What ChatGPT Enables
These are capabilities that LLMs like ChatGPT can do today so it will be interesting to see how they become more widely accepted and used:
Academic papers summarized for lay readers. There are already tools to use ChatGPT to summarize papers, but it would be even better if the authors review the AI’s output and make slight edits, so they can easily publish an official “popular” version of their paper.
Live suggestions while writing any text. Microsoft and Google are already rolling out features in word processors and email apps to click to generate text, so the next step will be to show suggestions automatically and roll it out more generally, even in messaging apps. It will raise questions about authenticity however.
If someone asks a question on a forum, people would sometimes point out that a Google search can easily answer it (“LMGTFY” - let me Google that for you”). Now people are starting to point out that ChatGPT can address their question or argument, so the starting point may need to be after that response.
Easy surveys of a topic - currently people spend a lot of time searching for a topic and reading about it but Google, Bing and ChatGPT already provide ways to search the web for you and get results summarized. For many questions today, those answers are less interesting than asking ChatGPT directly, but this summarizing power will be used when more precise answers or references are needed. For example, if someone wants a summary of the academic literature on a topic, they will start with an AI summary. In the near future it may even be able to analyze the papers to see which ones are e.g. more rigorous.
When writing on a topic today, the AI tools may just give minor suggestions, but that will change. The very nature of writing and even thinking will change dramatically, but that’s a topic for another post.