Can ChatGPT take the pain out of annual academic reviews?

I find writing about myself and my achievements for my annual academic review a miserable process. So I thought I’d see of ChatGPT could help.

I hate writing my annual academic self-evaluation. Scratch that, I dread it. There’s something about being expected to puff up what I do for others to critique or, worse, patronizingly pat me on the back for, that pushes me to a dark and miserable place in ways that few other professional obligations can.

So this year I thought I’d assuage the pain by seeking out help — not of the human kind, but of an artificial nature. Yes, I jumped on the ChatGPT bandwagon to see if a machine could help me out of my misery!

Beyond the not-so-tongue-in-cheek use of an algorithm to help out with my annual existential crisis, there was method in my madness. As well as providing an intriguing way to take my messy thoughts and ideas and transform them into something startlingly brilliant, ChatGPT more broadly represents a potential step-change in the automation of professional writing. And as I study the possible societal impacts of emerging technologies like this, I felt obliged to see just how far this might be stretched …

ChatGPT, while far from being infallible, has a remarkable ability to create elegant and persuasive (if not always true) prose from half-formed ideas, messy articulation, and muddled writing. This is…