[Yesterday I spent all day answering reader questions for the inaugural Kottke.org Ask Me Anything. One of them asked my opinion of the current crop of AI tools and I thought it was worth reprinting the whole thing here. -j]
Q: I would love to know your thoughts on AI, and specifically the ones that threaten us writers. I know you’ve touched on it in the past, but it seems like ChatGPT and the like really exploded while you were on sabbatical. Like, you left and the world was one way, and when you returned, it was very different. —Gregor
A: I got several questions about AI and I haven’t written anything about my experience with it on the site, so here we go. Let’s start with two facts:
- ChatGPT moved me to tears.
- I built this AMA site with the assistance of ChatGPT. (Or was it the other way around?)
Ok, the first thing. Last month, my son skied at a competition out in Montana. He’d (somewhat inexplicably) struggled earlier in the season at comps, which was tough for him to go through and for us as parents to watch. How much do we let him figure out on his own vs. how much support/guidance do we give him? This Montana comp was his last chance to get out there and show his skills. I was here in VT, so I texted him my usual “Good luck! Stomp it!” message the morning of the comp. But I happened to be futzing around with ChatGPT at the time (the GPT-3.5 model) and thought, you know, let’s punch this up a little bit. So I asked ChatGPT to write a good luck poem for a skier competing at a freeski competition at Big Sky.
In response, it wrote a perfectly serviceable 12-line poem with three couplets that was on topic, made narrative sense, and rhymed. And when I read the last line, I burst into tears. So does that make ChatGPT a soulful poet of rare ability? No. I’ve thought a lot about this and here’s what I think is going on: I was primed for an emotional response (because my son was struggling with something really important to him, because I was feeling anxious for him, because he was doing something potentially dangerous, because I haven’t seen him too much this winter) and ChatGPT used the language and methods of thousands of years of writing to deliver something a) about someone I love, and b) in the form of a poem (which is often an emotionally charged form) — both of which I had explicitly asked for. When you’re really in your feelings, even the worst movie or the cheesiest song can resonate with you and move you — just the tiniest bit of narrative and sentiment can send you over the edge. ChatGPT didn’t really make me cry…I did.
But still. Even so. It felt a little magical when it happened.
Now for the second part. I would say ChatGPT (mostly the new GPT-4 model), with a lot of hand-holding and cajoling from me, wrote 60-70% of the code (PHP, Javascript, CSS, SQL) for this AMA site. And we easily did it in a third of the time it would have taken me by myself, without having to look something up on Stack Overflow every four minutes or endlessly consulting CSS and PHP reference guides or tediously writing tests, etc. etc. etc. In fact, I never would have even embarked on building this little site-let had ChatGPT not existed…I would have done something much simpler and more manual instead. And it was a *blast*. I had so much fun and learned so much along the way.
I’ve also been using ChatGPT for some other programming projects — we whipped the Quick Links into better shape (it can write Movable Type templating code…really!) and set up direct posting of the site’s links to Facebook via the API rather than through Zapier (saving me $20/mo in the process). It has really turbo-charged my ability to get shit done around here and has me thinking about all sorts of possibilities.
I keep using the word “we” here because coding with ChatGPT — and this is where it starts to feel weird in an uncanny valley sort of way — feels like a genuine creative collaboration. It feels like there is a “someone” on the other side of that chat, a something that’s really capable but also needs a lot of hand-holding. Just. Like. Me. There’s a back and forth. We both screw up and take turns correcting each other’s mistakes. I ask it please and tell it thank you. ChatGPT lies to me; I gently and non-judgmentally guide it in a more constructive direction (as you would with a toddler). It is the fucking craziest weirdest thing and I don’t really know how to think about it.
There have only been a few occasions in my life when I’ve used or seen some new technology that felt like magic. The first time I wrote & ran a simple BASIC program on a computer. The first time I used the web. The first time using a laptop with wifi. The first time using an iPhone. Programming with ChatGPT over the past few weeks has felt like magic in the same way. While working on these projects with ChatGPT, I can’t wait to get out of bed in the morning to pick up where we left off last night (likely too late last night), a feeling I honestly have not consistently felt about work in a long time. I feel giddy. I feel POWERFUL.
That powerful feeling makes me uneasy. We shouldn’t feel so suddenly powerful without pausing to interrogate where that power comes from, who ultimately wields it, and who it will benefit and harm. The issues around these tools are complex & far-reaching and I’m still struggling to figure out what to think about it all. I’m persuaded by arguments that these tools offer an almost unprecedented opportunity for “helping humans be creative and express themselves” and that machine/human collaboration can deepen our understanding and appreciation of the world around us (as has happened with chess and go). I’m also persuaded by Ted Chiang’s assertion that our fears of AI are actually about capitalism — and we’ve got a lot to fear from capitalism when it comes to these tools, particularly given the present dysfunction of US politics. There is just so much potential power here and many people out there don’t feel uneasy about wielding it — and they will do what they want without regard for the rest of us. That’s pretty scary.
Powerful, weird, scary, uncanny, giddy — how the hell do we collectively navigate all that?
(Note: ChatGPT didn’t write any of this, nor has it written anything else on kottke.org. I used it once while writing a post a few weeks ago, basically as a smart thesaurus to suggest adjectives related to a topic. I’ll let you know if/when that changes — I expect it will not for quite some time, if ever. Even in the age of Ikea, there’s still plenty of handcrafted furniture makers around and in the same way, I suspect the future availability of cheap good-enough AI writing/curation will likely increase the demand and value for human-produced goods.)
Tags: artificial intelligence ChatGPT
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