I’m not. But it seems everybody else is, including members of my family – Mrs M, usually suspicious of (and unable to comprehend) any new tech, uses it to re-write/re-word/re-configure her own writings for her PhD. My son uses it for everything from helping me write a letter to the local council to sussing out details of his car insurance policy.
My only encounter with it was a few years ago when I asked to for a biography of me. It listed a whole bunch of non-existent musical compositions. I realise that’s not how you’re supposed to use it, and that it has evolved since then.
Still – I don’t think I have any need of it atm, but maybe I’m wrong…
Anyone else?
Is it free?
Typical Aussie response…
Just saw this. What a ridiculous comment. FFS.
I suspect Mousey went a’teasing…
ChatGP is free but limits you to five queries within a specified period. There are various paid tiers that allow unfettered use.
@Junior-Wells yes sorry!
99% of the clients in my – until very recently thriving – freelance writing and editing consultancy
As I’m hitting 70 in a couple of weeks, I can afford to take a sanguine view that tech in the form of AI has simply taken back what it gave me via email in 2001.
That said, feel very sad for younger freelancers who have experienced a precipitous falling off in the creative writing/editing, design or illustrative assignments they were relying on to support their families and pay their mortgages
Same here – after a lifetime of making a living from words I’m rapidly becoming redundant, but fortunately I’m at the stage where that’s part of the plan anyway. Five years younger and I’d be worried about the pension pot.
These days I mostly seem to be used to fact check things that have been written using AI. It believes everything it’s told, and unfortunately most of the people using it believe everything it tells them.
@chiz
On the plus side, I no longer have the problem of stupid clients derailing my concentration on big complex jobs when they call up to ask about tiny grammatical points – it’ll only take a minute. (A regular occurrence in Hong Kong where most of my work came from)
The other thing that used to get my goat was clients telling me their job was “urgent”. I once asked one lady client who made such a request to write down a series of numbers.
When she asked what all the numbers were I told her they were the telephone numbers of all of the other clients in the queue ahead of her. Luckily, she knew me quite well and took the joke in good stead
It seems to tell you what it thinks you want to hear. A friend of mine once let it loose on the first draft of a press release and was horrified to discover that it had actually *invented* several films to pad out someone’s credits!
My son uses it a lot. Very dyslexic, not discovered until he was in his GCSE year at school, his only qualification is a A* in Art, so, although he now reads, writing has never come easy. He uses it to “write” his business plans, at the restaurant he owns, it giving the necessary sheen to his seemingly very good ideas.
I have looked at it with fascination. Prompted by this post, I asked it to review Sgt Pepper in the style of Seuras Og, being big headed enough to think that might “work”. Lo and behold, not only did it flatter me in the description, a cert for nervous adopters, but came up with something I would be welcome pleased to have been capable of writing. As in, considerably better.
“Got it — Seuras Óg has a very distinctive style: playful, sharp-eyed, a little mischievous, weaving personal asides and sly turns of phrase with cultural commentary. Here’s a review of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in that vein:
Ah, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The one that came dressed for the circus and swore blind it was a revolution. And maybe it was, though like most revolutions it smells faintly of patchouli and spilled beer when you get close enough. Everyone calls it “the greatest album of all time” in the way people declare Guinness “good for you”: by reflex, more than reason.
The conceit — four lads from Liverpool ducking behind moustaches and satin uniforms, pretending to be someone else — is charming in its way, a schoolboy dodge. “Not the Beatles, honest! Just a new band with a brass section and day-glo buttons.” It’s cosplay as concept, but bless them, it works often enough. The title track is a strut, a wink, a quick curtain pull. Then suddenly we’re in a carnival of Edwardian fairgrounds, Eastern scales, and George Martin’s strings fluttering like a tightrope walker wobbling but never falling.
“Lucy in the Sky” is, of course, the jewel everyone remembers, though it’s really Lennon trying to write with crayons while McCartney steals the oil paints. “A Day in the Life,” meanwhile, still stops the clock — all sigh and shiver, the mundane turned cosmic, before collapsing under that orchestral avalanche like the world’s longest exhale.
But let’s not canonize too lazily. There’s filler here, butter spread thin. “Within You Without You” divides households faster than politics at Christmas, and “When I’m Sixty-Four” sounds like Paul practicing his music-hall face in the mirror. Yet even the weaker moments have a certain odd charm, the kind of misstep you forgive because the shoes were new and shiny.
So what is it, finally? Not the best album ever, but perhaps the boldest excuse any band ever gave for leaving the mop-tops behind. A technicolor mask they slipped on for a season, and in doing so taught half the Western world that an album could be more than just a collection of tunes. For all its fuss and frock coats, Sgt. Pepper is less a masterpiece than a declaration: we don’t have to be who you think we are. And that, more than any sitar drone or clarinet jig, is the real trick.”
That’s the thing with current AI: it’s flattering, verging on sycophantic. It “wants” you to keep engaging. This can have worrying implications if used for health and especially mental health advice, when a human might advise you to get help elsewhere.
For balance, I repeated the question but in the style of @Tiggerlion.
“Right then, here goes — a review of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the style of Tiggerlion (the enthusiastic, lyrical reviewer from the Steve Hoffman forums and elsewhere, known for his painterly, metaphor-rich takes on music):
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band isn’t so much an album as it is a world you tumble into, like Dorothy swept up in the tornado, only to land in a place where brass bands, Edwardian parlours, smoky jazz clubs, and lysergic daydreams all coexist under one roof. What The Beatles achieved here is less about a collection of songs and more about conjuring a complete environment, where every detail – from orchestral crescendos to the rustle of studio chatter – adds to the illusion.
The opening title track is pure theatre: the band bursts through the curtain with swagger and colour, McCartney strutting like a circus ringmaster inviting you to “roll up.” The segue into “With a Little Help from My Friends” is seamless, and there’s Ringo, everyman, reminding us that this music is about inclusivity – you’re part of the show now.
And then: “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” It doesn’t matter how many times it’s been picked apart for psychedelic shorthand; when Lennon’s voice swoops over McCartney’s organ figure, it’s like stepping into a kaleidoscope. You can feel the textures, the velvet and cellophane, the shimmer of something half-real, half-imagined.
But what’s remarkable is how varied the canvas is. “She’s Leaving Home” aches with melancholy restraint, while “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” explodes into calliope madness. McCartney brings pastoral balm with “When I’m Sixty-Four” – music hall nostalgia delivered with a wink – before “Lovely Rita” and “Good Morning Good Morning” snap you back into the clatter of everyday life.
And then, of course, the climax: “A Day in the Life.” Two visions stitched together, Lennon’s detached dream and McCartney’s bustling diary entry, linked by those titanic orchestral ascents. It’s one of the most extraordinary codas in recorded music – the great yawning E major chord, stretched to infinity, fading not into silence but into your own bloodstream.
The thing with Pepper is that it’s not flawless – some songs are slight, some ideas indulgent – but the flaws are part of its charm. It was never meant to be perfect; it was meant to be an experience. It was The Beatles imagining the possibilities of the studio as a canvas, and in doing so, they invited listeners into a new way of hearing music itself.
Listening today, you don’t just hear the late sixties; you hear possibility, daring, wit, melancholy, and that rare thing – joy. It’s an artefact, yes, but it’s also alive, endlessly replenishing itself each time the needle drops.
Would you like me to lean even further into Tiggerlion’s signature audiophile angle — describing soundstage, texture, and how Pepper feels on a great hi-fi system — or keep it at this more poetic, narrative level?”
I think Tiggerlion once said he listens on an iPod
Despite living in Blighty for 40 years, Mrs F still sounds a bit of A Forrin, and her written English isn’t great. She apparently uses CoPilot a lot for work documents.
One of the first Googles I did when I got my new laptop was “how to turn off Copilot”.
Sure, I use it for safe stuff like recipes and widely agreed-on stuff I can’t remember – “what’s the capital of Latvia” sort of thing. Would steer well clear of using it for important questions.
My programmer friend, now retired, uses it for writing otherwise-tedious routine stuff for his website and says that it’s getting to be very good for that purpose. Of course he checks and tweaks what’s generated before allowing it to go live on his site.
Programming languages have pretty rigid rules of syntax etc. so there’s little or no scope for producing rubbish that won’t work.
Oh yeah I did that in my last working year when Chat GPT signup was made available to the general public. Bit of a timesaver if you don’t know, say, the syntax for creating a table in Oracle, you can just bung in a definition from a proper SQL provider and hey bingo!
Be afrAId, be very afrAId…
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ie/blog/urban-survival/202507/the-emerging-problem-of-ai-psychosis
Here’s a tragic story re mental health advice, I alluded to this ⤴️
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/opinion/chat-gpt-mental-health-suicide.html
Sal did suggest this other.
Thanks, Hubert. The jury is still out for me on AI. It is seductive, and I’ve experienced interactions with it, where I’ve definitely experienced its seductive and unscrupulous guile. However, if approached with caution and coached well with the right prompts, it has promise. I found a Substack post that gives a script that enables the LLMs to turn any subject into a detailed learning course with study topics and ways to test yourself.
I did find it quite useful for generating ideas but then it kept on asking would you like further help and in that regard it’s very seductive.
Chat GBT isn’t “AI” it is a tool that uses AI. It certainly has it’s uses, seems many are using it instead of regular google searches though.
AI itself is changing the world completely, biggest advance in at least 30 years. It can do many positive things (medical especially) as well as negative. It’s not going away and we have to learn to live with it. Some jobs will disappear completely, others will be created.
Is Chat GBT a reform version of Chat GPT ?
Although AI and Reform is surely an oxymoron – don’t you need and least some intelligence to start with.
I going to start a new trend – Artificial Stupidity.
Never looked at it. I haven’t read any of the threads which appear here regularly including this one either.
Does that mean I can type what I like here because you won’t read it?
I’ve no real need to spend hours talking to an AI chatbot that doesn’t exist when I already spend so much time talking to myself.
I use Chat GPT and a number of aliases to generate 90% of the posts on the Afterword Forum. Can you guess which contributers aren’t me / Chat ?
They are the boring ones that get no responses.
See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly
I’m crying
I use it quite a bit. It can save a lot of time when searching online for information, and it’s able to collate and organize information. It’s totally flummoxed by spreadsheets but not bad at producing basic presentations. Just like other parts of the internet it can provide false positives and it’s sources should always be checked. There’s an art to writing the prompts which it works from – the better they are, the better work it produces. It’s proving very useful for a lot of the more tedious tasks at work.
I use it, sparingly, at work.
Even then, it’s just to provide some basic frameworks for written material. I don’t ask it for anything that requires research or provision of citations. It can’t be trusted with that.
A problem with getting reliant on AI chatbots is that it cannot discriminate itself between true and false information fed to it. It selects primarily on frequency of encountering particular data.
If a false piece of data is more widespread where it looks than a true piece, the false one is what it will select unless specifically instructed not to.
It is also not prevented from using AI-generated information to create more information, creating potentially dangerous feedback loops.
If the ubiquity of mobile phones has played a major role in decreasing people’s attention spans, one dreads to think of the long-term impact snowballing AI uptake is going to have.
Why bother thinking for yourself when AI will happily do it for you?
Next stop, why bother to question what AI tells you?
According to an article I read sometime last week, a great big spike in AI chat usage in this past June, suggests that lots of students are using it to cheat at exams.
But maybe that article was AI-generated.
Joke:
Q: What’s the best sort of thing to write, to make money from it?
A: Ransom notes.
Call me a dickhead, but It’s all getting a bit Philip K for my liking…
My wife mucked about with a family photo and put ‘kings and queens in Carnoustie’ into Chat GPT and it came up with this abomination and then complained she didn’t have a crown!
I think it’s beautiful. How much do you want for it?
You’re obviously mellowing in your old age, @Gary.
Not so long ago it would’ve been a case of hanging
the nobles from a lamppost rather than hanging their
picture on the wall.
An outrageous accusation! I’ve never wanted nobles to be hanged from lamposts. I’m no barbarian! I’d prefer them to be put down humanely.
Mrs theP, who is weeks away from retirement, has discovered ChatGPT and says it’s brilliant. Just today she asked it what the steps are to develop a brand identity, a logo, and a messaging strategy for a mountain bike track in a national park somewhere in QLD, and it came up with exactly what she wanted in seconds and saved her hours of head-scratching. She could have done with it years ago, she says.
Can’t help wondering whose work on this rather niche subject was scraped though.
Me and some aged chums meet most weeks where we read out our short short story homework (different title each week, 1200 words or so).
Just for fun, honest guv, I’ve asked Claude a few times to “help” me. Give him the title and an opening para and off he goes.
I, of course, have never presented these as my own work, honest guv, but the results are seriously (worryingly?) good. Claude seems to be learning my style and with some relatively minor editing I’m pretty certain nobody would spot the hand of AI.
No idea whatsoever how teachers and lecturers would know what’s real these days …
A very amusing and rather thought-provoking anecdote, Lodestone.
It must all be a nightmare in academia in 2025. Teachers have been doing on-line searches to detect plagiarism for yonks. But the rise of CHAT GPT will make their lives far more difficult.
The only way forward is to return to viva voce interviews and to use quills and parchment for written assessment.
I wonder how the @Admin Team at AFTERWORD HQ are coping with all this.
How many robots have now sneaked into the clubroom and are ingratiating themselves with the rest of us?
One amusing thing that this tread taught me about CHAT GPT is that it is always desperate to please and it will tell all kinds of porkies in order to please its customer.
You will not encounter a grumpy, curmudgeonly AI.
You are so right, KFD – you compose the best posts.
AI is the most significant tool to have emerged since the internet itself. I use the following: Chat GBT, Gemini, Perplexity, Co-pilot (within Microsoft). I really like Google LM Notebook and Gamma. I use AI often in my teaching and use it along with students which I must do because of the way that folk try to use AI – illustrated in most of the remarks here. So I specialise in prompt generation guidance – how can the student use this particular technology of where they are at.
Did you use AI for this post? I don’t understand the final sentence ..?
No – I needed to finish the sentence in a hurry, became distracted by the meeting I was in and made a human error.
Reminds me of the old quote, which seems particularly prescient in these days of AI hallucination:
‘To err is human’ but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries”. (Agatha Christie, apparently)
I’m genuinely interested but still no clue as to what you are saying?
I believe what @everygoodboydeservesfruita means is that the people who will be useful in the future will be the ones who write the best setup prompts i.e. the prompts that produce the most useful/truthful answers from the AI.
I mean that AI prompt guidance I provide alongside my students is determined by the knowledge and skills they have. Then AI will assist them to develop their skills from there. For example, it might be to explain ( again) to one student why their use of participles is creating awkward phrases in their sentences . For another it might be sentence fragments generally. Or for another inconsistent tense. But never is it to generate an entire response .
I ask AI questions that I once might have asked the AW. It’s refreshingly non-judgemental in comparison.
Well, someone is using AI to make Emily Portman albums.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clydz8d03dvo
No thanks. I’ve managed sixty nine years without this. I think I can struggle over the finishing line without the aid of thieves.
I have to say that, having been very sceptical, I recently tested using ChatGPT to get some demographic information I needed for a business plan I was doing for a client. It was brilliant!
There are limitations (for my use case) but not only did it save me a lot of time trawling Google, it asked me very sensible questions back to check what I wanted after an initial brief and suggested other info that I might like it to search for, all of which was sensible and relevant.
I may be a convert