My friend Rod gets all his news by reading the headlines on a web site called Market Watch because he refuses to pay a dollar per week to read the complete stories. But this only partially explains his stupidity.
“What’s all this excitement about AI?” he asked. “I read where one company’s stock went up 700% because it’s a leader in AI. And every other headline was about how AI is the next EXCITING BIG THING. Heck, we’ve been AI’ing cows for decades now and Wall Street just found out? And just ask any brown-shouldered AI technician how ‘exciting’ it is.”
Admittedly, Rod’s not all that computer savvy. He thinks a byte is what rattlesnakes and cantankerous old horses do. His chips are ruffled with ridges and he thinks software refers to the plastic knives, forks and spoons they pass out at bull-sale-barbecues. Cookies are what you get for dessert.
“Rod,” I said, “if you weren’t so cheap and could read the complete stories you’d know that the AI they’re referring to is artificial intelligence, not artificial insemination.”
Obviously, Rod hasn’t had too many run-ins with intelligence, real or artificial, and I’m beginning to wonder about myself. Not too long after the encounter with Rod I was reading a story in the New Mexico Stockman magazine about stress in cows caused by cold weather. It was a ho-hum story and not up to the usual excellent standards of the magazine. And then I read the fine print and you can imagine my surprise when I read that the sample article was written BY A COMPUTER!
Well, my friends, I’ve seen the future and it doesn’t include me. I blame something called ChatGPT that will write a story all by itself without any human intervention. Now you can add ‘writer’ to the list of jobs destroyed by the Internet. If you see me on the side of the road with a sign that says “Will work for food,” throw me a quarter or two. Actually the nerds and geeks say ChatGPT doesn’t write the stories, it generates them. So I’m a ‘generator’ now. Or a ‘linguistic engineer,’ as one out-of-work writer referred to herself.
ChatGPT is an “AI powered chatbot” (whatever that is) that can write novels, poems that don’t rhyme, emails from Nigerian princes, malicious computer code or your son’s 5th grade report about the Amazon rainforest. It does this by scanning sources like Wikipedia, The National Enquirer, books, the New York Times, scientific journals and my column no doubt, then putting it all together in one jumbled article. Trust me, ChatGPT writing would put a person with caffeine-intoxication to sleep.
Evidently teachers aren’t able to tell if a student wrote a report because given the same topic ChatGPT writes something different every time. I’d hope that a teacher could tell that a D student DID NOT write a report on how to build a nuclear bomb.
I read one account that says ChatGPT can even write good rap songs but I don’t think there is such a thing. One article said that ChatGPT can even write humorous columns but in all honesty none of them left me hemorrh
aging with laughter. ChatGPT does all this by plagiarizing content that was actually written by real people like me without any attribution or royalty paid to the original writer. This is flat-out stealing and just one more example of the morale decay in our country.
One of the unforeseen problems with ChatGPT is there has to be real writers writing original content for the chatbot to be able to steal from. I guarantee if some poverty stricken editor at the New York or LA Times is forced to pick between a bad article written for free by a computer, or a good article written by a professional, they’ll pick the free one every time. Even though an article written by ChatGPT might contain one sentence that says one thing and then in the very next sentence says the exact opposite. So basically what you end up with are two computers lying to each other.
I read where ChatGPT already has 100 million users and 1.8 billion visitors per month… but I don’t know if the glowing report was written by a real person or some self-serving computer.
