SINGAPORE: If you hadn’t lived under a rock, you wouldn’t have missed the recent mass fainting against artificial intelligence (AI) platforms such as ChatGPT. These so-called chatbots have been treated like shiny rubbish all over the world, and in my view even more so in Singapore.
Of course, the wonders of AI have been talked about for some time, mostly in tech geek circles. But ChatGPT and its likes have brought this discussion to the public eye. Hardly a day goes by that someone doesn’t express amazement at what these systems based on natural language processing technology can do.
However, the dangers that come with it are rarely discussed. Sure, there were some words of caution, including articles published by local media, but they were mostly the type that tried to counter the outlandish Terminator-like theories about how machines could take over the world. It was from
Generally speaking, the number of proponents outnumber the opponents, and the noise is louder that encourages the adoption of all forms of AI.
Perfect for mundane everyday
Indeed, ChatGPT is a great tool that can come in handy for all sorts of things, both routine and non-routine. I’ve spent a while going from getting recipes for family dinners (when I was recently asked for a recipe for paella, I was instructed that I should use arborio rice. Frankly, most of Spain I use this tool for everything from summarizing long documents. And you can easily get background knowledge about your area of interest in your daily work.
It is very likely that it will minimize the need to perform the mundane and mundane parts of many jobs, allowing humans to appreciate the creative and other more important aspects of their work. .
Senior Communications and Information Minister Janil Putuchary recently said the same thing to parliament. Referring to the work of the team tasked with integrating ChatGPT into Microsoft Word, he said: “…we see the potential to assist civil servants in some aspects of the writing process, such as summarizing lengthy reference material, considering relevant ideas, and improving the clarity of their writing.”
Other than “improving text clarity”, this is definitely a worthy goal, but that’s another time.
