The Future is Unwritten

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The Mimic

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How will ChatGPT change everyday l= ife? Sarah Myers West on artificial intelligence and human= resilience.

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Arteum

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Attracting more than a mil= lion users within days of its release in November, ChatGPT—t= he new artificial-intelligence application from the U.S. research lab OpenA= I—has provoked intensive global media coverage in the month and a hal= f since. Responses to the technology—which can generate sophisticated= written replies to complex questions; produce essays, poems, and joke= s; and even imitate the prose styles of famous authors—have ranged fr= om bemused astonishment to real anxiety: The New York Times tech columnist = Kevin Roose wrote that “ChatGPT is, quite simply, the best artificial= intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public”—whil= e Elon Musk tweeted, “ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dang= erously strong AI.” Critics worry about the technology’s potent= ial to replace human work, enable student cheating, and disrupt the world i= n potentially countless other ways. What to make of it?

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Sarah Myers West = is the managing director of New York University’s AI Now Institute, w= hich studies the social implications of artificial intelligence. As West ex= plains, ChatGPT is built on more than 60 years of chatbot innovation, start= ing with the ELIZA program, created at the Massachusetts Institute of Techn= ology in the late 1960s, and including the popular SmarterChild bot on AOL = Instant Messenger in the 2000s. West expects this latest version to affect = certain industries significantly—but, she says, as uncanny as ChatGPT= ’s emulation of human writing is, it’s still capable of only a = very small subset of functions previously requiring human intelligence= . This isn’t to say it represents no meaningful problems, but to West= , its future—and the future of artificial intelligence altogether&mda= sh;will be shaped less by the technology itself and more by what humanity d= oes to determine its use.

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Graham Vyse: How = do you see ChatGPT in the history of artificial intelligence as a whole? =09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09

Sarah Myers West:= Artificial intelligence has been around as a field for almost 80 year= s now, but its meaning has changed a lot along the way.
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In its early days, AI focused on w= hat we’d call “expert systems”—technologies that wo= uld replicate human intelligence in certain ways. Now, what we refer to as = AI is very different—largely, an array of data-centric technologies t= hat, in order to work effectively, rely on a couple of things that didn&rsq= uo;t really exist before.
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The first is massive amounts of da= ta.
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This was enabled by the internet b= oom of the 2010s, when tech companies developed the capabilities to leverag= e the production of data on a huge scale—that is, to develop systems = that could look for patterns in extremely large data sets. In this sense, w= hen we talk about AI today, it’s essentially what people were ta= lking about as big data starting in the 1990s.
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The second thing these systems rel= y on is massive amounts of computational power to process all this data. =09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09

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Overall, what this means is that A= I, as a field, has become increasingly dependent on the resources of a smal= l number of big tech companies that have built or acquired these two things= : huge data sets and huge computational power.
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What it doesn’t really mean,= though is any close replication of human intelligence. So although it&rsqu= o;s very effective at doing a small subset of tasks, what we refer to as AI= is very different from what humans are able to do.
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Vyse: What’= s new about ChatGPT in this history, then?

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West: ChatGPT is = more effective than anything before it at producing text responses that clo= sely mimic human writing. But even there, I’d understand it as the ne= west version of older technology.
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If you go back to 1966, for exampl= e, Joseph Weizenbaum developed a natural-language processing system called = ELIZA, an early chatbot. ELIZA was designed specifically to mimic what it w= as like to be in a therapy session. So if you were to say, I had a real= ly hard day at work, ELIZA would know to say, Tell me more about t= hat.
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When people interacted with ELIZA = in 1966, they had much the same reaction as people are having to ChatGPT to= day—that it was this remarkable technology, In fact, Weizenbaum&rsquo= ;s secretary—because her conversations with ELIZA felt so intimate&md= ash;would ask him to close the door when she was speaking to it, even thoug= h she knew exactly how the system worked.
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Another example that’s a lit= tle more recent: I remember, back in the 2000s, playing around with a chatb= ot called SmarterChild on AOL instant messenger that would offer essentiall= y the same kind of interaction—you’d talk to the system about y= our day, and it would feel like a very intimate experience.
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ChatGPT builds on those precursors= , but it does so using huge amounts of data, largely culled from the i= nternet.

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=D0=90=D0=BB=D0=B5=D1=81=D1=8C =D0= =A3=D1=81=D1=86=D1=96=D0=BD=D0=B0=D1=9E

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More from Sarah Myers West at = The Signal:
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=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09“I don’t s= ee ChatGPT being used effectively in tasks that rely on deeper lev= els of intelligence. I do think we’re likely to see it accelerate a g= eneral preexisting trend, though, that’s been devaluing certain categ= ories of work—or making their human elements more mundane. For instan= ce, where someone used to write text themselves, work that required real cr= eativity and ingenuity, they might now be asked just to edit AI-generated t= ext and make it incrementally more meaningful.”
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=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09“There’ve = already been extensive concerns about how ChatGPT can be used for = cheating in education systems, manipulation in the media, new ways to con p= eople into giving over their information, or fraud generally—all of w= hich are legitimate, and all of which OpenAI has acknowledged. But there&rs= quo;s also a deeper concern about the technology’s use by a very few = companies, which is that they’ll develop their use without any clear = avenue for broader public input as to how it will affect people and the pub= lic interest.”
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=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09“As to how wides= pread the effects will be, I honestly don’t know—and I= don’t think that even the companies behind the technology necessaril= y know yet. They certainly haven’t discussed publicly how they intend= to make it profitable. Which I think is the critical issue at this junctur= e: There just isn’t very much transparency from those who’re de= veloping this technology, and those who’ll be deploying it, about whe= re it’s heading.”

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= Continue reading ...

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The Signal explores urgent q= uestions in current events around the world—to support it and for ful= l access:

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