Executive summary. ChatGPT and any other number of artificial intelligence tools are here. And here to stay. Like a good friend of mine said, “think of it as a calculator for words.” Tip: stay to the end of this one, I guarantee you’ll get a chuckle!

What is ChatGPT? It’s a website that uses artificial intelligence. It’s free.

It takes whatever you write in its prompt and gives you an answer. Anything. For a question in words and an answer in words, it takes just seconds. It sometimes takes just a little bit longer on tougher subjects when there are references or links involved. This “little bit longer” is about 15 seconds instead of 7.

What subjects does it cover? Everything. Personal relationships, physics, animal health, recipes, just anything you can imagine. It will provide an answer in whatever length you want and in any format. My mother just had it pick her the Elite 8 in the NCAA March Madness Tourney (it wasn’t 100% correct, but she placed 3^rd in her competition). You can have it produce a drawing, a flow chart, an outline, or just a simple paragraph-by-paragraph answer.

Gone is the human effort. This is a legitimate fear. Why should I, the author, write this article when I can just tell Chatty (this is what I call “her” when I talk to her in the prompt) to write it for me? Take this 2.5 hour exercise and turn it into 7 to 15 seconds.

My story. This article is written for anyone in the construction industry that hasn’t really started poking around AI. I’ve recently started my PhD program and have used Chatty as my study buddy. She doesn’t write my homework, but for a lot of them, she could. As a construction engineering lecturer at a local university (separate from my PhD studies), it is obvious when my students turn in AI-generated work – they’re using words (sometimes in Latin) that I never have.

Here’s just something fun and funny, but also something that gives you an idea of just how much power these new intelligence engines have. Today I was working on a project for one of my classes and I typed this into ChatGPT:

Can you provide a drawing or sketch of a man laying in a pipe trench with trench shoring with a rubber tired loader adjacent to the trench?

This is what Chatty gave me:

It’s funny, right? I forgot to put in “…laying pipe in a pipe trench…”

So, I revised the prompt to this:

Can you provide a drawing or sketch of a man laying pipe in a pipe trench with trench shoring with a rubber tired loader adjacent to the trench?

Then I put in the next prompt:

Can you lighten up the sketch in color, can you lengthen the trench box, can you put the man inside the trench box, and can you have the excavator help the man push the pipe into the pipe it is connecting to.

Here’s what Chatty gave me:

I don’t know about you, but I think this novel excavator may be enough to earn me that PhD!

And one last thing, don’t know if you noticed, but not on Google the first bit of your answer is AI-generated. You get a “conversation” back from the search engine in addition to the links you’ve been getting the past couple decades.

Work safe!