Last night, I was in a heated debate with some friends from my women’s club about none other than ChatGPT, and I think it is applicable for any construction professional who is currently or who is planning to use ChatGPT to write emails, briefs, or other documentation for either work or personal purposes.
We were reading applications for our scholarship committee and tried to spot when an applicant used ChatGPT. It wasn’t against eligibility to use ChatGPT on the application, but we were just noticing that it was pretty apparent when ChatGPT was being used. And then, someone brought up the em dash, and I had very strong opinions.
There have been viral posts going around social media that suggest the em dash is a product of AI chatbots, and that is simply not true. The em dash has roots dating back to ancient Greek. I have personally been using the em dash for almost two decades.
Someone in my women’s club asked, “Doesn’t an em dash require special keys on the computer?” And I automatically responded, yes alt 0151.
She then asked me if em dashes were on typewriters, and the answer to that is no. Typewriters and computer systems don’t often support em dashes. Historically writers would either do – or a space followed by a – followed by another space to do an em dash. Now, with special keys we can easily use an em dash—kind of like this—and I have used em dashes in my writing for decades. But I digress.
What Does This Mean for Construction?
This does bring up a truly interesting conversation about ChatGPT doing our writing, and the ladies and I came to an agreement last night about when ChatGPT can help and when ChatGPT can hurt, and I hope you can too.
When it helps: ChatGPT can be a very helpful tool in some capacities. It can help take your thoughts and flesh them out a bit for something like an email. ChatGPT can also help potentially with fun creative projects. I am writing a novel, mostly just for fun, and I was having a hard time writing one scene. I asked ChatGPT to help, and it did a lovely job with the setting and the characters and the dialogue. And then I tried it again for another scene and it did an awful job. On the second, third, and fourth attempt, the characters were all wrong and there were pieces of the story missing, and so I ultimately scraped all ChatGPT for my novel, except for that one scene.
When it hurts: ChatGPT, in my opinion, can be very detrimental to a business when it is used to gather facts from the internet. I cannot stress this enough. There is so much bad information on the internet. I do not trust most of it. As a journalist, I pride myself on finding verifiable and reliable facts, and not information spit out by anyone on the internet.
Let me explain with an example. The other day my children were having a disagreement. My five-year-old was arguing that watermelon is a color. My eight-year-old was saying watermelon is not a color. So, they did what any five and eight-year-old would do. They asked Alexa. Alexa essentially said, according to user xyz, watermelon is a color.
My eight-year-old gave in that the five-year-old was right, and I said, “No, how can you just trust Alexa blindly?! How do you know user xyz wasn’t your five-year-old brother who put that information into Alexa to be right?”
The bottomline is ChatGPT can be a very helpful tool, but it can also be an unreliable narrator.
That being said, generative AI (artificial intelligence) that collects and curates data from your estimating, project management, and accounting systems can be a very reliable narrator—that is if your workers put good information in. There’s that em dash again.
We would love to hear your thoughts. How is your organization using ChatGPT? How are you using it professionally? Do you consider ChatGPT a reliable narrator?
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