What’s a Thousand Times Better Than ChatGPT? You Are
ChatGPT has been the hottest news in town, the New York Times calls it “quite simply, the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public”, and we can’t go anywhere without hearing it mentioned.
But there’s something better, and it’s been around for a while, and that something is you. We tend to lose sight of our significance in the mundane routine of our lives. We don’t see anything special in the reflection looking back at us each morning, but we are amazing. Yes, we’re all made of dust and divinity, and that’s part of the irony. We may feel like crap some days, but we are still as beautiful as a sunset and as breathtaking as a Milky Way-filled night sky. Neither ChatGPT nor any new AI on the horizon can come close to matching us. Here’s a quick list of a few reasons why.
Creativity
Sure, you’re not trained on 570 gigabytes of text with 175 billion parameters. No one is breaking down the doors to invest 10 billion dollars in your development. You don’t have a billion bits of information at your fingertips or in your head. Nonetheless, you’re lightyears ahead in terms of creativity. The reason is that ChatGPT is pre-trained on examples we’ve generated to guess the best response to a question. It relies on content that was first created by us, and it also relies on our questions as a prompt. For us, creativity is in our DNA. We are alone among the species on earth to create art, music, poetry, and stories. We’ve been doing it since the moment we first walked the earth. Without any prompting. And if you erased everything that’s ever been created in the history of man, we could create more. The well will never dries up.
Free Will
This is an obvious but important point. AIs are very limited in the choices they make — in fact, they can make zero conscious choices. Everything it does is reliant on programming and positive reinforcement input in order to guide its responses. In contrast, we don’t function through programming, and we don’t need a prompt to move us to action. Except maybe on Saturday mornings or laundry days. We can freely navigate the course of our lives and venture outside of our comfort zone if we choose to.
Free will may seem very philosophical and unimportant, but without free will, it’s impossible to give or receive the one thing we can’t live without: love. If you were able to program a human-like companion to say “I love you” every morning, how meaningful would that be? Since it’s programmed to do exactly what you want it to do, it’s basically just you telling yourself you love yourself. For love to be real and meaningful, you need to relate to someone with free choices. Even a pet will be a hundred times better than AI in this department.
Emotions
Closely related to the previous point. AIs can’t be moved by music or poetry or art — even if it’s able to create it. It can’t get sad, laugh, cry, or feel empathy. It wouldn’t make any difference if there was a blizzard outside or a tropical paradise. ChatGPT will continue to do what it does day in and day out without any feelings involved. On the positive side, it probably would be very good at day trading.
Intelligence
AI is developing to the point that it’s able to provide very coherent and intelligent responses, and we fantasize that one day we could build something like a Samantha, an advanced AI operating system, in the movie Her (it’s a good movie and worth watching if you haven’t seen it). We’re fooled into thinking that it’s real intelligence, but forget that it’s artificial, simulating real thought.
Something interesting in movies like Her and Ex Machina is the characters’ intrigue with the AI, not unlike our own interest in the AI of the day. The human characters are drawn into a relationship with the AIs corresponding to a need they have in themselves. Maybe this speaks more to our loneliness as we retreat more and more into a virtual world and have found ourselves less able to make friends or build relationships with people in the real world. But … that’s a discussion for a different post. Good night.
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