[almusdives]

The lost "work" is two years of ChatGPT logs. Sounds like AI systems had concrete benefits to this researcher in a number of applications, but I'm not sure how I feel that their discussions with AIs are so casually being described as "work". Seems slightly misleading?

[PunchyHamster]

People really do think that throwing prompts at AI is equivalent quality with actual work.

[Dansvidania]

I ask with genuine curiosity: have you ever talked about AI as a tool? If so, does it not count at all as work?

I lean towards no, but I routinely call it a tool. I can’t reconcile the two statements.

[Kim_Bruning]

They really don't.

Just the first thing that comes to mind: ChatGPT can act as an enhanced Jupyter notebook where you specify tasks in English. This isn't an analogy; they literally run Jupyter kernels in the backend with chat as the frontend. There's also canvas mode for iterating on actual documents, and the search/retrieval features make it a genuinely useful research tool independent of generation.

And this is me defending OpenAI, which I've stopped using. Other systems are more capable.