Wednesday, February 08, 2023

The Race Is On

 The battle lines are drawn for the biggest technology arms race in eons. It’s over artificial intelligence (AI), of course. Microsoft has invested in ChatGPT. Google has unveiled Bard.

The Guardian breaks down what these technologies do in fairly simple terms:

“These are types of neural networks, which mimic the underlying architecture of the brain in computer form. They are fed vast amounts of text from the internet in a process that teaches them how to generate responses to text-based prompts. This enables ChatGPT to produce credible-sounding responses to queries about composing couplets, writing job applications or, in probably the biggest panic it has created so far, academic work.”

Fidelity reports that “Silicon Valley is anticipating massive change from so-called generative AI, technology that can create prose or other content on command and free up white-collar workers' time.”

So is generative AI going to simply make work more efficient in ways that actually help workers or is it going to lead to more of the widespread layoffs currently sweeping the tech industry?

Maybe both.

Bt as Axios notes via an expert: “Trying to compete on efficiency with robots never works, they always win.”

So there will certainly be job losses due to robotics, including in the media space. The role humans play in generating boiler-plate type content, for example, is definitely ending.

Good riddance to that.

As for more sophisticated content creation — that requires sentient beings, and as much as enthusiasts and pessimists predict AI developing such capacity eventually, I don’t that happening anytime soon.

I’ve tested ChatGPT and competitors multiple times and the original essays they generate, while adequate in terms of language usage, utterly lack any of the qualities I looked for from my hundreds of writing students at Stanford, U-C, Berkeley or SF State.

Human beings notice things robots don’t — they have an eye for telling details, they can sense when someone is lying, and they can use words to invoke a wide range of emotions.

Robots can do none of those things. They can’t make us cry.

In fact I haven’t seen a single robot-generated text that would receive better than a “C” in one of my classes…even though I was a notoriously easy grader. 

But although I am contending that the chatbots cannot produce great writing, that does not mean they won’t create some extremely effective pieces that have impacts.

That’s because unfortunately I fear they’ll be used to intensify the waves of disinformation and conspiracy theories already polluting our atmosphere like errant nuclear bombs

And when it comes to the integrity of our political system, the damage they cause may prove to be just as severe…

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