From The Washington Post:
Can anything stop the digital destruction? I think so. At bottom, ChatGPT is no more than a vast recycling machine. It can search our collective digital brain for pre-cooked ideas and pre-assembled facts and then churn them out as columns. It can imitate whatever style you tell it to imitate. But it can’t provide the human element — vivid observations or fresh ideas or leaps of imagination. The best way for columnists to survive in the world of artificial intelligence is to write more human columns. This general rule — avoid destruction by upping the human element in what you do — applies to most other knowledge-intensive jobs.
Here are some ideas for avoiding the coming column-aggedon:
Live an interesting life.
Generate new knowledge.
Avoid predictability.
One of the most powerful arguments in favor of automation is that it forces producers to be more productive by focusing on their comparative advantage. This will surely be the case with columnists. ChatGPT can do all the predictable things — producing anti- (or pro-) Trump rants or summarizing the causes of the war in Ukraine. But can it change your mind? Can it produce “color” that encapsulates an historical moment? Can it persuade a politician to spill the beans? Can it generate a new way of looking at the world? And can it make you laugh? Not yet — and, in some cases, not ever.
What can you do that ChatGPT cannot?