I’ve been playing a bit with ChatGPT for some time now and I’m not the first to say it’s amazing if not mind-blowing. AI can just write you a blog post and you don’t even have to worry one bit. No writer’s block. No more struggle with the blank page. I must admit the lazy person in me is extremely tempted.
Considering I haven’t written here in what, almost a year I think, it seems as though ChatGPT is the answer to any blogger or writer’s problem.
But is it really?
Lazy as I am I just cannot bring myself to simply put out a prompt and let the AI do its magic for me while I sit down and sip on watermelon smoothie on this hot hot summer day.
It just feels off. It feels wrong. It feels like it’s missing the point of maintaining a blog in the first place. At least a personal one.
I guess for company blogs, that would be a dream for sure. No more looking for writers to craft boring topics trying to link some kind of mundane human activity to their equally mundane products. Saves them money. But sadly lost revenue for the writers. Such is the way of technological innovation. The wheels on this bus goes round and round. And eventually many if not all of us mere mortals limited by our humanness will be crushed by the weight of this exponential AI growth.
Don’t get me wrong. I embrace change. I’m not burying my head in the sand pretending the inevitable isn’t already here.
But I’m also not too excited to the point that I want to throw away any form of humanness in everyday tasks.
But I do proceed with caution. An abundance of it. I’m exploring it and loving it but I keep reminding myself that while AI and maybe AGI is already creeping up on us all, this is not enough reason to lose hope on the probability that AI and AGI would benefit us more than harm us.
Someone said that AI is like a child. Our child. And how it grows up will depend on how we “raise” it.
Maybe that’s true. But maybe it will inevitably evolve autonomously on its own anyway regardless of how we try to “align” it to our purpose and liking.
Because if you think of it, “general purpose” is such a broad term that encompasses all possibilities — including those we failed to account for, whether intentionally or accidentally.
I know that’s a scary thought. But we are living in the midst of something our forefathers can only dream of. And as it’s been said a million times since March this year, “what a time to be alive!”
And as for me, be it utopia or mass extinction or anything else in between, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. If this is truly inevitable and inescapable and this is how we die as a species. I think that would still be glorious.
Death by progress. Quite romantic don’t you think?
PS. This post was written 100% by human me. Pretty obvious given the mistakes I guess.
Let me know what you think… :)