Let’s chat, or not.
My partner is an academic who has very little experience of technology; plugging in her 5 year-old mobile phone is about as hands-on as it gets. When I showed her the brouhaha brewing around ChatGPT, it was initially met with a blank response. The technology adoption curve rings true.
AI has been touted to have its day in the sun since 2016 but has never really lived up to the hype, primarily due to poor implementation of machine learning never mind the chatbot widgets on the lower right of websites. This time though, something feels different - someone high up in tech PR land decided to light a match under AI which has ignited the ChatGPT fireworks. Everywhere I look, ChatGPT gurus are popping up, showing me how to use it properly.
Yes, I know I need to use personas.
Funnily enough, a lot of those folks used to be Web3 enthusiasts and before that they showed me how to use Instagram to grow my fanbase. But that is all an aside to the fact that your common technology enthusiast is stuck between wringing their hands at the potential loss of jobs and jumping for joy at the potential for eradicating repetitive work. There is no doubt that ChatGPT and its sexier Generative AI colleague Midjourney have provided much fodder for debate; often pitting the technology against human psycho-social notions of finding meaning in life through work. Whilst those rage on we are guilt of missing the wood from the trees:
ChatGPT is still very much ai - not AGI.
It’s not sentient. It cannot collaborate with you. It cannot anticipate what you are going to ask it next. It cannot strategise. In some cases, in cannot even see when it’s wrong. The feeling in academia sums it up nicely:
Even when we consider that ChatGPT3 has a fairly minute amount of data that it learned from (175bn parameters) compared to 4 (170tn parameters) it still doesn’t cover distinctly human aspects like inference, reasoning and intuition. Knowledge workers with years of training and experience cannot simply be wiped out overnight.
So should we be losing sleep? I’m not, yet. If we were to find reason though, it would be in the ethical minefield that the adoption of this technology presents. Just because we can use the technology, doesn’t necessarily mean we should. As with any shiny new thing that comes out, let’s make sure we know where the safety is before we randomly wave it around.
