I'd say the difference is that game AI (chess AI here) is competitive. Its goal is to defeat an opponent in a zero-sum game, it has no other use, except maybe indirectly if techniques developed while making the engine have applications elsewhere.<p>ChatGPT is different. It can be used to compete against humans in a game, for example by writing an essay for you and try for the best score. Grading is a form of competition. And sure enough, it is "unsporting" to use ChatGPT.<p>But not all writing is a competition. In fact most of it isn't. For example let's say you are using ChatGPT to translate text, one of the things it is good at. You are not trying to compete against a human translator in a translation competition. You are just trying to understand some text, and you probably don't have the time and money to hire a professional translator, and the alternative would have been to just not do anything with the original text. You didn't beat a human, you did something you couldn't do before, a net positive outcome (or maybe net negative if the translation is misleading, but certainly not zero sum).<p>Same thing if, say, you are getting help from ChatGPT writing technical documentation in decent English, because you are a tech guy and not a good English writer. Same thing here, you can't afford a professional writer and editor, you are not trying to write a best-seller book, so without ChatGPT, you would have just written the documentation using your poor English, which may have harmed the comprehension of the people reading it. Again, a net positive.<p>There is AI vs human competition, and some people may rightfully or not think their job is going to be replaced by a machine, but it is only a small part of the story. Think about what (good and bad) things simply can't exist without ChatGPT in the absolute sense rather than "who is better".<p>Chess engines will make you play better chess, but what's the point? In the end, there is a winner and a loser, and no matter how high the level is, it will always be the case, you can't have two winners. That's what we have some arbitrary rules like "no engines" when people play against each other, because the absolute level of chess playing means nothing, the only thing that matters is what happens between the two players, it is zero sum.