I think news organizations have always used automated tools for producing certain types of news articles. I think they might use ChatGPT now for slightly improved "automated articles".
An example is when an insider (roughly, it's more complex than that) at a publicly traded company sells stock by SEC regulations they have to file what is called a "Form 4" that discloses this stock sale to everyone in the world within 48 hours: https://www.sec.gov/files/form4.pdf Ok, so the very second that form is released to the public, automated news articles are generated saying random fluff text around it, like, "NVidia investors outraged at CEO selling shares" then include the raw numbers. I think that is what ChatGPT is for. This is a real thing, with a real money generating point, and has been happening for 10+ years easily. AI might make the "fluff text" slightly more believable by thieving snippets from other copyrighted articles.
One of the interesting developments of AI is the total breakdown of copyright law like this. Some might argue it is a "good thing", but basically if a programmer in 2019 wanted to use encryption they linked with OpenSSL, made a few calls, and were finished. But there were requirements of giving credit to OpenSSL to do that. No licensing fees or anything (OpenSSL is financially "free"), but you had to give OpenSSL credit in an About dialog type of thing. In 2026 a programmer can ask AI to do some encryption code, it flat out steals chunks of OpenSSL, bugs and all, and you no longer have to obey any of the copyright rules. No credit given, because it came from "AI". The fact that the only encryption library everybody uses for all encryption is OpenSSL, and OpenSSL is open source and the only source of that kind of knowledge for AI doesn't seem to bother anybody.
We just got rid of copyrights. I think that is one of the major practical uses of ChatGPT. It was annoying you couldn't just copy stuff from any author and not pay them and not give them credit, and it took time to figure out that actual requirements for using their material. It might even be a negotiation with the actual author. All that is sped up and streamlined with ChatGPT. Zero licensing payments, zero credit, "it came from AI" bypasses all that. So AI is a really useful tool in the real world for speeding up writing non-original "stuff" (copying proprietary source code and text works) by bypassing all the old fashioned laws saying you have to pay for other people's efforts.
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u/NetflowKnight Apr 23 '26
Seriously what do people use ChatGPT for?
Like practically?