ChatGPT Doesn't Know What Work Is

A Labor Day tribute to real workers in the real world and hope for the future.

Turret lathe operator machining parts for transport planes at the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation plant, Fort Worth, Texas, 1942 (credit: Howard R. Hollem).

By Michael Judge

I recently had a conversation with a young scientist gainfully employed as a medical researcher tasked with better understanding—and hopefully finding a cure for—Alzheimer’s. When I asked her how artificial intelligence (AI) has affected her work, she said enthusiastically that it “has shaved years off my research and brought us closer faster to understanding and curing Alzheimer’s.”

And then she added, “And many of my friends and colleagues use ChatGPT to help them write speeches for weddings and other occasions!” If you haven’t heard, ChatGPT is an incredibly powerful and user-friendly AI language model, or “chatbot,” released last November that can respond—fluently, almost naturally—to complex questions. It does so, TechRepublic explains, by mimicking human speech and reason and “training on a vast library of e…