ChatGPT – Humans versus Machines

Like many of you, I have been eagerly reading articles and listening to the many theories, conspiracies, and doomsday activists around the launch of Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT). And naturally, I couldn’t help wondering if the articles I am reading now are no longer “Human” made, but ChatGPT generated. 

The debate between "human" versus "machine" has been ongoing for decades. With the release in November 2022 of ChatGPT, the discussion has reached a new level. These tools can generate articles, emails, and even books that sound like they were written by humans. But can they replace human writers altogether?

When it comes to understanding how future articles will be produced, there are several factors to consider. One of the most significant is the quality of the content. While machines can generate content that is grammatically correct and coherent, they lack the ability to convey emotions and context like human writers can. For example, an artificial intelligence (AI) tool may be able to produce a news article on a natural disaster, but it cannot capture the human impact of the event as well as a human writer can.

Another important factor to consider is the speed of content production. Machines can generate large volumes of content in a short period of time, whereas humans have a limit to how much content they can produce in a day. This means that AI writing tools can produce more content in a shorter period, which can be beneficial for businesses that need to produce a large amount of content on a regular basis.

However, there are also limitations to machine-generated content. While machines can produce content quickly, they lack creativity and the ability to come up with new ideas. Human writers can bring new perspectives to the table, which can result in more unique and engaging content.

Additionally, AI writing tools may not be able to produce content that is personalised for a specific audience. Human writers can tailor their content to meet the needs of a particular audience, whether it be a certain age group or a specific industry. This level of customisation is difficult for machines to achieve.

It is important to note that while AI writing tools can generate content that sounds like it was written by a human, they still require human input to function effectively. These tools require training data, which is typically collected and curated by humans. Additionally, human writers are needed to monitor the quality of machine-generated content and make necessary edits.

So, who wrote this article? 

A recent article by Alta van der Merwe from the University of Pretoria summarised my personal sentiment, that we need to acknowledge that ChatGPT is a power tool for writers / students alike, but that it is important that writers / students use artificial Intelligence in an ethical and equitable manner by acknowledging the use of the tool in generating content.