A friendly reminder: ChatGPT is just an advanced autocomplete

Do you remember the first time technology genuinely surprised you? Not just impressed you, but made you stop and think - This changes what is possible.

For instance, the first time you saw 3D graphics, perhaps on a PC or a Playstation 1? The resolution was low, the frame-rate was few, but controlling a 3D avatar through virtual space was kind of mind blowing (*Driver* was my first experience of this, drifting around parking lots and fleeing police in an American city. When I went back on a nostalgia trip a few years ago it was almost unplayable, but at the time it seemed like the possibilities within that disc were infinite).

Or when you first saw a digital camera, built into a mobile phone? There wasn’t a megapixel to speak of, and it was far less impressive than film at the time, but it immediately changed your definition of what a phone could be, your imagination of what was possible.

Those technologies have of course since improved by orders of magnitude, but the magic of that first impression we found didn’t repeat with each iteration.

We chase the dragon of that magic first impact whenever we open up a tech blog, or click on the latest MKBHD video, but we rarely catch it.

I remember a point in time when my smartphone’s keyboard that caught that dragon. Back in 2016, I installed SwiftKey. It had a modern UI, and a great killer feature; autocomplete - a predictive text engine that was based on a neural network built right into your phone.

No longer was the next word predicted solely on the word that came right before it. It used the context of the whole sentence or paragraph, and was trained on your typing habits over time. And there it was again. That feeling.

How did it know exactly what I was about to type? Almost before I did? The technology had just read my mind before I'd even finished the thought.

You could even tap on the centre word a few times, and it’d keep going, (sure, before eventually running out of context and producing garbage).

This feature wasn’t strictly a GPT, but it was a branch from the same evolutionary tree. It was a neural-network powered feature; it was AI.. It was magic.

The first “strictly GPT” feature that many of us experienced was Gmail’s smart compose in 2018. I remember the first time I personally experienced this. It would quite literally finish your sentences for you. It was even occasionally useful!

It was super impressive and far more advanced technology. But magic? Not quite. That spark was claimed a couple of years earlier.

Enter ChatGPT

So when OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT to the world, it wasn’t the first predictive-text AI or even the first GPT we had encountered - most of were already using one on a daily basis.

But somehow, this seemed different. The scale of it was pretty damn groundbreaking. The way it formed paragraphs and found answers, seemed almost otherworldly. And everyone sat up and blinked. It *did* seem like magic.

What I think happened is that this technology seemed to almost suddenly skip several generations at once.

Imagine turning up to your school or workplace, your friend showing off pixellated photos on their ‘dumbphone’ Samsung, and then the very next phone you purchased had a modern telephoto, wide-angle, 50MP smartphone camera right next to your ‘contacts’ app, taking some of the best photos you’ve seen in your life.

Imagine you were happily playing Driver on the PSOne back in ‘98 and then you visit your friend to witness the wild, vivid online gameplay of GTA5.

You’d go crazy, thinking this was alien technology. Others would sell the family silverware to try and invest in the companies. But that didn’t happen.

Instead, we gradually got used to those technologies over time. And nobody panicked.

When we eventually get the next release of Grand Theft Auto, it’s going to be brilliant - but it’s not going to completely overhaul and redefine the world of gaming overnight.

GPT technology has come at us faster than we were ready for. It’s changing many industries in a very short timeframe. Hell, we got GPT-5 before we got GTA6!

So I think it’s super important to take pause and step a little back, to look and see what this technology is, and what it isn’t.

It’s not a sentient being, sitting and plotting to take over the world at 3am.

It’s not a worker that can come up with novel ideas, and have the motivation, dedication and duration to turn them into something truly unique and special.

It’s not an outsourced freelancer that is desperate to do a good job so that it will be awarded that second or third larger contract.

It’s autocomplete.

Extraordinarily advanced, extraordinarily sophisticated autocomplete - but autocomplete nonetheless.

Use your brain.

See it as such, and you’ll be using this tool wisely. An autocomplete’s real power comes when you provide it with a good foundation, a solid context. When you use it as it’s own foundation it’ll certainly produce something, but you’ll likely find it won’t be any good.

Resist the temptation to use it for creativity, for idea generation, for writing posts, or for writing convincing emails (writing itself a tool to help you think!). Avoid using it a first port-of-call when solve problems, or designing new systems.

Happily, use it instead to fill in forms, to proof-read your editorial, to research deeply into ideas, to summarise large swathes of content, or yes, even to write pages of code that you no longer need to type out by hand.

For many, resisting the seemingly easier path takes some willpower, and takes some self-belief.

But by spending time where it matters - at the beginning of your creation - when you do end up at the chatbox, you’ll have started with a more novel context and a deeper understanding. If you so choose, AI can then take it and supercharge it. By treating this tool as a ‘last-mile’ solution, it’s genuinely more powerful, and you’ll get much better results.

And thankfully over time, you’ll find yourself less brain-dependant on big tech, and you’ll find yourself spending less time incessantly sanitising slop.

You’ll be thinking thoroughly. Continuing to enjoy the craft. Maintaining your self worth. You’ll be nurturing and developing a brain that is more uniquely you, and much, much more valuable.