ChatGPT seems to have a political bias (for example, when searching “What is the solution for the Ukraine and Russian War?” ChatGPT favors one side.) However, I adore ChatGPT. Despite its flaws, it’s like a personal advisor, teacher, and omniscient guide all in one.
And ChatGPT has flaws, just like everyone else. It told me my retirement pension would one day be “$135,000” in monthly CPP checks. Wow! I can hardly wait to retire (I plan on never retiring.) It also conks out when I ask brief, general questions, and in those cases I have to reinstall the app. And because my ChatGPT app only has data before 2021, it can’t give me step-by-step instructions on using the most recent MailChimp email automation features.
But AI is excellent for students and employees, especially the AI that comes with Grammarly’s paid version. It’s a game-changer. For instance, we can copy and paste a direct quote into Grammarly. And if we then highlight the quote, Grammarly gives us options to rephrase it, shorten it, make it formal or friendly, and more. In other words, it’ll instantly paraphrase the quote for us, and if we don’t like its version, we ask it to try again until we receive the paraphrase we want. It can even rewrite an entire essay, although I believe the direct quotes may get lost in the rewrites.
I use Grammarly’s AI for writing professional emails. My boss wanted my emails to be less friendly and more formal. He even paid for a course on business communications for me to learn this. So, I take my emails into Grammarly, highlight them, ask Grammarly to make them formal, and then ask Grammarly to shorten them. And my boss loves the results.
But that’s not all ChatGPT and AI can do. I recently created a social media campaign on a complex engineering topic. Due to its technical nature, I couldn’t have made the campaign on my own. So, I asked ChatGPT to give me the technical content. And then, I took that content and rewrote it. I then did two plagiarism checks, one with Grammarly and another with a plagiarism service I discovered by asking ChatGPT. I rewrote the content again, pasted it into Grammarly, and had Grammarly rewrite it several times until I was happy with the final version. And then, I did a last edit.
But that’s not all AI and ChatGPT can do. I had to make an email campaign that integrated the MailChimp email automation service with another pop-up service called Optin Monster. And I needed to make an automated A/B split test campaign in MailChimp, which I had struggled to learn how to do over the past three years.
However, ChatGPT instantly gave me step-by-step instructions on how to achieve these ends. So, questions I couldn’t resolve over the last three years are being answered in seconds by ChatGPT. And my boss loves the changes I’ve rapidly made, thanks to AI, so much so that today he gave me a raise.
But in the back of my mind, I wonder about the implications of growing reliant on AI to write my emails and do my job. What happens when AI becomes widely adopted, and everyone’s game is upped remarkably? What happens to us, then?
One solution to this dilemma that ChatGPT gave me is to take online courses from the Blockchain Council on AI, the Metaverse, and Web 3.0. That way, we can stay ahead of the game before everyone catches up. It’s the first movers’ advantage, as knowledge is power. And these courses come with certifications that we can proudly post on our LinkedIn profiles.
Whether or not we take these Blockchain courses, we can use Grammarly and ChatGPT to gain a significant advantage in academia and at work. But what happens when educators realize our writing is stellar not because of our natural abilities but because Grammarly is an editor on steroids? So many exciting questions, such as this one, remain concerning AI and academics.
AI makes us better students and employees. And we deserve to excel! After all, we are on a karmic ride together to become AU success stories. Admit it: we’ve got more potential than anyone could imagine. AI is one way to realize it.