By now, you’ve likely heard about ChatGPT. If you haven’t, you might want to take a hard look at your news sources and social media habits.

ChatGPT is a chatbot that utilizes generative AI. It’s the most well-known tool out there at the moment, but there are many more, and new tools are being released every day. ChatGPT is free with certain usage limits, and the newest version of ChatGPT (GPT-4) is now available for an insanely low $20 per month subscription.

I won’t spend too much time here describing what generative AI can do. Basically, tools like ChatGPT can act as a research and writing assistant. The tools will improve your writing. Ask it a question, and it will provide an answer in any writing style you desire. It can write poetry and songs. It does get facts wrong at times, so you have to review and edit all the output, but the output is often amazing.

Generative AI also includes text-to-image tools such as Midjourney that can create a beautiful image in any style simply with text prompts. Text-to-video isn’t as fully developed at the moment, but it’s coming.

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If you’re in a creative or knowledge worker field and you’re not using some of these tools, then you’re already falling behind.

The use cases are endless. Creative departments can now use AI instead of engaging a graphic artist. Many copywriters can easily be replaced with ChatGPT. Services such as Fiverr will be much less necessary or useful. Why outsource a simple creative task when an AI tool can produce something better in less time?

Jobs will disappear; new jobs will be created

This point shouldn’t be up for debate. This happens every time we have a significant new technology. Many jobs will no longer be necessary, but the output and creativity enabled by generative AI tools will create opportunities for new jobs that we could barely imagine just one year ago.

Think about a junior attorney. With tools like ChatGPT, much of what they do such as drafting contracts and other documents can be generated using AI. Of course, attorneys will need to review, check and edit the output, but legal teams can now be smaller, and more effective.

Check out this old interview with Steve Jobs to give you some idea of how tools improve our lives. The same notion applies to AI (even with the obvious risks which we’re not getting into here).

AI is not your competition

Despite that reality, you shouldn’t think about how you’ll be replaced by AI. Rather, you’ll most likely be at risk of being replaced by someone else using AI. These tools are amazing, but they’re much more powerful and effective in the hands of experienced professionals who learn how to generate the best outputs.

Professionals are already experimenting with these tools, learning which prompts to use, and how to best employ iterative processes to quickly produce high-quality results.

Tools will become more specialized

Each industry and profession will soon have AI tools customized for the output needed by knowledge workers in the applicable field. Text generation tools like ChatGPT will be tailored for fields such as law, advertising, human resources, etc.

You might think that you can wait for more specialized tools to arrive. Perhaps you can. But the more you start learning how to interact with these tools now, the further along you’ll be as better tools are introduced to the marketplace.

Enjoy the ride

For many, the emergence of AI as a part of our lives will be very stressful. If you’re feeling this way, try to recalibrate how you will approach this new reality. Embrace the challenge. You’ll realize how this can liberate you from the more mundane parts of your job. Challenge yourself to see what you can produce with the assistance of these amazing tools. Every knowledge worker will now have access to a remarkable assistant with almost infinite knowledge.

For now, think of it as playing with these tools. It can be quite fun. And along the way you’ll start to see just how productive and creative you can be.