Do you use ChatGPT when writing your articles?

We all see this question coming at some point: That a reader would pose such a question to me over my live chat.

Well, I don’t use ChatGPT when I write.

There are several reasons for it, some being practical ones. And others that make me think also that Artificial Intelligence’s capabilities and impacts even in its presently astounding forms, may be overestimated for some use cases.

Disclaimer: I would really love to have a tool that generates long-form content that aligns perfectly to my whims. But the present generation of large language models can’t yet fulfill my needs.

ChatGPT gets it wrong some times.

Consider ChatGPT’s response to a similar question to my latest post on the Circular Flow of Income:

This is quite the long-winded response that doesn’t answer the question appropriately.

In general, the consensus is that ChatGPT can handle simple-enough Economics-related questions, but there tends to be some errors and gaps in highly-elaborated answers.

And as a rule, I use ChatGPT only for reinforcing lessons with my students using both the correct, and the incorrect bits, to try and make my lessons more interactive and less full-on instructive.

I write for specific purposes.

As most of us know, when posed an academic question, ChatGPT will tend to return structured answers complete with introduction, body, critical analysis, and conclusion.

You might think this would be god-send to me, but ChatGPT really can’t fulfill as yet:

1. My posts double as specific and unique readings for my students and have few equivalent sources in textbooks or even other educational websites;
2. Related to the above, if I managed to secure superior informational sources to close knowledge gaps with my students, I would tap on these sources by default – i.e. I am writing because existing materials are insufficient in themselves.

ChatGPT can’t draw graphs.

Well, at least not out of the box. With some knowledge of Python, and the appropriate coding environment set-up, you could draw the graph to your requirements.

On the other hand, drawing the graphs and annotating them for the varying purposes in my posts is probably better-achieved by doing them on my own.

Concluding Remarks.

I do use ChatGPT (and Google’s Bard) for various purposes, such as for writing computer scripts, or rewording various chunks of texts to cater to specific audiences. But these are seldom the case with posts that I write for this website of mine.

And that shouldn’t come as a surprise to you.

ChatGPT after all, works in its amazing way, by learning seriously huge aggregated data from various sources. But it is ultimately limited to that, and is also often a victim of having to learn from conflicting materials, which is not uncommon in Economics.

If you find that ChatGPT, as learned based on the aggregated existing materials, fills gaps in your knowledge extremely well, it suggests that you have serious knowledge deficiencies in the subject.

Well, that obviously is not the case for me, so ChatGPT is of little to no assistance to the posts that I write.