I've been around long enough to remember what MFAs are. I bet many of you weren't, so here's a brief intro.
Back when Google launched AdSense, there was a huge race to get the algorithm, to understand how AdSense pays you. It didn't take long to understand that the ads were served based on keywords. If you wanted ads about cars, you should have keywords related to cars in your posts. Easy, right?
So, within weeks, people created automated tools to fill meaningless blog posts with meaningless words, no sentences whatsoever, just bulk words related to specific topics. Something like:
car, driving, driver, steering wheel...
That was it. Hundreds of posts with no meaning, sprinkled into meaningless websites every single day. For a while, AdSense paid. Eventually, it learned how to deal with this type of content, and these so-called blogs were penalized. That's when a name was also invented for them: MFAs - Made For AdSense.
Fast forward 20 years and you get ChatGPT. There's a rush of content creators towards this new shiny tool, because, well, it could drastically simplify our work. There are tons of Twitter threads on how to use ChatGPT for content creation, for generating articles, even for journaling.
And that's where the MFA reference comes in handy. ChatGPT is just a glorified MFA. It's just tons of gibberish, put together in a seemingly coherent way by thousands of hours of back-propagation, on models with trillions of parameters.
But just like MFA, there's no life behind it. There's no conscious process that created that article, People get so easily fooled by the "intelligence" word in the "artificial intelligence" description of ChatGPT. If you just take a few hours to learn how "AI" works, you will understand there's nothing intelligent about it. Absolutely nothing. Just billions of permutations on words until the output has a certain level of correctness, of plausability.
If you would get up of you chair right now, take that cup of coffee off of your desk, walk towards the window of your room and just look around for 2 minutes, while sipping your coffee - and then describe just this tiny little sequence of actions, well, there will be more life, more authenticity, more value in your writing than in all ChatGPT output ever,