Everyone is talking about ChatGPT. Japan is even talking about it! I've caught mention of it on the news a few times and one of my teaching friends tells me that high schools are going to add a class to teach kids how to deal with this coming AI.
A few months ago I chatted with the bot about Japanese history, mythology, and literature, haiku, a little bits of philosophy, enka, and cheesecake. The results were interesting. The bot made a lot of mistakes but was overall impressive. I tried a similar chat a few days ago and the results were much much better. Also, it can talk in Japanese now (and in Chinese too, according to @ace108) Clearly they have been making a lot of improvements over this beta release.
Anyway, this won't be another post showing off my conversation with the bot. I already did that and a great many others on Hive are doing the same. I want to instead think about what AI means for our global society and where we are headed from here. If that sounds fun to you, read on!
A few days ago @riverflows put up a great post musing over some of these ideas. Her post made me think a lot. @trumpman has also thrown up several, including this one where he suggested that this technology is moving so quickly that by the end of this year we are going to see huge changes to our world. Big talk, but I think he's right on the money.
It's sometimes hard for us to see change that is happening. Day to day things look much the same and our memories of the past make us biased towards thinking that things will stay basically the same all our lives. Sure small things change. A dial phone changes to touch-tone and to a touch screen. But it seems like science fiction to think bigger things are going to change. And that's just it: science fiction. I think in many ways we have become cynical to these big dreams and we dismiss them as science fiction—or "unrealistic" in other words. At least pop culture has and it's hard for most of us not to be influenced by what pop culture thinks.
Image by Ralph from Pixabay
Many of us can remember life before the internet. That was a huge change and one that is far from over, but somehow that doesn't feel like such a big deal. Maybe in part because that was a very gradual change and remains a gradual change.
All this is to say, so we look at this new chat bot, ChatGPT, and we fail to see how this marks the beginning of a extreme and radical change in our lives, our society, and our world.
We can already see some of the effects the bot is having. High school and university students are using it to write their papers, and it's doing a good enough job that teachers and schools are panicking. A lot of Hive users have started using it to write most or all of their posts. Some users have admitted this, but odds are pretty good there are a great many more who aren't admitting it. Even professional publications have expressed worry that they may (and already are) see many more article submissions that were written by AI.
Many have expressed that this is just a temporary problem and not the beginning of a huge change. We just need to develop AI detection software. The ChatAI people have even released a program to detect when something is written by their own bot, tho they admit it's accuracy is not good.
Well... it's not a temporary problem and this is an arms race that we can't win. Not only will AI's ability to write keep increasing exponentially but it won't be long before we can train AI on our own writing so that it mimics our writing voice. Take me as an example. I have been writing on Hive daily for 5.5 years, and on the internet for over 25 (since 1996). That's a lot of my writing the AI could suck in to learn my style. Not only that, but it could probably analyze how my writing has changed in that time and could accurately predict how it might continue to evolve. After this there will be no way to tell if I wrote a thing or an AI bot trained on my writing wrote it.
Image by 0fjd125gk87 from Pixabay
Schools are going to have to completely change. With AI there will be no way to accurately assign homework. Anyone who wants to cheat will be able to cheat and cheat perfectly without detection being possible. Should schools just ignore this and say the common refrain, that the ones who really want to learn will study and not cheat? That might be true (to a point) but is it a good answer?
ChatGPT is going to become locked behind a paywall soon enough, so that will give schools more breathing room, but ChatGPT is just the first. Many more are coming and some of them will be free. As the old cliché goes: The cat's out of the bag.
But it's not just text that's a problem...
AI Perfected Deepfake
I'm sure you all know what Deepfake is. If not: briefly, it is a technology that let's us make someone's face and/or body look like a different person's in video. SO far it is interesting but imperfect and can be detected because of these imperfections.
There is a similar technology that can also replace someone's voice with another's, tho I don't know the name of this tech offhand.
Already many with a forward-look are panicking about this technology. And we might understand why: once perfected, we will no longer be able to trust video. You can imagine the chaos this could cause. Just within politics, imagine each side using this tech to show people on the other side doing horrible horrible things.
But the tech is imperfect, right? So no problem. We just keep improving the Deepfake detection software faster than Deepfake itself improves. Again, the arms race.
Enter AI. Just like with text, I think this ends the arms race immediately. AI will be able to make deepfake so perfect that nothing we develop will have any chance of detecting it.
How will we deal with this as a society?
Doctors and Lawyers
I asked @markymark his opinion on ChatCPT in his recent AMA. He pointed out a curious recent case where a company was trying to develop an AI lawyer that could argue against tickets in court. A bunch of lawyers banded together to get this stopped. But I think it's safe to say many other companies are probably developing similar ideas. Can lawyers get them all stopped?
One can imagine how much AI might change the law profession.
(Photo by Alex Knight)[https://www.pexels.com/photo/high-angle-photo-of-robot-2599244/]
One we might agree will be vastly improved for all of us is the medical field. What are the two main problems with doctors? One, there aren't enough of them so we wait forever to see one only to have them rush thru the visit as quickly as possible so they can get on to the next patient, barely giving us ten minutes of their time. Two: Their experience and knowledge is limited. Even the smartest and most experienced doctors in the world have a limited knowledge of every single symptom and every single possible drug to treat said symptom and every single possible drug interaction and every single possible drug side-effect. AI can and will fix both of these things. All it will take is a nurse who knows how to interact with the AI and that takes of the time problem. And the knowledge problem? AI will have access to all the world knowledge on illnesses, symptoms, drugs, etc, and it will be able to search this database of knowledge in seconds.
For awhile doctors will still be needed for more complex problems, but for minor stuff? AI will completely replace them there.
The Coming of Job Crisis
I know some people don't like CGP Grey. He comes off as very arrogant (people say he's even worse in person) and he evidently doesn't fact-check the info for his videos very well making people from every profession he's made a video about very angry at him.
That said, I think the ideas he gives in this video are spot on. AI is going to replace every job eventually. That is the revolution that's coming. It's not that AI will kill us à la The Terminator nor that it will make the perfect robot à la Star Trek's Data. It's that it is going to replace us.
Now what will be the results of this? Will those who control society allow us to not work even if there are no jobs? Will they have the power and ability to prevent it? Will this lead to a more balanced society where we all are provided with everything we need and have the free time to follow our own interests (the Star Trek future)?
Whatever the case may be, it is coming faster and faster. @Trumpman is right— we are already going to see major changes before the year is out. We aren't quite at what that video talks about yet, but we are getting closer and closer. ChatGPT is just the first hint of what is to come.
What do you think? Am I jumping the gun on predicting all this? Let me know in the comments.
(title graphic by Tara Winstead: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-reaching-out-to-a-robot-8386434/, text added by me in PS)
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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. |
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