The OpenAI logo appears on a mobile phone in front of a computer screen displaying output from ChatGPT in Boston, Tuesday, March 21, 2023. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)
I’m not doing AI stuff. I still don’t have the ChatGPT app, which is probably the most popular of all time. Because now we have to have an entire evil artificial intelligence network around the world eavesdropping? I’ve never had a fun column where you tell 0 and 1 to write a column in your style, and when they do, you raise your hand and say, “Why bother?”
I’m not at all worried about losing my job. My father sent me an AI poem and said that we poets are already sinking and can’t move forward. But it was a terrible poem. Not to worry.
On the writing side, I basically take the stance of “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross. She asked her ChatGPT to write lyrics about the end of a relationship to the song “America the Beautiful,” but let’s just say the robot isn’t Cole Porter.
I know a lot of technical writing jobs are at risk, where great prose and poetry aren’t important. And in the visual arts, yes. For example, as one of Terry’s AI expert interviewees said, graphics are her worst time as an artist. The Times tells her to come up with a composite photo of a teddy bear riding a skateboard in her square, and it does so in seconds.
The whole profession is in the ditch.
Even more depressing is when my wife showed me an example of someone asking the program to do an Anders Sohn-esque watercolor painting, and of course it did. It’s going pretty well too.
OK, it’s bad. But is the “extinction crisis” a bad thing?
This is what a group of tech industry leaders, including some of the people who invented AI, called out late last month as a small problem facing us. A threat to human survival. It is equivalent to something beyond the new coronavirus and the hydrogen bomb.
A one-sentence statement issued by the non-profit Center for AI Safety said, “Reducing the risk of AI-induced extinction is a global priority, alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. It should be.” “The open letter was signed by more than 350 AI executives, researchers and engineers,” The New York Times reported.
mouse or rat. Neighborhoods go.
I’m still hoping for some HAL solution. As you know, the computer in “2001” killed another astronaut at one point, but our Dave is still on his spacewalk. “Open the pod bay door, HAL,” commands Dave. “I’m sorry Dave, unfortunately I can’t do that,” HAL replies. Dave: “What’s the problem?” Hal: “I’m sure you know what the problem is as well as I do.”
What I mean is Dave is back inside. He unplugs HAL. “Dave, my mind is confused. I can feel it.” Then HAL begins singing an old saw. “Daisy, Daisy, answer me. I’m half crazy, all for your love.”
Then, somewhere beyond Jupiter, Dave grows old, dies, and is reborn as a cosmic baby of sorts.
No problem, right?
Even so. “If this technology doesn’t work out, I think it could go quite the wrong way,” Sam Altman, chief executive of a company called OpenAI, who knows much more about robots than I do, told the Senate subcommittee. said in “We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.”
So here’s the deal. Blue-collar workers have been dealing with the threat and fact that automation will take their jobs for decades. Now, the robot chicken has returned home as a roost for white-collar workers who use 50-cent words like “existential.” What makes us sober on the issue is to admit that having to work less is not necessarily a bad thing, as both anarchists and Marxists have long sought. Let robots do the intellectual heavy lifting. Then humans can go surfing. if they will allow it.
Larry Wilson is on the editorial board of the Southern California News Group. lwilson@scng.com.
