ChatGPT Can’t Take Your Job Unless It Figures Out How to Do One Really Difficult Thing

Is the artificial intelligence revolution about to fizzle?

Aaron Dinin, PhD
5 min readMay 25, 2023

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Are you worried about ChatGPT taking your job? Me too! After all, writing is a huge part of my job, but, in the time it takes for you to reach the end of this sentence, ChatGPT can spit out 2,000 coherent and compelling words about the exact same topic.

Clearly, I’m screwed.

However, a recent experience using ChatGPT has me thinking the situation isn’t as dire as I’d originally assumed.

For starters, using the phrase “artificial intelligence” to describe something like ChatGPT is a misnomer. A better phrase to describe it might be “large language model processor.” However, since “large language model processor” doesn’t make for compelling headlines, everyone seems to have agreed that ChatGPT, and other tools like it, are “artificial intelligence.”

Fine.

Whatever.

We can keep calling this stuff artificial intelligence, but let’s also agree that ChatGPT (and its similar tools) are as stupid as they are intelligent.

To be clear, I’d say the same thing about humans. People aren’t nearly as intelligent as we like to think (myself…

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Aaron Dinin, PhD

I teach entrepreneurship at Duke. Software Engineer. PhD in English. I write about the mistakes entrepreneurs make since I’ve made plenty. More @ aarondinin.com