ChatGPT and the Falling Sky
As a writer, the recent addition of a conversation-based text interface to a popular AI has writers and content creators running around proclaiming the sky is falling. As is true with most sky-falling panics, this one isn’t as bad as they are making it out to sound.
AI and ChatGPT will change the world, but the sky is not falling.
What Is ChatGPT?
Data, science, and programmers have set different bars along the way for what they think constitutes artificial intelligence. OpenAI is a non-profit organization set up to create and distribute data models that mimic artificial intelligence. GPT-3 is the current dataset they are using.
You may remember an earlier offering of theirs called Dall-E which is a data set trained to produce images from a text prompt. Dall-E is a little clunky to work with if you aren’t experienced with some basic concepts, so they mad it easier to use and called it Craiyon and people have been using it ever since.
ChatGPT is the easier interface created to give access to AI models that already existed. There are some upgrades of course. This is what it looked like before they laid ChatGPT over the top.
ChatGPT offers more than a simplified interface. It offers the ability for your session to continue with the model AI remembering and interacting with previous inputs. The idea is that with enough time and skill, you could get ChatGPT or some other model to write exactly what you want. Almost like a human writer :)
Will ChatGPT and AI Change Everything?
Of course, advancements like ChatGPT will change things, but it probably won’t be as bad, or nearly as fast, as you think. Depending upon how old you are, you might remember some of these greatest hits:
- Fast internet connections with powerful home computers will change investing and finance
- Very true
- Free trades
- Build your own portfolio
- Roboadvisors
- FinTech
- Computerized (program) trading
- Still an awful lot of humans working in investing and finance
- Financial Advisors
- Hedge Funds
- Family Offices
- Brokers - Digital Cameras and Online Repositories will eliminate professional photography
- Took a while for digital cameras to be same as film quality
- Stock photo libraries accessible anywhere changed the industry from one where only those with connections could sell stock photos to a more democratic one, with resulting price decreases - Amazon and a bunch of other internet companies circa 1999 will make brick and mortar stores obsolete
- Pets.com is the poster boy story for this belief. Maybe they were just too early, if all of the ads on TV for Chewy are any indication.
- Stores like Barnes & Noble that opened online-versions of themselves to take advantage of being “digital” or “online” have rolled that back in. A website is not special. A store with a website isn’t special.
- Jim Cramer who built his name in that internet-to-home investor frenzy no longer is part of the website he started. Instead, he has a show on TV. - News -> I’ve got nothing here. As predicted, news has been decimated, although I wonder how much of that is thanks to a squeeze-every-dollar private equity buying spree.
- Maybe, news’ next act is out there just waiting to be created and optimized - Music and Movies changed in ways no one could have predicted. The models that exist today were fantasies in the 2000s when industry desperately ran campaigns to stop and punish piracy.
- Music is much more democratic now. There are a lot of ways to build your own following and generate income from your music.
- Radio is still both very important and very influential.
- The transition from TikTok song to “real” hit occurs when the radio starts playing the song.
-Movies can be hugely transformative to music in ways I think no one imagined. Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill earned more money in a year than in its entire existence thanks to a part in Stranger Things.
- Movies fought long and hard against VHS Tapes, then writable CDs, and DVDs. These days, only the hardcore, or low funded viewers bother to pirate movies now that studios have released their draconian hold on them. Streaming services make it worthless to pirate Marvel movies, for example.
And so on and so on. Maybe I’ll collect a bunch of these anecdotes and publish them.
Or… since ChatGPT will spell the end of human writers I’ll just ask it.
-> write a summary of news and headlines since the dawn of the internet showing how they changed the industries that they impacted
Since the dawn of the internet, news and headlines have evolved drastically, changing the way people stay informed. In the early days of the internet, news websites began to take off, providing readers with up-to-date information from all over the world. This changed the way people consume news, giving them access to real-time updates at any time of the day. In the early 2000s, social media exploded onto the scene, giving individuals the ability to share news and headlines directly to their followers. This quickly changed the way news was spread, as users could quickly and easily share news stories with people across the globe. As news and headlines continue to evolve, so does the way people interact with them. Now, instant updates and personalized news stories are delivered to readers through apps, allowing people to stay informed in a more efficient and personalized way. The internet has revolutionized the way news and headlines are produced, consumed, and shared, changing the way people stay up to date with what’s happening in the world.
It isn’t wrong, although that isn’t really what I meant. I could spend time refining my inputs, and maybe that is the new skill that will separate AI-writers from basic writers.
Ask any programmer and they will tell you typing out the correct syntax for an IF -> Then statement is not what makes them a great programmer so much as knowing that the IF statement has to be there, how it needs to behave, and what that generates on the other end.
Oh, and being good at using google to find programming solutions that understand and fit.
In fact, if you want to pop out to the techie world, GitHub already has a feature called Copilot that suggests potential code solutions. It doesn’t work all that well yet, but by using it, developers everywhere are training their own replacement model.
AI is here to stay, and it will change the world, but don’t worry about your paycheck just yet. These things take time to play through. After all, its been 40+ years since the Jetsons promised us anthropomorphic maids to clean and manage the house, and all we got was the Roomba.
AI images maybe needs a bit of finesse as well:
- writers running around like the sky is falling
