You have been marketed at relentlessly, and you can smell it now. The breathless thread. The claim that everything changed this week. The course that will not say what is in it until you have handed over your email address. It is entirely reasonable to have concluded that the whole subject is noise.

It is mostly noise. Underneath it there is a smaller, duller thing that is genuinely useful: a tool that is good at reshaping text and bad at knowing facts. That sentence is close to the whole of it, and everything practical follows from taking it literally.

What is actually true

  • It saves real time on assembly work — summarising, reformatting, first drafts, changing register, pulling structure out of a mess.
  • It produces confident, well-written, wrong answers, and gives you no signal at all when it does.
  • It knows nothing about your organisation that you have not pasted into it.
  • It writes the average version of everything: fine for a status update, wrong for anything that has to sound like you.
  • The skill involved is small and learnable — give it enough context, ask for a specific format, check the parts you cannot verify.

What is being oversold

  • That it replaces expertise. It replaces some typing. The judgement about what is worth saying is still yours, and that was always the scarce part.
  • That there is a magic form of words. There are a handful of moves, they are boring, and they are written up in this blog's other articles rather than held back.
  • That you are behind. The useful part takes an afternoon to learn, and nothing about it expires next quarter.
  • That it is free. It costs you the checking time. Any task where checking costs more than doing was never a win, and quite a few tasks are like that.

None of that requires enthusiasm. You do not have to find the subject exciting to get an hour back on a Tuesday, and being suspicious of the claims is a better starting position than being impressed by them — suspicious people check the output.