# 1000 Days of ChatGPT: Transforming Work or a Cheat Tool?

- **Episode:** [232](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/232.md) (2025-09-16)
- **Type:** news-roundup
- **Tags:** chatgpt, ai, transforming work, cheat tool
- **Time:** 11:19–18:09 (start 679s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/232?t=679](https://truthliesandwork.com/232?t=679)

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[11:19] Al Elliott: So as I said to you before, I alluded to before, it's been, it's been around about 1,000 days since the launch of ChatGPT. Now, this isn't just my nerdiness of actually having a big calendar and marking off the days. It just, it was an article in, let me have a look. It was in cityam.com, that very famous news publication, by a guy called Henrik Landgren. He sounds maybe Germanic. So I'm sorry, Henrik, if I got that wrong, but it's 1,000 days. So he basically looked at it and said, right, what's happened? Has it been the apocalypse that we thought it was? I mean, we all use ChatGPT for funny images. I know that we've done some, some really funny things. I tried to get ChatGPT. I was talking, who was I talking to? It might have been my brother, I think, on WhatsApp. And I was, because I've got an intolerance to eggs and I won't go into exactly how that intolerance manifests, but I asked ChatGPT, I sent a picture of me and I said, please put me eating a Spanish tortilla full of eggs on the toilet. And make it photorealistic. And ChatGPT said, no, I'm afraid I can't do that. It did say, I can make a cartoon version, which was actually a bit more accurate, I think, to be honest
[12:23] Leanne Elliott: Right
[12:24] Al Elliott: Anyway, so moving aside from that, that's a, that's a little overshare. What have you used ChatGPT for in the last 1,000 days, Leanne?
[12:30] Leanne Elliott: I use it to help me put the show notes together for the podcast. I use it to translate journals that are in different languages. I use it to give me a quick summary of something. So for example, I had somebody today that was like, oh, I just need like a 2-line explanation of the coaching programme I'm offering as a prize to listeners of another podcast. And I had like a 200-word, I just went, can you just give me this in 1 to 2 sentences? And it was done and I sent it off and it was lovely. So yeah, lots of things like that, administrative type copy, low-level copy. Writing kind of stuff
[13:10] Al Elliott: Yeah, absolutely. You know, we, we quite often use it for, I mean, I use it more than Googling these days, I think
[13:16] Leanne Elliott: You do?
[13:17] Al Elliott: Now the question is, in terms of the workplace, has it, has it caused this sort of unemployment tsunami that everyone said it was gonna be? Well, kind of the answer supposedly is yes or no, because first of all, it has made some work a lot easier. As Leanne alluded to before, we can do stuff in days or minutes that would take us weeks or a whole department to do. There are fancy people out there. We haven't done it yet, but there are fancy people out there Yeah. About there who create agents that hand over work to each other. So you can do things like build an entire virtual marketing department. I've seen people on Twitter, X, Twix, um, uh, who, who basically have created this scraping thing where they'll scrape an idea from YouTube, a trending idea from YouTube. They will then plumb it into something else, which will create a script, and they'll plumb it into, uh, I think it's called, uh, ElevenLabs, which will then create a voiceover, and then it will go into some stock image and create some backstock image and then just spit out TikTok. A TikTok ready to be uploaded and they're doing like one a minute
[14:10] Leanne Elliott: Come on
[14:10] Al Elliott: They also, also, I didn't know this existed, but there, there are TikTok farms. Did you know about this?
[14:14] Leanne Elliott: TikTok farms?
[14:17] Al Elliott: Yeah
[14:17] Leanne Elliott: No
[14:17] Al Elliott: So there are places which have got like 10,000 phones with robotic arms that are basically just swiping on TikToks. And what you can do is if you can pay to put your, to, to, to have them go onto your account and just swipe up and down and watch your videos over and over and over again
[14:35] Leanne Elliott: Interesting. But it's not engagement, is it?
[14:37] Al Elliott: No, of course it's not. It's cheating, which is again, which is where we're coming down to the ChatGPT because, um, you, yes, you can use it for all the stuff you were talking about there. And I'll talk about, um, NotebookLM, but some people are using it a little bit to cheat. They're trying to get their people to do, get ChatGPT or Claude or whatever to do their entire job, which is kind of going against the point, I think
[14:56] Leanne Elliott: The employee is trying to get ChatGPT to do their job
[14:57] Al Elliott: Yes. I'm sorry
[14:58] Leanne Elliott: Yes. Okay
[14:58] Al Elliott: Right. I'm away from engagement farming now from TikTok farming. Right. Yeah
[15:01] Leanne Elliott: All over the place
[15:04] Al Elliott: It's as professional as you remember, listener. So the question is, is it eliminating jobs? And—
[15:10] Leanne Elliott: Is it?
[15:11] Al Elliott: Yes
[15:11] Leanne Elliott: Right
[15:13] Al Elliott: And no
[15:14] Vanessa Judelman: Okay
[15:14] Al Elliott: It's eliminating those jobs, which are things like just data entry. It's eliminating those jobs where someone said, go and find me a quote that says this on the internet. It's eliminating jobs like, oh, I'm just gonna go and upload something to Excel. I need to go and like enter that all day. That is But we all seem to have moved up a little step because, because for the majority of people, that's not their whole job. They're able to say to ChatGPT, here, here's some unordered data, paste it in. Can you put, can you turn it into an Excel file for me? And then 10 seconds later they've got an Excel file
[15:45] Leanne Elliott: Mm-hmm
[15:45] Al Elliott: So they're not spending the hour putting everything into an Excel file. They're spending that time, they can step away and go and do something else. So, which is really, really cool. Lee, what are your thoughts so far on it? What do you think? Do you think No
[15:59] Leanne Elliott: Why? I think, I think it's, I think it's a question of, do I think AI is gonna take over all jobs? No. Do I think AI will have the capabilities to take over the majority of jobs? Yes
[16:14] Al Elliott: Right
[16:14] Leanne Elliott: But I think there's gonna be an element of organisations choosing to be human first. We're trying to be like human-centric, but I think human first might become a, might become a thing. I think just it, it, the way it is now, I don't trust ChatGPT entirely in terms of accuracy. I find mistakes, hallucinations are a big thing that's being talked about now where you ask it to fact-check its work and it's still wrong and it just makes things up
[16:40] Al Elliott: And you're absolutely right
[16:41] Leanne Elliott: And I think it— what?
[16:43] Al Elliott: That's what it always says to you. You're absolutely right when you point out a mistake
[16:46] Leanne Elliott: Yeah. Even Claude today, I was like, you okay? Like, I've asked you to correct this very specific things and you're telling me it's done, but it's not. It's like, you're absolutely right. I'm so sorry. Let me do that again. And then still didn't do it. I was like, seriously, honey, you okay? So I don't know. I just don't trust it that much. I certainly wouldn't trust it with any data that I'm working with in terms of organisations, in terms of that collation. To be able to then check it is gonna take even longer. So current capability, no, I don't think so
[17:14] Al Elliott: No. And I think also what's really cool is because everyone's got AI, no one's got AI
[17:18] Leanne Elliott: Yeah
[17:19] Al Elliott: So it's democratised the way that we sort of, we can talk online and create content. So it means that you either have to be very good at content or very human. I think this is where it's, I mean, it's doing things like I've read, there's a London biotech that raised £2.8 million in funding with just 2 employees and the rest of it's AI. Very cool. But then on the flip side, there's a couple of people who've tried to do AI therapy and then very quietly and quickly shut it down thanks to the backlash on it. So I think basically what this article seems to be saying is, That yes, it's gonna change work. The, in fact, lemme just read the quote. It says, the question isn't whether AI will change work, but whether you'll lead that change or follow it. And I think this is the cool thing. AI is brilliant at taking on the grunt work, but it's even more important to be personal and even more important to be human because you'll stand out by being human