All week I've seen basically two dominant takes about how AI is going to impact creative work in the future (three if you count "generative AI is a fad with no value," which I do not): (1) It's going to take people's jobs (rip); or (2) It's going to help people do their jobs better.

I'm a writer and have been thinking a lot about use case (2)—since I'm not emotionally ready for my job to be taken by AI, I'm trying to figure out how to use AI to do it better. So far, I've been exclusively considering the use of AI in the sense of the "photographers using photoshop" analogy. That is, using GPT-4 to quickly draft or edit things based on prompts, while I, the human, am still "doing the work" creatively speaking. Obviously this is feasible today and going to become normalized soon, to some extent.

However, this article makes an interesting case for (2) in a way I hadn't considered before: GPT-4 opens up entirely new ways for humans to work, period. ChatGPT already improves on Google for high-level research—ask it for a summary of some well-established topic or field and chances are you'll get a coherent and set of pretty-accurate facts cobbled together from its training data (much of the Web, Wikipedia, scientific papers). But when tools become available that let ChatGPT provide this kind of summary from my own works, notes, and prior research? That is going to totally change the game.

In the last couple years I've already seen easily a 2-3x boost in my writing productivity thanks to Obsidian, a research tool that—at least the way I use it—is entirely "manual" (i.e. not automated or "smart"). If I could get the benefits of Obsidian for making connections between information and ideas, powered by an intelligent assistant that "knows" how I think and what I think about... it's cliché to say the possibilities are endless, but that's really what I'm looking at here.

Anyway, I want to inject some optimism into this hot topic. It may end up that in 10 years we're all unemployed. But I still need to do my job today. I see a lot of reasons to be excited, rather than defeatist, for the applications and value of GPT-4 in this regard.