Reality can regenerate in the blink of an eye or at the stroke of a pen. The year 2025 has already shown us that the Dow Jones can lose 5% of its value in a day, while ChatGPT can write a solid research report on any of the topics in AR in a fraction of the time it takes our volunteer authors and freelancers to pull one together. Sometimes it feels like the only things we can rely on to not change are the profits and losses that workers’ comp and commercial auto yield year after year, respectively. Hence this month’s cover story.
I did not use generative AI at all to write that story. Instead, I relied on Google searching, calling people I trust, reaching out to strangers whom I heard had very interesting viewpoints and throwing in a dash of my own experiences. The adventure took me 25 hours. Then I asked ChatGPT to write the article (including the same tortured metaphor), toying with different prompts for 15 minutes. If you care to see that exchange inclusive of the final article (and me futzing around with the export), here you go:
https://chatgpt.com/share/67f17418-d428-8010-958d-b224e5f36233.
Whose article is better? The two have ample (coincidental) similarities. Some of ChatGPT’s themes such as regulation or interest rates did not come up a lot in my research, while others did, and I focused elsewhere out of preference (medical inflation) or deadline pressure (vehicle telematics). My article is much better (right?), but was it worth the 100 times longer it took me to write from scratch? Actuaries are grappling with questions such as this every day as we reevaluate our value proposition in light of generative AI.
ChatGPT can answer your questions, but it cannot walk a mile in your shoes. It cannot run seven continents or build a temple. It cannot start an insurance company that survives 203 years. It cannot comply with accounting or bias regulation. As far as we know, it cannot fix your commercial auto combined ratio. Neither can AR, but we will always aspire to be a vehicle for what your fellow actuaries think, feel and experience on these fronts. That is who we are, and we believe that from there, no limit exists to what we can accomplish together.
