By skyforbes 
“If used well, you can stand out”. Exploring how everyday interactions with ChatGPT blur the line between productivity and dependency.
“AI-driven, AI-powered, AI-this, AI-that, yadda yadda…” and what else?
Well, ever since the launch and subsequent explosion of ChatGPT, AI tools and the AI industry in general have taken the world by storm with some really useful tools, but also a lot of fluff and buzzwords in general.
While the tech industry continues to ponder over the actual Return on Investment (ROI) of implementing various AI tools in their day-to-day professional lives, we decided to explore a personal, somewhat dark side of AI that few people brave to admit “their personal relationship with AI tools like ChatGPT, how much they rely on it and the extent (and its effect) of this reliance in their personal lives”.
First things first — What was our motivation behind choosing this topic?
A Rise In ‘AI-lationships,’ Blurring The Line Between Human And Robot — this super insightful article (do give it a read).
Well, if you don’t wish to go through the harrowing task of skimming through this article, we’ve got you covered with a TL:DR: “A new Edu Birdie study mentions that 25% of Gen Z believe AI is already self-aware, and 69% say they’re polite to ChatGPT, responding with “please” and “thank you” — showing how easy it is to start thinking of the machines as human.
1 in 8 even vent to AI about their colleagues, and 1 in 10 would replace their boss with a robot, believing it would be more respectful, fair and, ironically, more human.” Whew! That’s a lot of stats to digest, right?
Armed with this secondary bit of information, we decided to focus on primary market research to gain first-hand insights on this topic through qualitative interviews. For this article, we focused on our interview with Gordon McMillan, an external lecturer at Grenoble Ecole de Management. Some obligatory background information about Gordon for better understanding: he is a Content Strategist and Former Head of Content across Europe for Twitter. He is very much involved with utilizing ChatGPT in his everyday life, so he was an excellent subject for our interview. Alright, let’s dive deep into our interview and what we came up with.
According to Gordon, he “uses ChatGPT most days if I’m doing any kind of work, whether that’s professional work for paid projects or doing it for personal projects as well. My main use of it is to generate content ideas and to work on content strategy ideas.”
When we asked to describe his relationship with ChatGPT, he described it as being his assistant.
“So I’ve used ChatGPT, the paid version, to set up a number of custom agents. If there’s a particular job that I want to do, it might be doing some research on a particular company, I’ll click on my content marketing assistant. One of my personal pet projects is a blog about books and writing. I’ve got another custom GPT for that. I create different assistants for different roles.”
One of the major accusations that ChatGPT faces is hallucinating answers and such misinformation could be dangerous leading to life-threatening decisions. We asked Gordon about his extent of trust with ChatGPT and his response was quite valuable:
“I am reasonably trusting of ChatGPT. Unless the tool has stated a certain statistic or a certain fact, because sometimes it gets years wrong, dates wrong, all kinds of things. So I don’t always trust it. I think I trust it for the general sweep.”
We then moved over to the major focus of our topic of utilising such AI tools to discuss or describe our feelings and try to treat it as a friend or therapist. To which he responded:
“I have not used an AI tool to discuss my feelings; however, my wife has. For me, it’s a professional tool.” When asked if he has ever made a conscious decision to not use ChatGPT for some reason, he said: “I’ve written a couple of books, and there’s a lot of discussion about people using AI tools to basically write books. You know, some people are open about it. But for me, as a writer, I would hate the idea of it contaminating my creativity or contaminating the work. It’s no longer my own, it’s shared.”
So, how does he feel when he interacts with such tools? Empowered? Creative? Sceptical? Gordon has a different answer:
“The number one feeling I would say that I get from interacting and using AI tools is productivity and having AI, ChatGPT, there as my assistant.”
Thanks, Gordon. And as a wrap-up, any final advice, especially to AI-reliant young people like us?
“I would caution against using it for your personal life too much, and then focus on it for where it can really add value to your life. If there’s a business that you want to create, it can really be an ally and a kind of digital friend in helping you go places fast. Be careful and check the work. If you use it well, it can really make you stand out.”
Merci beaucoup for this very valuable advice, Gordon! We will definitely remember your thoughtful words before engaging with any AI tool.
Well, there you have it. An insightful interview with our professor, with excellent advice on how to utilise AI tools like ChatGPT and how not to (if you would like to save your sanity and be productive at the same time!). For the complete interview (and more insights), watch it below!
Enjoyed reading this article? How about you head over to our article on “mental health at workplace” and gain more insights (for your own benefit).
Also, buckle up, this is just the beginning! We will keep arming you with more such insightful content and interviews.
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminating the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.