I was drafting a relatively low-stakes document for work, so I thought it'd be an interesting avenue for seeing how ChatGPT could help in spitballing the text.

I've messed around with LLM applications a bit before but I thought I could now try and incorporate one into my writing process properly.

I found out that:

ChatGPT is very good a suggesting a variety of ideas and angles that seem professional and well thought out.
Most of these ideas come roughly from a single creatively sterile business/corporation viewpoint – like reading variations of an especially trite LinkedIn post. You can change this by fiddling around with the prompt, but everything is still pretty boring and generic.
None of the suggestions made by ChatGPT were particularly useful. I need to produce a piece of writing that's at least marginally interesting, and none of ChatGPTs suggestions had any traction beyond, again, a boring LinkedIn post. There's a huge market for Garbage Professional Text (GPT, heh) but I have no use for it.
I hoped ChatGPT would've functioned as a catalyst: even bad suggestions could lead to good ideas. The smooth-brained and sterile dribble ChatGPT cranked out wasn't it, though, even if it all sounded very convincing.
If you want a formalized tool, Eno's "Oblique Strategies" scratches a similar itch but is way better, since you usually get your creativity flowing from the get-go. There’s also a great bot that pulls a random Oblique Strategies card a few times a day. It has saved my professional bacon many times!

The point is: if you want to write honest, interesting things with some real soul, the process is just as important as the end result. There's a lot more of "you" in the work than you'd think, even if what you're writing is a piece of fairly rote PR stuff or whatever. You CAN cut corners, but by doing so you're also making your work more boring.

If capitalism requires you to pump out crap super fast, then ChatGPT is great, and that's a big part of the problem right there.

I'm not saying ChatGPT or other LLMs wouldn't be a huge thing for everyday writing especially in corporate and bureaucratic environments in the future – much like spellcheck and automatic formatting help out (and fuck shit up) in the professional everyday all the time nowadays. I can totally see how I could benefit from an "AI helper" or whatever, but, you know… Ehhhhh.

In summary, for now, I still regard ChatGPT as a mediocre tool for creativity (and a dangerously great tool for faking proficiency), and so far my writing process is too important for the final output to sacrifice it for the speed and platitudes of automation.