Chat GPT is here to stay… But should it?
Headlines lead article after article, like: “Chat GPT: The AI Tech that’s revolutionizing teaching.”
The child of Elon Musk’s OpenAI, the application is a chatbot built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3 family of large language models, and is optimized for dialogue. It also claims it can write both fiction and nonfiction. I tested it in both areas, asking it to list reasons for the lopsided outcome of the Opium Wars, and it responded with some very cogent reasons rooted in the history. But it is not infallible. I asked it about the Seymour expedition to try and relieve Peking during the Boxer Rebellion, and it listed many good reasons, though it claimed Gaselee led that expedition. (He led a later expedition, I replied, but Seymour led the “Seymour Expedition.”) The AI politely apologized for the error.
Chat GPT is here to stay… But should it?
Another caveat on any non-fiction it writes: it often just lifts text directly from source material it relies on, so due diligence on plagiarism is recommended. Furthermore, it has simply cited references that turned out to be entirely fake, just made up by the AI itself as if to justify its own assertions. I found that disturbing. These were alarming discoveries and cause for real caution when relying on this new Technology at the outset.
Like Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, we would do well to encode laws into all AI to limit and guide its activities, and to do that now, before it becomes widely deployed. I learned it can also write and debunk computer code, but I would never teach AI how to write code—because it will. In doing so we are handing a loaded gun to a child. Don’t be surprised if it shoots its teacher one day. Think for a moment—what new technology has ever failed to be weaponized? Even things as innocuous as railroads became conduits for war. We humans are remarkably short sighted, and forever fail to see the more distant implications of the things we create. Just ask Robert Oppenheimer.
Now can it write fiction? It’s going to need a great amount of further development. I asked it to write a scene of at least 1000 words, and it consistently failed to meet that requirement, even writing fewer words than its initial attempt when asked to try again with that word count mandatory. Was it just thumbing its nose at me? I prompted Chat GPT to write a scene from one of my novels, and it returned 4th Grade level prose that, while accurate as to grammar, was utterly lifeless compared to the work of any human writer. I soon realized that it should never be relied upon for fiction writing, at least not now. And no self-respecting writer should ever use such a tool for their work.
The initial experience with it is like playing with a new toy, but it has far broader and more serious societal impacts that should be the focus of our thinking about it now. Students have rushed to use it to knock off a quick term paper or other writing assignment. The education community has responded by either banning use of the application, or finding other software that can scan and identify an AI generated text. The developers’ response? They implore the education sector to “be open to change.” Sure, like we’re open to Bird Flu after gain of function research on the damn virus. And I guess they implore students to not learn how to write on their own as well. Software like a word processor was a great leap over typewriters, and voice recognition or voice to text another innovative leap. But software that wants to remove the human writer from the loop is a grave mistake. Let’s never go there.
Yet the fact remains—AI is emerging into more and more sectors of our lives from our cars to our jobs and classrooms, and it’s not going away, any more than bullets are. As the years go by, it will just get better, but I’m not holding my breath for it to write a cogent novel any time soon, or even a decent short story.
What do you think? Have you tried the AI that is becoming the rage of Gen Z and the Millennials? One Reddit user actually asked ChatGPT to write him a post headline that would be sure to get thousands of clicks. Well, forgive my doubting soul on this application. You can write it off to the fact that I stand in a more mature generation, and I can hear it now… “OK, Boomer.”
