You know that friend who never has to work a day in their life because they have a trust fund? Well, imagine if you had access to a tool that could do all the work for you. Enter ChatGPT, the AI language model that can generate text in a variety of styles and on any topic. It’s a powerful tool that can be incredibly useful, but it also poses risks.

ChatGPT can be seen as a type of trust fund, a source of easy ideas and content without having to put in the hard work of brainstorming and writing. It’s easy to fall into the trap of relying on ChatGPT to generate all your ideas, but this can be dangerous. Just like relying on a trust fund to provide for your every need, using ChatGPT without any critical thought can lead to a lack of creativity and a failure to develop valuable skills.

It’s super important to remember that ChatGPT is a tool, not a replacement for human creativity. AI-generated content can be a starting point, but it’s up to us to take those ideas and shape them into something unique and valuable. ChatGPT is great for generating rough drafts or providing inspiration, but it’s up to us to review and refine the ideas it generates.

We also need to be aware of the dangers of overreliance on AI-generated ideas. Just like how blindly following a trust fund can lead to financial ruin, blindly following ChatGPT-generated ideas can lead to disaster. The infamous failure of Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund that relied heavily on complex financial models, is a prime example of the dangers of overreliance on AI-generated data.

Wanna know why I’m using the decades-old LTCM as an example here? It’s because the free version of ChatGPT doesn’t yet know about the failures of Celsius, FTX, SVB, and Signature Bank. But how different is LTCM from FTX? At the LATHH, I explained at the same time the FTX thing to someone understood LTCM and LTCM to someone who knew about FTX. Then we were all on the same page.

Another example is the use of bad data in military actions and corporate missteps. In 2011, the U.S. military mistakenly bombed a convoy in Afghanistan, killing 23 people, including women and children. The mistake was attributed to the use of faulty data in a drone targeting system. In the corporate world, relying on AI-generated data without critical thought can lead to bad decisions that cost companies millions of dollars. Huge bummer.

So, while ChatGPT is a powerful tool, we need to use it responsibly. It’s up to us to ensure that we don’t become reliant on it and that we don’t blindly follow the ideas it generates. We should view ChatGPT as a starting point for our own creativity, and not a replacement for it. In the end, it’s up to us to put in the hard work and create something new and valuable. That’s why this blog post–largely written by ChatGPT–was kicked back by me to ChatGPT to rewrite a number of times to incorporate notes. And here it is for you.