Guytron - thanks - I guess I’m trying to imagine I’m a kid writing a school essay - often given a word count to achieve with a margin of error of perhaps 10%. Or a Uni essay. This after all is what seems to be terrifying the education world at the moment! But when it comes down to it, given that there’s no simple way to control word count, or no reliable way, I’m getting the feeling that academia need not worry too much. Of course if you really know what you are doing you could get ChatGPT to write an essay summary first, then get it to add detail to each item in the summary one by one, then manually edit for length (and accuracy!), and combine using WP software. But some students would probably decide it was easier to write the essay themselves - which might be a good thing.
ruby_coder - thanks - I guess I’m expecting too much too soon. I read a piece online about how ChatGPT generates texts of various sizes taking stuff into consideration which actually went over my head (not hard to achieve) and I can see this is way more complicated than I realise. I think I’m encountering the gap between the online / news media hype, and the current reality (which none the less impresses me hugely).