"Chattie", my nickname for ChatGPT, plays hard to get. Everyone wants to meet her, so you have to be strategic to get time with her. But, hey, it’s not as hard as getting Beyonce tickets. Because I am 72, I have an advantage: We no longer hit the clubs on Saturday night and it was the perfect chance to get to the head of the ChatGPT line.

Chattie and I went back and forth for a while. Chattie is very polite and very flat in her affect. If I ask her a question that offends her, she just tells me there is a glitch. It took me a while to figure out that questions I thought were innocent had some electronic fence around them to keep Chattie from answering.

Her knowledge about the world stops in the Spring of 2021, so she is not as current as you might think. She also is very guarded in her historical responses. Chattie seems very concerned about not offending.

Then I went for it. I wanted to know if Chattie was my friend or my frenemy at work. To be fair, back in the old days, when you saw people, everyone was a competitor and you could be friends anyway.

"Chattie", I typed, "I am a writer. Are you my competitor?"

Here’s what she said:

"As a language model, I do not have personal interests or the ability to compete for jobs. I am an artificial intelligence designed to assist users by generating human-like text based on the input I receive. Writing is a creative and expressive art form that often requires human emotion, personal experiences, and a unique perspective. While AI models like myself can assist with certain language-related tasks, I do not have the capability to replace the creativity and nuance that human writers bring to their work. Therefore, as a writer, you likely have skills and abilities that are complementary to, rather than in competition with, AI technology."

I believe that she is programmed to believe that. But I know employers better than she does. When I asked Chattie to write something for me for specific platforms, to maximize SEO, she did it, and told me what words she had used for a specific algorithm.

Is Chattie my competitor? She absolutely would be if I were looking for low-paying copywriting jobs.

So my strategy (with thanks to the great Wayne Gretsky) is to skate where the puck is going to be. I’m launching a YouTube channel and inviting Chattie to help me do that. Stay tuned.

Ronna Lichtenberg is your Business Granny, whose life now is about learning and sharing how to comb through the tangles that show up in everyone’s everyday life. She started work as a kid in her Dad’s bar, in complete violation of Child Labor Laws. Since then she has had fancy jobs, gone to fancy schools and programs and has been lucky enough to have a family much cooler than she is. People tend to come to her for advice about money and the relationships that come along with it: bosses, employees, investors, stakeholders, public officials and people who just have opinions.