ChatGPT And Its Place In Our World
ChatGPT And Its Place In Our World
A web developer's thoughts on A.I.
The tech world is all abuzz here lately. The topic sends science fiction fans into excitement and conspiracy theorists into their bunkers.
A.I. Or Artificial Intelligence.
The most important news has centered around Openai.org and its work. The first big attention release was DALL-E which was released for public testing mid 2021. DALL-E allows the user to enter text prompts, and the A.I. returns images based on your text prompt. Some were good, some were terrible, but it wasn’t the images that mattered. It was the amazement of asking DALL-E to give you “trail cam footage of Gollum eating watermelon” and getting what you requested!
Fast forward to November 30, 2022, and OpenAI announces ChatGPT. An A.I. chatbot you could interact with. Ask it to fix your code. Chat about history. The possibilities were endless. The internet went to work.
ChatGPT opened a new world of online content. Soon, bloggers were using it to make articles, developers were using it to create code, and copywriters were creating SEO content with it. I’ve used it for a quick blog article for some starter content. The article was okay, but more on that later. The point is, ChatGPT took off.
Since then, more and more A.I. products and services are popping up using other models and machine learning protocols. The space is wild, and I can’t wait to see where it goes.
I have some thoughts on what is happening, but before I do, I want to discuss the tech itself.
What is it?
Let’s get this right out the door. This isn’t “intelligence” in the classic use of the term. Movies and media have always depicted artificial intelligence as human-like in its thinking. There is nothing conscious about ChatGPT, and the marketing department most likely drummed up the term A.I.
ChatGPT is a language modal. If you want details on how a language model is trained, here is a cool video. If I were to boil it all down to two words, the technology behind ChatGPT is simply pattern recognition with a special interest in language.
Now, I am not downplaying this technology. What OpenAI is doing is revolutionary and will change our world (more later). Still, if you think about what ChatGPT is doing, it is taking a large sample of data, processing and analyzing it for patterns, and then repeating it. Things we as humans attempt and do and fail at every day. The only difference is a computer is doing it, and computers can process and analyze a lot faster than us. What takes humans decades to master through repetition and hard work, a computer can master in seconds from reading it once.
So if you’re worried about robots taking over and turning us into batteries, keep waiting. However, that is not to say this can’t be a problem. A person doesn’t need to be “intelligent” to do damage.
My thoughts.
I am a rose-colored glasses or world-is-ending type of guy. I am a realist, and the A.I. issue is a complicated one, and it will impact our world in complicated ways. So I will give some positive and negative impacts that can come with A.I. in the future. But before that, let’s talk about what ChatGPT, DALL-E, and all other AIs are.
Its a tool.
First, if you do any creative art professionally or habitually, you should us A.I.
I love to write. Fiction. Non-fiction. Short form. Long-form. I enjoy it. When I first heard about ChatGPT’s ability to crank out a novel or technical paper, I had mixed emotions about a computer doing something I must work at, but then I tried it.
I spent some time with it, and asked it to write me tech article for my website. Nothing the bot wrote was spectacular. It had grammar errors and odd sentence structures, but it was okay. But then I realized I had the beginnings of an article I would be happy to publish or deliver to a client. Not the final product that would need some work. ChatGPT had just brainstormed and written a first draft for me.
The blank page can be very intimidating for an artist. Artists or musicians are using Midjourney.com or Soundraw.io for inspiration. Coders are using it to make boilerplate code as a starting point. Influencers are using it for idea generation and content creation.
Its a just a tool that can be used in many ways. And ultimately, a tool is only as useful as the craftsman holding it.
What it can do now is very impressive. OpenAI has made many technological advancements, and its just version 3.5! What will version 4 achieve?
This is a big discovery.
Onto the positives! The major upside is utopian. If we can teach machines something as complex as language, imagine the other things, we could teach computers to do. A.I. isn’t doing complex stuff, but could humanity reach a new level if computers were trained to care for the mundane and repetitive? For some, but I fear for the others.
Mundane and repetitive builds foundations.
Asking for a starting point for a WordPress plugin or having A.I. build a starting point for a tech article is helpful for an expert coder and the hobbyist writer. Still, I have the foundation to do those things without A.I. I fear the upcoming talent and students using A.I. to complete assignments and write term papers. We need to include the foundation that comes with actually putting in the work.
I fear services like A.I. that are supposed to make our lives easier end up handicapping our future. Life needs a struggle into order to feel real. You can already see young people coming up today with little care, dealing with high rates of depression and suicide. I am sure there are many reasons for this rise. How much is due to technology or some other issue? We may never know for sure.
Conclusion.
Ultimately, I am not worried about A.I. Kids will try to cheat. Teachers will adapt. The tech will be developed that sniffs out AI-generated content. And the wheel keeps turning.
A.I. could bring anew way of humans to toil, but is that a good thing? Does human existence have meaning without some goal or struggle? It does if you can find that true meaning. That thing we all struggle to find.
God.