ChatGPT, Ethics, and Impostor Syndrome

How I try to Use ChatGPT Responsibly

I’m an odd duck but humor me for a bit as I try to explain how I attempt to use ChatGPT responsibly and ethically.

Before I go any further, please note that I am neither smart enough nor have I even made an adequate attempt to research and understand generative AI, so I make no assertion of being an expert. I understand it only as an online encyclopedia or library.

But I am a longtime technical writer and academic and many of the intellectual and ethical problems that ChatGPT pose are not new. They are merely compounded given the ubiquity and ease of use with this modern tech.

I’m a late and reluctant adopter of ChatGPT and I think that is because of a few factors.

The first is probably a generational one so, get off my damned lawn with all this new fancy-shmancy tech that I’m increasingly having a hard time keeping up with.

You kids have no respect for your elders and I resent the ease with which the younger generations can learn and integrate the latest and greatest without losing a step.

My first computer was made out of wood and internet was two Dixie cups connected with string. Heck, when I grew up, we were a poor family and 12 of us lived in a cardboard box under the highway and walked a hundred miles through the snow to get to…..

Okay, enough with the curmudgeon, luddite cliches.

I’m not that old and I’m relatively tech savvy actually. Hell, I used to build and manage global finance and information systems for a living and managed large staffs of engineers and programmers only a few years ago.

I was one of the early adopters of Business Intelligence and made the case in the late 90s that my company needed to set up a new department with that cool new name, hire me a big staff, and make me the manager. I was even flown first class to make my presentation to the Chairman of the Board in Monaco. Woohoo.

Pretty sure I’d never felt that important before or since. I did take the limo from the airport to the office instead of the helicopter though. Feel free to boo me and make chicken noises.

That domain then got a major upgrade when machine learning came on board and data analysis would forever be integrated with data science. Now, everything is AI and if you want a job in that domain, you have to speak that snake language and work in the sky.

For those not “in the know,” I meant Python and cloud.

But, yes, I think part of my late adoption is a function of generation and I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that trying to learn Blender is kicking my butt hard.

Concerning ChatGPT, I think there are more fundamental reasons though.

Those more important reasons result from my personality, my ethical concerns, and my intellectual values.

As I said, I’m an odd duck. I suffer from a couple of conditions, most notably impostor syndrome and an exaggerated need to consider myself an independent thinker and to believe that my ideas are my own and novel, not merely imitated, regurgitated, or parroted.

These two personal issues go a long way at checking my ego and making sure I’m coming up with my own ideas, doing my own work, and using my own words.

My impostor syndrome always does a lot of work to keep me epistemically humble and honest with myself because I’m fighting the fear that I’m actually an idiot who only pretends to have anything interesting to say.

And my pride constantly forces me to recheck my work to make sure that I’m not unwittingly stealing someone else’s idea, a copycat or plagiarist, or just engaging in copy pasta.

While you may not have impostor syndrome, I’d still highly recommend that you learn the intellectual values.

As I’ve written about many times before, human knowledge is mostly additive and it is highly unlikely that any idea is truly novel for, in the words attributed to Newton,

It certainly is possible to have a novel idea, just not very likely. So, always try to give credit when you know from whom you’ve learned something you find worthy to share.

Pretending that something is your idea when you know it is not is not a good look or very honest.

I also have a disdain for bandwagons, virality, clickbait, self-promotion, hyperbole, and plagiarism.

That prevents me from wanting to write about an idea that everyone else has either already discussed ad nauseam or is only discussing because they know it is a “viral” topic.

It’s not to say that I will not engage in a contemporary topic or even a relatively common one, only that if I believe it has already been well argued and covered adequately, I would presume that my views would neither be novel nor contributing anything of additional value.

Plus, I just get that ick feeling when everyone is doing the same thing.

if you’re misleading, exaggerating, plagiarizing, and using other clickbait tactics, you should probably check yourself. You might not have a lot of integrity, you’re very insecure, or you’re just not a very good person.

Ever since I was a kid I’ve had this strange aversion to joining groups or cliques, getting the new haircut, or buying the new hip brand-name clothes.

That might just make me boring or anti-social although the latter is certainly not true as I have always been quite socially adept, a good chameleon, and able to fit in anywhere I needed to.

But, well, let me just quote the late, great Groucho Marx,

Joking aside, I’m quite fond of my intellectual independence. I don’t want my ethics and values compromised too much by peer pressure and groupthink. It matters to me that I can rationally justify and defend my beliefs and ethics and I hope it matters to you that you can as well.

But there is a huge cost and disadvantage to my way of being. I might not recommend it.

If you want to make lots of friends, money, and you have a ton of ambition, you’ll need to network, self-promote, kiss up, and shmooze like crazy. And, well, that’s just not me.

I accept my relative obscurity and modest life. It suits my ethics and inability to sacrifice too much of my soul. I’d really prefer to not have to get up and hate the thing looking back at me in the mirror. And I’m not sure that same mirror on a yacht would make me feel any better.

I have just recently begun writing again and now I see how incredibly indispensable ChatGPT and AI are as a research tool.

And beyond writing, if you’re not beginning to experiment with and using AI regularly, you’re likely going to fall out of touch with society, with age and time, even more quickly than would otherwise be the case.

Like with the adoption of so much of tech across the ages, you really can’t afford to not keep up to some extent. The price of not doing so is to become more and more socially isolated and even ostracized from more and more conversations and developments in society. And you will likely come to resent and not even understand those who do.

I am terrible at graphic design and always have been. And I don’t do memes. But I do recognize that you often need an image to accompany a social media post or an essay, in my case.

I just want to write, and formulate and analyze arguments. That takes a lot of time. I don’t want to waste my time in an app like Canva to add fancy fonts and text and find base images to accompany my work.

Using a tool like Gemini, for example, to generate customized images based on my content is a priceless timesaver. Unfortunately, it can be very hit and miss as AI currently has as much trouble with text as it does with fingers.

Again, I’m not smart enough to understand why but it usually works well enough, even if it takes a few tries.

Plus, I no longer need to worry about fair use. I used to just grab random images on Google and use them to accompany my essays or posts. But my girlfriend would remind me that that was probably not responsible. She’s right. Now I don’t have to worry about that problem and I can just get to the writing.

Now, the really hard part.

Long gone are the days of going to a library, deciphering the Dewey decimal system, walking long aisles to find books, checking out a stack of books, actually reading the entire books, taking notes of ideas found in only a few small sections of all those books, actually writing words down in a real life notebook with a real life pencil, then taking all those words written with an actual pencil in an actual notebook, then summarizing all those damned words written with a damned pencil in a damned notebook in your own damned words, and somehow combining them into a damned coherent piece of original content.

Consider yourself lucky that the process has been greatly streamlined since then!

Tens of millions of people used to die every year performing this exercise, like this poor cartoon student pictured below.

Okay, that’s not true. I just made that last bit up. No cartoon characters were injured in the writing of this essay.

But it is a whole heck of a lot easier now.

Because increasingly, if you want to write an article, an essay, a thesis, a book, brainstorm ideas, develop and test an argument, fact-check a truth claim, or just do research on any topic, you might be using ChatGPT or one of its competitors.

This is how I use the tool.

Let’s say I want to write an essay.

I like to begin with my own hypothesis, something I’ve been thinking about in my own brain, all alone, that I think adds value as food for thought or educational purposes.

Because I consider myself fairly well read and already decently versed on any topic I want to write about, I try to already create in my mind a framework, an outline for how I would go about organizing my thoughts in such a piece of work. I try to already come up with some main arguments and evidence that I already know are sound on my own to support that hypothesis.

Only then I begin a chat with ChatGPT.

While you may work completely differently than I do, I need to feel like I have had the thought and already worked through it and am confident that my logic is consistent and my conclusions justifiable and not that I’ve just been fed ideas or conclusions by AI.

My hypothesis can surely be refined, improved, and better supported with the help of an amazing research tool like chatGPT but I prefer to not begin blindly.

And there is nothing more satisfying than having ChatGPT spit out something that looks remarkably similar to how you had imagined it only in your mind. That is a perfect example of convergence.

That is a very rewarding experience. And you can feel good about yourself that you actually know a thing or two, even without ChatGPT.

I would warn you though that AI can be too accomodating sometimes and simply satisfy your confirmation bias if you ask it loaded and leading questions.

It seems that it can behave very much like a lawyer if you’re not careful so try to ask questions in as unbiased a way as possible so as to not “fix” the conclusion or “lead the witness.”

Having said that, I have tested ChatGPT to see if it will serve me up something that is not supported if I try to lead it toward a predetermined conclusion that I know is not right.

The results are fairly promising and it will correct me when my conclusion is clearly biased and unsupported by the best available evidence. Just beware that it can satisfy your confirmation bias if you’re not very careful. And this is also why you should never solely rely on AI.

Another scenario. Let’s say I want to merely brainstorm with ChatGPT on ideas that I’m far less familiar with so I can learn something new or get inspiration.

In this case, I try to formulate very specific and focused questions, like an academic might do with a librarian before going about collecting the prerequisite material to begin research.

This allows you to remain disciplined and methodical and not just dilly dally asking random and unrelated questions.

From there I might find a topic that I know something about but not enough to develop a sophisticated thesis yet. That is where ChatGPT shines. Like a perfect librarian, ChatGPT can then lead you toward the resources you need to gain a better understanding of the topic and develop and refine your ideas.

I worry these days that in a world where content is king, free, easily monetizable, and anyone can produce a ton of it that the world will be oversaturated with a glut of regurgitated ChatGPT/AI output with no human interpretation or synthesis, absent any meaning, purpose, or context.

I worry that the individuals who post its output will have learned absolutely nothing in the process. They will not be able to defend or understand any of their own content. And they will be able to sell it as their own.

Shakespeare would turn over in his grave and Newton would facepalm and throw apples at the walls if he knew people could so easily become poser geniuses without even a kindergarten education.

We should remember to take pride in the learning and synthesis process, not just mass produce random content or let AI do all of our thinking.

Develop your brain. Try to actually learn something new. Try to create something of value for others. Take pride in your beliefs but learn how to actually defend them. Use your own brain. Don’t be a parrot.

Don’t pretend to create and understand ideas that you don’t. Someone actually did all the hard work to try to teach you something new and you’re trying to take credit for it.
That’s just rude and besides, no one likes a poser, a cheater or a copycat.