DIGITAL LIFE

How ChatGPT Could Change Everything

Artificial intelligence and our relentlessly spinning world

I stumbled across a video the other day in which the speaker likened the invention of ChatGPT to the invention of the printing press. At first, the analogy seemed a little extreme. Now, I’m not so sure.

I first began to hear people talk about ChatGPT a couple of weeks ago. The conversations came on the heels of the controversies that surrounded the Lensa AI image creation tool. In 2015, these image-creation programs were in only their most infantile stages. Even just a year ago, they were still something that very few people had heard of.

But within the last few months alone, these tools have grown in popularity so much that people would have been hard-pressed to make it through December without being flooded with the dazzling self-portraits that these programs were creating for people.

Users on Medium have likely encountered these sorts of photos too; Midjourney, Nightcafe, Lensa AI, and the Dream app are only a few of the programs producing them. What had been a brand-new idea only a few years ago has burgeoned rapidly into something that’s become an awe-inspiring tool of creativity and a dire threat to all artists. Enter ChatGPT:

ChatGPT has access to a lifetime’s worth of written text and can produce fluid articles from it within seconds. It can write code. It can collaborate. It can be fed text and do its best to imitate the style it’s given. It can be told to write the final Game of Thrones book in the style of Ernest Hemmingway and produce something passable. That this software will inevitably improve over time is enough to scare many.

But that’s how the story goes. There was probably a time when wheels instilled fear in the minds of “angle enthusiasts.” Few of the innovations that have changed history were met without skepticism. Some of them were met with screams of blasphemy and calls for execution. Maybe I’m just paranoid and this won’t have a meteoric impact on the world of writing. But I’m not so sure. In my lifetime alone, I’ve already felt the earth’s rotation slow to halts a few too many times for my comfort.

“Every generation faces its challenges,” said the people who weren’t born and raised by phones with access to the entirety of known information. “Your grandpa lived through WWII and the Great Depression,” they say, and it reassures me some. But it isn’t the same. Look around us — an ailing climate, smartphones with apps that know us intimately, and artificial intelligence at our fingertips. Although I guess the “Hey Siri” update negated the need for fingers. The Googles and the Alexas have quickly grown to be familiar companions. Pandora’s boxes are piling high in Amazon warehouses.

These problems we’re facing defy comparison. So sometimes it’s comical when people tell me that the smart homes that surround us and the cellphones that addict us and the social media giants that stalk us and the planet that desperately needs us don’t each represent unique challenges.

That it’s these bizarre developments that provide the context to our lives is a privileged burden to bear. We have access to the entire collection of human knowledge in our pockets, we’re the very first people to contend with the idea of artificial intelligence, and we might be the humans to bridge the gap between computers and consciousness. But to get to this place has demanded the eeriest of sacrifices.

To have tools and devices that our ancestors could never have even conceived of is to face challenges that are all our own. We’ve dug holes that weren’t possible without the gargantuan excavators we’ve invented. We’ve opened humanity’s darkest chasms yet.

It’s at pinnacle points where we have the most to lose, but we’ve been charging full speed ahead up this misty mountain of impossible innovation for decades now. The singularities that our most apocalyptic movies have warned us about are at our doorstep but it’s a hazy, hazy dawn and we’d rather lie in bed and scroll through TikTok. The moment at which artificial intelligence transcends human intelligence has been long-feared as the point of no return.

But even as Chatbots begin to mimic history’s most prolific authors and our world’s greatest minds, even as algorithms generate artwork of staggering beauty, the alarm bells are surprisingly silent. The Terminator future was never one that seemed likely to me when I was younger. Lately, though, I’m not so sure. I think we might be spared from the Arnold Schwarzenegger 80’s bliss and suffer just about everything else. The inevitable improvement of our world’s expanding network of Artificial Intelligence might just result in something terrible. (Imagine a non-fictional sentence like that spoken twenty years ago.)

But people in 2003 weren’t quite so desensitized to the prospect of a robot uprising. We like our new iPhones so much that we can turn a blind eye to the realism of the techno-dystopian movies that come out each year. The achievements that have happened in the world of technology within the last few months are impossible to overstate. The improvement of these programs is inevitable and the paradigm shift that it will represent will be colossal.

But just as the synthesizer stoked fear in the minds of musicians only to become another tool in their arsenal of creation, this essay-writing and image-creating software might only heighten our capacity as artists. So far in the conversations I’ve had with ChatGPT, I’ve found more than my fair share of causes for concern. But when I fed the software some of my own work and asked its thoughts on steps forward with my story’s plot, I was floored at its collaborative potential.

Just what these new innovations in computing technology represent now is uncertain, but they’re poised to join the ever-expanding list of technologies that change everything.

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