Are you familiar with those cheesy motivational posters that some people hang on their office walls? You know, the ones that say cringeworthy things like "PERSEVERANCE" beneath a picture of a sailboat trying to navigate a stormy sea? Yeah, I've always hated those posters.
I once had a boss who COVERED his office with those tacky things. On his first day, he summoned every employee for a one-on-one, and I proceeded to open my mouth and insert my foot immediately upon arrival. "Whoa," I exclaimed uncontrollably as I looked around his office. "Was there a sale somewhere at Motivational-Posters-R-Us?" That boss never liked me much. I can't imagine why.
Well, maybe I have a guess or two. Perhaps it was the "motivational" poster that hung for years in my cubicle. It was a gorgeous shot of a beach at sunset with the word MOTIVATION in giant print. Beneath it, an inspirational message I could always turn to during rough times: "If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon."
Well, it's been twenty years or so since I hung that poster up -- I figure it's high time we gave those robots a shot.
Nothing's been more buzzworthy this year than artificial intelligence and ChatGPT, the interface that lets you talk to a robot and beg it to write your term papers for you. Artificial intelligence is here, it's smart, and it's becoming hard to tell the difference between AI and a real person.
This smart technology has grown considerably, even over the past couple years. If you don't believe me, go to Youtube and search "AI commercials" and watch some great clips from a few years back, when they tasked AI machines to study the human race and produce TV advertisements humans would like. The resulting ads were delicious nightmares, where eight-legged breakdancers with cheese for lips told you that pizza was better than family.
Today, though, teachers are literally struggling to tell the difference between real homework assignments and AI-generated cheats. The practical benefits of advancing AI are limitless, from self-driving cars to robots that can do the intellectual heavy lifting for us. Of course, the down side is that we as a people continually move ever closer to a dystopian future where mankind becomes enslaved by robots smarter than us. "The Terminator" CANNOT become a documentary, people.
That said, if a kid can now skate through college letting a robot write his term papers, there's absolutely no reason why a tired newspaper columnist can't take a quick vacation and let some piece of software write his newspaper column for a week, right? I figured it was worth a shot, so I went to the ChatGPT interface this week and gave it a simple command:
"WRITE A NEWSPAPER COLUMN IN THE STYLE OF DISPATCH/ARGUS AND QUAD CITY TIMES COLUMNIST SHANE BROWN."
Simple enough, right? It took ChatGPT about 3.5 seconds to deliver a 700 word column. This was the first paragraph:
"Saddle Tales: Where Hooves and Hearts Converge, by Shane Brown. Howdy there, folks, and welcome back to another riveting ride through the wild and wonderful world of the Quad Cities. Today, I reckon we're gonna stir up some dust and dive right into a topic that's as timeless as the Mississippi's flow – horses. Yep, you heard me right, those four-legged companions that have been galloping through history, leaving hoofprints on our hearts and heritage."
I will never doubt technology again. Had I not given you a spoiler alert, there's no way you would've known that paragraph wasn't written by me, eh? The artificial intelligence knows me perfectly: my fondness of the word "howdy," my predilection for flowery alliteration, and of course, my favorite column topic of all time: horses. You nailed it, ChatGPT!
Don't blame the robot, though. It was pretty cocky for me to have assumed that ChatGPT would have any earthly idea who Shane Brown is, let alone what my "style" would be. Just because one nice lady at the grocery store last week told me she liked my column (aww!) does NOT make me a household name worthy of anyone's intelligence, artificial or no.
Also, I'm not saying that I Google my own name on the regular, but if you DO fancy searching online for "Shane Brown," you'll likely run into a business called Shane Brown Performance Horses. That particular Shane Brown lives in Texas, likes horses considerably more than myself, and has no qualms posing against fenceposts while wearing spurs that I can only presume jingle, jangle, and jingle. I believe ChatGPT just wrote a column in HIS style, not mine.
Artificial intelligence has evolved, but probably not quite to the point where I can take a vacation and leave my column in its good hands -- mostly because artificial intelligence doesn't have hands. Yet. Please tell me it doesn't have hands.
No comments:
Post a Comment