MY TAKE …
Wednesday, January 18, 2023
Everyone who reads professionally must now wonder – is that written by this person whose name is on it, or was it created by a piece of software?
Is this person real, or is that the nom de plume of a coder passing off their software-driven piece of writing as their own?
Fact or fiction – and how can I tell the difference?
ChatGBT adds another dimension to already obvious questions about people who might not be legitimate faking their pitch, book, product, term paper, or credentials transcript.
Not recent press ink-hemorrhage as companies raise the stakes as well as money, another Consumer Electronics Show has come and gone – leaving educators, editors, and HR professionals fretting over how to tell an original term paper, original manuscript and query letter, or an original cover letter and resume written by a real person vis-à-vis one created with ChatGPT. So many recent articles about A.I., in particular, the new ChatGPT, so many are writing about and wanting to get smart about and try out, as have I.
I doubt, though, that I would be as interested in the A.I. future unfolding if it wasn’t for the thrilling and scary elements of its reality, a lot of which is known and understood by the best nerds Silicon Valley and offer up …
In particular, if you haven’t read the book or heard – at least listen to this, invest an hour of your time watching an interview/podcast – learn about Mo Gawdat’s book ‘Scary Smart – The Future of A.I.’ in a podcast interview from a few months ago as he startles/alarms/excites people about the future of A.I. Sean Pastnernak’s published a light-hearted piece the other day, written using ChatGPT – part tongue-in-cheek, part ‘preview to a scary movie.’
Seriously, we all know the pros (and sometimes accidental cons) of how ‘auto-correct’ can make an unexpected joke (or horrible faux pas) of a hasty text or email message.
I’ve come to love the editing help I get from Grammarly – far better than Microsoft’s ‘help tool,’ but when I read and polish a piece I write, I know it’s my words that are the message.
But does a reader?
Does it matter who wrote something?
It seems innocent enough if it’s about fiction or objective truth recitals, but if it’s making an argument or a sales pitch, how do we know if it is real, reliable, and right-headed?
We can easily not fuss about this when reading poetry or fiction – we’re reading made-up stories and don’t expect integrity as much as we expect to be entertained; we anticipate, like movies and entertainment television, to have a short-term suspension of disbelief play with our emotions and quicken our heart rate …
But when we read the news, or severe journalistic analysis or reporting of things we want to learn, or need to know, is it real, or is it a new kind of spin?
There was a time when money and art were the things crooks profited from counterfeiting. There has been a time in this internet epoch – when anyone can purport to be informed and/or opinionated – they don’t need a soap-box platform in a public square at the heart of a busy city.
They can be anyone, anywhere, masquerading as someone else from somewhere else, and we cannot know for certain. They might be another internet scammer sitting on a bar stool in some country halfway around the world or someone down the hall in a cubicle masquerading as someone completely fake but appearing real.
Now we have to wonder as well whether the writing of anything from love letters to business proposals was thought about and authored by a real person, a fake person, or a real person using a software tool to write their fakery for them – and as evidenced by Mo Gawdat’s book and by Sean Pasternak’s piece, these tools are ‘just the beginning’ of where A.I. is taking us.
Because, as we are mostly wrapping our heads around this for the first time, it’s old hat to the tech gurus who are already hard at work (or tasking computers to do it for them) inventing the next new scary thing to unsettle our lives. There may be controversies and frauds, but A.I. will also drive lifesaving and life-altering breakthroughs in science and medicine that will make the sequencing of DNA look like a slow-motion film.