Amidst all the concerns surrounding machine learning and how artificial intelligence may impact society, one sailor appears to have found a real-world use for harnessing the polarizing tech.
Posting on Navy Reddit last month, one user — known simply as Senor_Rico — claiming to be a sailor reported that he had tamed the wild and unruly AI beast by using ChatGPT to generate his annual performance evaluation.
Completing such documents, also known as an enlisted evaluation report or “brag sheet,” can consume a sailor’s precious time while a swarm of daily tasks continue to mount.
But Senor_Rico claims the ChatGPT application will allow sailors to “feed it a brag sheet” and watch a fresh, automated eval roll off the cyber line, sparkling and ready to submit.
It took two weeks to train ChatGPT to write a brag sheet, Senior_Rico wrote, adding that the AI was first fed older evaluations in order to learn.
Once up to speed, the program, according to the purported sailor, “will turn your brag sheet into a full eval write-up.”
“This is great,” one Reddit user wrote in response. “I’ll be referring my homies to this.”
ChatGPT was developed by homies at the company OpenAI, an organization later acquired by homies at Microsoft.
The software allows users to feed questions or information to a chat bot and receive a polished report in return.
By February 2023, ChatGPT set the record for having the fastest growing user base, according to a study by UBS, a financial services group.
Some Navy Reddit commenters, meanwhile, expressed concern that using such a tool could threaten other sailors’ security clearances.
“Would not recommend for those that hold clearances or do cleared work,” thinklikeacriminal wrote. “You are gonna f--- up and out the wrong s--- in there.”
“Well yeah, don’t feed it a classified brag sheet,” Senor_Rico replied.
Another Redditor aired beef not with AI, but with evals altogether.
“Writing evals is stupid since it’s a popularity contest anyway,” Leading-Show8764 said.
Zamone “Z” Perez is a reporter at Military Times. He previously worked at Foreign Policy and Ufahamu Africa. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he researched international ethics and atrocity prevention in his thesis. He can be found on Twitter @zamoneperez.
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