ChatGPT and AI Luddites

I find some of the resistance to using tools like ChatGPT interesting, and honestly a little sad. Just the idea of closing yourself off to something that could improve your life is an interesting stance to take. For me, it has definitely saved me time, helped me explore things that bounce into my curious mind, and enabled me to take on some projects that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to to do.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve used ChatGPT to play around with prime spirals, just because I find them interesting, used it for domain name ideas, ideas for fonts, and got some pretty helpful insight on the best approaches for a software product I’m working on. I even started having it draft little news items from an imaginary nation where the news is happier than what’s going on in the US currently (reading through those imaginary news clips honestly brings a little smile to my face).

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been using it to help me build a couple of apps, just for personal use and for fun — a city-building game and a drawing app. For work, it does honestly save me quite a few hours every week, especially on some tedious tasks that I would rather not spend time on. I also realize that competitors in my profession are using this technology to be more efficient, and I would be at a major disadvantage if I refused to utilize it as well.

There are of course downsides to this technology, and some pretty big ones at the society level. But it has undoubtedly made the day to day of my life better and more creative. For those that flat-out refuse to use the technology, I feel as though they are only limiting themselves and setting themselves up to be at a major disadvantage.