the dirt
If we outsource the ‘boring bits’ of writing to ChatGPT, we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
So, we seem to be pivoting from ‘AI will do everything’ to ‘Hybrid is where it’s at’.
In other words, get ChatGPT to draft something, then improve it yourself. Broadly speaking, AI does the ‘boring’ or ‘repetitive’ bits so we can focus on ‘higher-value’ tasks – or, perhaps, get fired.
Let’s leave aside the tacit admission that ChatGPT isn’t actually all that good after all. I mean, we knew that anyway.
What strikes me is the confident belief that you can know, in advance, where the knowledge value of a task is going to be.
Sure, you can apply the 80/20 rule to writing. Twenty percent of the work yields 80% of the value. But here’s the thing: you don’t know which 20% up front.
Insights will emerge during the writing process. That’s a guarantee. But you don’t know where, when or how.
I don’t care how many times you wrote something similar before. The brief may be the same, but the client, the project, the situation is different. More to the point, you yourself are different. There may be stuff in there you just weren’t ready to learn before, or that you needed other learning to unlock.
It’s easy to overlook this emergent insight after the fact. Once you’ve done the writing, you internalise what you learned from it. It’s often tacit knowledge that you pick up without realising. But when you come to the next writing task, that’s when you’re going to feel it.
So, outsource the ‘boring bits’ to ChatGPT if you want. But know that you just sacrificed whatever value you could have got from that work. There might have been gold in among the dirt.