AI and ChatGPT have been the talk of the Internet for a few months now and a few days ago, J.D. and I had an interesting chat about it after he watched this first video:
I’ve been thinking about it a lot as well and walked away from my chat with J.D. thinking that we’re going to be OK. Right now, AI is good at recreating what we already know. It isn’t capable, yet, of creating anything new.
So when I stumbled upon this next article by one of my favorite writers, Ted Chiang, I had to share it with you:
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web [The New Yorker] – “But, despite ingesting a vast amount of information, it hasn’t been able to derive the principles of arithmetic, either. A close examination of GPT-3’s incorrect answers suggests that it doesn’t carry the “1” when performing arithmetic. The Web certainly contains explanations of carrying the “1,” but GPT-3 isn’t able to incorporate those explanations. GPT-3’s statistical analysis of examples of arithmetic enables it to produce a superficial approximation of the real thing, but no more than that.” (there is no snippet I can pull that does the article justice)
The part that ties our two pieces together is when Ted Chiang writes about being a writer. Specifically, you have to write to get better at writing. It’s in the practice that you get better at it. It’s the Helsinki train station all over again.
AI will change how we live our lives, much like how the Internet did, but it remains to be seen to which degree. But you must pay attention!