Techie Tinkering: ChatGP-Me

OK...right off the bat..this is a crushing loss for ChatGPT. I just wanted to be in the matrix! I didn't want to be in the matrix AND look like the lovechild of Rick Astley and Simon Cowell. Good luck sleeping after this, folks.

A brief preview of the post's purpose

Could ChatGPT do a better job of writing for this blog than me?
There's only one way to find out!

On fading into irrelevance

I'm used to feeling past it.

I've accepted that I'll never be a F1 world champion.

The two hour marathon? I think I'm gonna have to leave it for someone else.

Honestly, as I wallow in middle age, I feel too old to do anything noteworthy.

I've now transitioned to living vicariously through my children and hoping that this, in time, will help them to make something of themselves - in the way I never seemed to manage.

So feeling past it, with age, isn't new to me. But feeling past it just because I'm a human, is new and uncomfortable for me....let's face it, ChatGPT is starting to make all us fuddy duddy humans look bad.

I feel like I've been slow to really try and exploit LLMs (although I've tinkered a bit in the past) - and probably that's because I'm trying to hold on to the hope that as a human I am in some way "special" and can't be effortlessly replaced by a few bits and bytes.

Still - you evolve or die, right?

So I thought I'd have a fiddle and see how ChatGPT might be employed in the pursuit of the most noble cause of all - writing this blog.

Can ChatGPT help with my anxiety?

A lot of these blog entries are a bit silly...and I only do them for fun...but more work and worry goes into them than you might think.

My most recent blog on my treadmill is a good point of reference. Look at the data in the article. It finishes on the 8th of April... And I published it on the 28th of May - about 7 weeks later. What happened in the time between? Writing, rewriting, stressing, fretting, editing, rewriting...

Don't get me wrong, it's not like I sit there for days on end staring at it, trying to get every character 100% correct. But I do want to feel like the stuff I write adds value. I'd like to think it's occasionally entertaining...and I don't want people to tune out because my spelling, punctation and grammar are that bad. So I iterate over and over until I have the mental strength to declare it "good enough" and push to publish.

I feel like I'm on the borderline between "healthy quality control" and "obsessive overthinking".

So I wondered - could chat GPT help? If I asked it to criticise my blog entry, would it give me reassurance that there wasn't, really, that much wrong with it.

I gave it a draft of my blog on why I prefer working from home and invited it to give me feedback. It talked about the structure:

I actually had decent subheadings in, so that didn't worry me a lot. Do I think the introduction and conclusions could be better? Maybe... but I didn't feel like "oh wow, I've got to go change that".

Then it talked about my tone of voice:

Honestly, I am good with this. I quite deliberately swing from sounding almost professional to sounding pretty daft. And I like that I ramble on...I think it's consistent with my general "dad energy".

You know what? Yes, this helped. ChatGPT didn't call me out on anything horrible...so I felt like my blog was probably OK.

I could get my wife to read through to get the same warm fuzzy feeling, but she's busy and ChatGPT did this instantly. So I think I'll ask for feedback again in future when I want reassurance.

On the back of my request, though, ChatGPT presented me with another question that made me wonder:

Would you like me to revise and rewrite a version of the post with these improvements included?

Should ChatGPT rewrite my work for me?

I mean, I was interested to see what it would do. I won't bore you with the whole thing, but it was...good! It turned my rambling into something that felt much more like other blogs. It took my gentle meandering logic and replaced it with punchier, more direct, prose.

A couple of examples:

"Enough said." - ChatGPT is well 'ard.

"Organic rhythm of in-person collaboration" - that's how a smart person would say what I was waffling on about!!

I don't think I could fault the work ChatGPT did on my article... and, honestly, if I were compiling content for A N Other website or blog, I'd use it. But I just couldn't get over the sense that it didn't sound like me. And seeing as most of the point of this blog is to "put myself out there" I kinda feel that not sounding like myself is defeating the point a little. And, of course, I must always think of you, my fans, and your high expectations whenever a blog "drops".

But what if ChatGPT could sound like me?

I figured that basically I'm just like a normal person...but a bit nerdier. So I told chatgpt to fold that in:

Make the above sound slightly more nerdy

...and, wow, did ChatGPT deliver...

The LAN simile is one of the most touching things I've every read.

RSS feeds, of course, being on the bleeding edge of modern comms.

I agree. Priceless.

Slightly more nerdy I said, ChatGPT....slightly.

No, no, abort, abort...don't like it. It's doing me wrong.

Here ended my experiment into making ChatGPT sound like me. You guys deserve the best...the real deal...prime, 100% original Ashwin.

One more question... Should ChatGPT write my blog for me?

So, we had limited success in having ChatGPT rewrite my work...but I wondered "what if it just wrote it in the first place?"

If I hadn't invested time in writing the thing already, I could live with the slightly bland tone of the output... I could just use it as a leg-up...start from there, then drizzle some Jamesy magic over the top.

The fundamental problem with this, of course, is figuring out how to tell it what to write... but I have a fix for that.

One of the reasons I do this blog is just to keep my little creative brain ticking over...to think about different things, mess around with stuff, experiment with ideas etc. This is important to me, not just because it's sort of who I am... but also because it's sort of my job.

Part of my role is encouraging other people to innovate, to try new things, to mess around and have fun...and to present stuff. As such, as well as these blog entries, I also have a bunch of slide decks... so that if we have a gap on the schedule for a lunch n learn, or I go to a meetup and there's lightning talks, or I just want something to break the ice with a new team or teammate... I can whip out a slide deck of the beautiful pancake art I've done over the years...or the things I've 3D printed or...I can give them a bit of information about my new treadmill. eg:

Example slide. They're not things of beauty.. I tend to keep them pretty "text only" so that I can chuck the content into whatever template deck is befitting of the occasion...

And that's when it hit me...these decks contain the information I want to share... I just want it written out in slightly longer form.

So, I gave ChatGPT the slide deck about the treadmill and asked it to write me a blog post based on it.

(I should note, I only thought to do this after I published my article about the treadmill.)

And what it put together, I reckon, is worth sharing in its entirety:

Walking the Talk: Why I Became the "Treadmill Guy" at Work

By James Ashwin | May 25

You know that guy. The one slowly pacing on a treadmill during your Zoom call, bobbing ever so slightly while discussing quarterly goals. Yep—that’s me now.

Let’s Start With a Disclaimer

Before you jump to conclusions, no, this isn’t a well-researched health transformation story backed by meticulous data and glowing before-and-after photos. In fact, let’s be clear: my science isn’t sciencing. Between finishing a home renovation, a carb-loaded trip to Italy, and an equally indulgent return home, this journey was never going to be about dramatic weight loss. My original hypothesis? Nonsense.

Why I Did This

Like many of us, I sit. A lot. My exercise happens in short bursts—walk the dog, go for a run, maybe a gym session. But in between? It’s sedentary city.

I’ve always liked standing, but standing still is weirdly hard. That’s when I thought: Wouldn’t it be better to just move a little throughout the day? Enter the treadmill desk.

Oh, and maybe I’d get super-thin. (Spoiler: I didn’t.)

Why Now?

Several reasons collided at once:

I moved into a new office with space for both a sit/stand setup and a treadmill.
I’m winding down my company.
And honestly… I’m not getting any younger.

It felt like the right moment to experiment.

What Does It Look Like?

Picture a regular Zoom call. Now picture it with a slight swaying motion and a quiet hum in the background. That’s me.

How It’s Going (Quantitatively)

I wish I could give you hard stats. But my treadmill’s software is, well… pants. It requires a mobile app to record walks (not the handy remote it came with), walks sometimes stop randomly, and there’s no way to export the data. Some sessions get saved twice, others not at all. It’s chaos.

How It’s Going (Qualitatively)

Now this, I can tell you:

I’ve kept up with it—only missed a couple of days.
It’s gentle movement, not a workout, but it feels good.
It helps me stay focused in meetings.
It’s totally doable for typing and using a mouse.
Faster walking makes it harder to do anything else—but that’s probably expected.
People do raise eyebrows at first, but then they stop caring.

Being "the treadmill guy" can feel a bit odd. But I don’t mind. It’s become part of my new normal.

The Gear

I’m using the WalkingPad Z1. It’s:

A reasonably priced, well-reviewed treadmill.
Suitable for heavier users (like me).
Sturdy and not too noisy.

Sure, it’s a bit heavy and the app is frustrating, but it gets the job done.

What’s Next?

I’m not obsessing over how far I’ve walked anymore. My main goal now is to normalize this whole “walking in meetings” thing.

That said, I would love a better way to track the data—so maybe that’s a side project in the making. I’ll report back if it turns into anything.

Also… I should probably start wearing shoes.

TL;DR: Walking while working isn’t revolutionary, but it is remarkably effective in combating the daily desk slog. I’m not trying to break step records or drop five stone—I’m just trying to move more. And honestly? It’s going pretty well.

Pretty good, eh?

Honestly, I'm shocked my how much I like this. There's a couple of structural errors - it's not presented the pros and cons of the treadmill in the way I'd have expected...and it seems just to have ignored the photos in the deck... but they'd be relatively quick things to straighten out.

And I like the tone. It's quite succinct and lightweight. It feels like the kind of thing people would actually read.

(I know that my writing's not always the easiest to follow...and a good DJ plays what the audience wants to hear...not what they want to play!)

I also feel like I don't have to worry about simple things with this output. As I obsessively re-read this blog post, I find that I don't need to worry about the spelling in the ChatGPT response...it has that side of things pretty well nailed down.

So maybe. Maybe I should have ChatGPT write my blog entries. I can't say much more than that for now, I don't have a definitive answer for what that means, or feels like, but the fact I'm thinking about it is fascinating in itself, I think.

One step beyond

ChatGPT is always keen to help - and it asked me whether I'd like to format the article for LinkedIn.

I thought I'd give it a go.

It wasn't great. It added a bunch of emojis and made everything aggressively succinct. Not for me.

It did suggest a list of hashtags I should use, though, which could actually be pretty helpful in future.

It also suggested the kinds of photos I should use and nice captions - even if they lack the acerbic wit I'm famous for.

...and it even offered to generate the pictures for me... like this chap:

Oh yeah, that's the good stuff. It will be so easy to photoshop my head into this picture!

So, yeah, I might use a couple of these features going forward, too.

Conclusion

These were a pretty quick couple of experiments...and it's already given me a lot to think about. It seems clear that there's opportunity for ChatGPT (other brands are available) to improve my workflow around this blog....but quite how I do that, whilst retaining the authenticity that (all joking aside) is pretty important to me - still TBD.

As always, huge thanks to anyone that's read this far. Spartans, the lot of you!