Moments before I finished typing up my experience of having an artificial intelligence (AI) generate a hundred portraits of me, an e-mail arrived in my inbox: I was allowed early access to a text editor with an integrated AI for writing. I played around with it and soon found, with amazement, that the software was more or less able to write my blog posts just based on the title and first paragraph. I wanted to share this here… but then things came thick and fast.
ChatGPT was released and immediately overshadowed the results of my little experiment. It’s
a chatbot based on the language-generating artificial intelligence GPT-3.
It works like this: In a chat interface in your browser, you enter a text prompt and the algorithm will generate a text based on it. This could be something you want it to write, like a blog post, a story, a poem or a song lyric. ChatGPT can also summarise a text and answer questions about it. Or you can just have a good old conversation with it (but you can tell it what to be – for example, a psychotherapist).
I played around with it and scouted the internet, and here are just some of the things it can do:
- Jokes
- Twitter threads
- College-level essays
- Create text-based games
- Sitcom Scripts
- Explain things in various levels of complexity
- Write and fix code
- Take the role of a therapist specialised in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
- Generate story ideas
- Translate text
- Write music in the style of Mozart
(I created a collection of examples and articles about ChatGPT)
They’re going for my passion!
I’m amazed by this technology and think it’s really cool. But I must also admit that it gives me a queasy feeling – because it hits very close to home. See, writing has always been my thing. Of course, I do and have been doing other things in my various jobs, but I see it as my core competency. Give me some information, an idea, or a story and I will produce a text based on it. In that sense, I’m kind of a one-trick pony. And the robots just learned my one trick.
Now, I’m not that worried that AI is taking my job, there are other things to do – I’m more worried about what AI is doing to my passion. My creative soul is a bit hurt. Is the thing I’m good at so easy to replicate that an algorithm can do it? I should probably pick up some new hobbies like woodwork or quilting now to fully restore my sense of human worth.
The question arises: What are the uniquely human skills that I should focus on now?
A glimpse into the future
But enough about me. This hitting so close to home naturally made me think about the bigger implications. As of now, there are some things Chat GPT isn’t (yet) very good at. For example, it is based on data from 2021 or older, so it doesn’t have any information about the world after that. It also generates a lot of inaccurate or plain wrong information (here’s a collection of ChatGPT blunders).
But think about it this way: If that’s what’s out in the public, the cutting-edge stuff AI researchers are working on must be quite ahead of it. So I’m not thinking mainly about what this technology can do – but what it will be able to do in a year, in five years, in ten years. And what the world will look like because of it. Here are some things that were on my mind the last few days:
Journalism and Copywriting
I took an existing news article and tried to have ChatGPT replicate it by just giving it the title and the main thesis of the text. It was about the soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo and if he’s becoming a liability to his team. The AI did pretty well, though it used old information. If ChatGPT would have had real-time access to all the information online and could have immediately used it, it probably would have been able to more or less write the article which took a human several hours. This will be the real game changer.
There are many writers employed by news corporations, organisations and news outlets who do nothing more than remix content that is available online. It seems that most of this will be done by AI very soon – coming to think of it, it’s probably already happening. What humans will need to do mainly is write good prompts and fact-check and edit texts before they are published.
The upside is: We creators will probably be pushed towards being more of our authentically weird selves online since that’s harder for a machine to recreate. That could make content made by humans more interesting.
Education and academia
The essay as a type of homework the way we know it will probably be dead very soon. Kids will be able to paste the assignments into the chat window and get a finished essay within seconds that might not be recognisable as computer generated. I’m curious about what educators will come up with in reaction to this development.
Of course, this technology has many advantages when it comes to studying. For our papers we won’t have to read through long, boring papers and textbooks, we can just have them summarised by the AI and then ask specific questions about things that are relevant to us. This will make dealing with information very efficient. The question is: will we learn as much?
Customer service
This is a bit random, but I had ChatGPT generate a customer service e-mail based on a real-world example, and with a few tweaks to the prompt, it worked well. So I’m thinking quite soon a lot of customer service will be automated. If you integrate the AI into the system, it may draft response e-mails – a human just has to read over them to prevent really bad responses and then hit send.
Now it’s your turn
If this is the first time you hear about this, I have a suggestion for you: Sign up for a free ChatGPT account. Play around with it. Try the ideas you read about here and tweak them. Add your own.
Especially, think about your profession and/or your passions. In what ways could this be useful? In what ways could it change the game? Try it out. Have a glimpse at the future.
Let me know in the comments or via e-mail how it went.
(Disclaimer: An AI did not write this post)