For weeks my LinkedIn feed has been inundated with posts about ChatGPT. Some of these are from recognized authorities. But many more are penned by content marketers and/or tech-dudes-turned-AI experts. Experts I’ve come to label as Chad-GPTs.
A recent graduate from the University of Whatever-Was-Trending-Last-Year, Chad-GPT has hacked his productivity so effectively that he’s become an expert in AI within the space of a week. The specialism of his subject: ChatGPT, a Systematic Approach to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences (SALAMI, for short), and the most viral sensation since COVID-19.
Chad doesn’t write about AI himself, of course. That would be so 2022.
No, Chad gets the AI chatbot to generate reams of identikit posts and endless content carousels for him which hail ChatGPT’S capabilities and share its ‘hacks’ for how to streamline your own productivity.
The naive enthusiasm with which Chad waxes lyrical about the rise of AI reminds me of that rooftop scene from Independence Day.
You know the one I’m talking about.
A cassette of New Yorker hipsters throw a party on top of a skyscraper, complete with fancy dress, crap signs, and 90s techno music, to welcome their alien visitors. Only instead of engaging in extraterrestrial pleasantries with a legion of Daft Punk lookalikes, they find themselves consumed in a burning beam of blue and blasted off the face of the planet.
Now, I’m not saying ChatGPT is going to do that. It probably doesn’t have Roland Emmerich’s budget. But to carry this metaphor to its painful conclusion, these people are all content creators, and what they’re welcoming to their party is the AI that’s about to put them out of work.
So who are these people who are promoting our new AI overlords?
Who is Chad-GPT? And wtf is in it for him?
Let me tell you about the kind of guy Chad-GPT is.
Chad is a boy racer driving a souped-up hummer (or a flashy Wankpanzer, depending on your point of view) he paid for using Bitcoin. He almost certainly hasn’t passed his driving test; he hasn’t got a clue how anything around him works. But that’s not going to stop him putting pedal to the metal and pumping out reams of digital content.
Chad pushes his chatbot to the limits, breaking down barriers both roadside and literal. He’s the Andrew Tate of content creation; a self-professed performance optimizer, streamlined for maximum efficiency (or at least that’s what it says in his bio; for all you know he might be influencing from the inside of a Romanian prison).
Chad doesn’t give a fuck whether he runs you off the road in the process or takes up OpenAI’s bandwidth. He’s going to copy and paste the shit out of command prompts he finds on Reddit, smash it into Open.AI, and sell it to the highest bidder for a cool million dollars.
The problem with Chad-GPT and his approach to AI is that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And it’s up to you to work out that he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know.
** Enter stage right our old friends: Dunning and Kruger. **
As someone who became an expert just last week, Chad-GTP still inhabits the peak of ‘Mount Stupid”. He has yet to reach the Plateau of Sustainability by passing through the Valley of Despair and climbing the Slope of Enlightenment.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that last sentence came from running J.R.R. Tolkien through ChatGPT. But that cannot be the case, because Chad doesn’t know who J.R.R. Tolkien is.
But the thing about Chad is that I kind of know how he feels.
Because Reader, I used to be him.
For two years as a freelancer, I wrote articles for AI startups on dozens of subjects ranging from rethinking the management structures of machine-assisted companies to the visual recognition sensors self-driving cars use to map out their environment,
I once even got an authors box at the bottom of the page citing me as an ‘expert’ on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and related topics, almost certainly because their shareholders would have lost their shit if we’d said:
‘He studied Ancient History at Oxford and wrote his thesis on Caligula.’
I remember this as a time of intense imposter syndrome, and looking back the feeling was justified. I never got my head around the why underpinning my subject. Sure, I hunkered down, asked advice from my mentors, and studied like shit in preparation for my assignments. But I never really got to grips with AI in a way that I could be considered an authority.
And herein lies my problem with Chat-GPT: many people won’t.
Chat-GPT enables people to position themselves as ‘experts’ overnight, and rewards content creators who value quantity and simplicity over quality and creativity. The onus of critical thinking will increasingly fall on us, the reader, to identify authenticity, human understanding, and literacy of long-form thought among the content we consume.
But these are early days. And in the long term, once we’re tired of Chad’s endless identikit explainers, how-tos, and AI-generated content carousels ceaselessly spamming our timelines, we’ll start to nourish the quirkiness and creativity involved in crafting communications.
Or we’ll all be consumed in a burning beam of blue.
