I couldn’t sign a PDF. I don’t know why I couldn’t sign it. I could sign other PDFs, just not this one. I finally joined a Teams call with an IT technician. He took control of my computer and checked and rechecked settings. Everything looked like it was set up properly. He couldn’t figure it out either. Ultimately, he told me to have the author of the document rebuild the PDF to see if a new version would work.

After we hung up, I received two emails. The first was the auto-generated email to say the tech had closed the trouble ticket.

The second email was from the technician. In it, he offered some amplifying information about the Adobe error. The text began with a quotation of the error messages I had received. Beneath that, in a bulleted and sub-bulleted list, were five steps I might consider taking to resolve the issue. I tried them. They didn’t work.

I had a hunch about what was happening, but I wasn’t sure yet. I have an officemate who uses generative AI tools more often (and more creatively) than I do. I called him over. “Would you take a look at this text? What do you think?”

He looked for about 30 seconds; first studying the substance to try to understand the error. But then he managed to look past the function to see the form and it hit him. “Oh. This is ChatGPT,” he said.

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