A Pandora's Box of Existential Fears
For the past several weeks I have been spending an hour or so of daily time doing a bit of research on what - at least for me - is the newest thing in Artificial Intelligence (AI): ChatGPT. For the uninitiated (myself near the top of the list), ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, an AI and research company headquartered in San Francisco’s Mission District. The company launched ChatGPT on Nov. 30, 2022. It is “an artificial intelligence text generator,” which our “Mind Children” (as the Harvard roboticist Hans Moravec dubbed them more than 30 years ago) consider it to be the “future of work.” Simply stated, ChatGPT is an AI tool that can generate human-like text. It is a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology, that allows users to have human-like conversations and much more. The language model can answer questions, and assist the user with tasks such as composing emails, essays, and code. Usage is currently open to the public free of charge, because ChatGPT is still in its research and feedback-collection phase. The more I have read, learned and digested, the more I fear that potentially, it’s akin to Cliff Notes (remember them?) warping on crystal meth.
Let’s face facts: most of us have never seen anything remotely like ChatGPT outside of science fiction. As with most new cyber technology, it is more quickly grokked and grasped by the young than their elders. There’s nothing new about that. I mean, what immigrant parent or grandparent didn’t stand in awe of their young one’s mastering English long, long before they themselves spoke their first intelligible sentence? In most cases, it never dawned on them that the children were immersed in the new language from the first moment they went out to play. What parent or grandparent doesn’t believe their 3, 4, and 5-year olds are geniuses because they can run circles around their elders on an I-Pad, or Smartphone? I often tell my lifelong learning students (many of whom are in their 80s and even above) that if there’s something they don’t understand about accessing information, “Ask your youngest great-grandchild for help.”
As time progresses, the uses of Chatbot technology are going to grow and become ever more sophisticated. For now, students are already handing in written assignments which are the products not of their cerebral synapses, but rather their computer’s software. In a piece published a couple of days ago in the New York Times, 4 writers - Claire Cain Miller, Adam Playford, Larry Buchanan and Aaron Krolik reported on a research project in which a random assortment of 4-graders were each given a writing assignment. “We used real essay prompts from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the standardized test from the Department of Education, known as the nation’s report card). We asked the bot to produce essays based on those prompts — sometimes with a little coaching, and always telling it to write like a student of the appropriate age. We put what it wrote side by side with sample answers written by real children.” None of the experts involved in the project, which included a fourth-grade teacher; a professional writing tutor; a Stanford education professor; and Judy Blume, the beloved children’s author, could tell the difference . . .
As a university instructor and writer, I do not want to wake up one day and find that I’ve become irrelevant due to some devilish bot . . .
It should come as no surprise that educators ranging from elementary, middle and high school teachers through instructors at such prestigious institutions of higher learning as the Wharton School of Business (whose graduates include Donald and Ivanka Trump, Elon Musk and Donald Trump, Jr.) and Harvard Law (whose graduates include Adam Schiff, Chuck Schumer, Jaimie Raskin and Merrick Garland) have voiced extreme concern over the negative impact that ChatGPT can have on learning. True, students may receive higher grades because their essays and papers are structurally and grammatically perfect . . . but what about learning itself? The major purpose of education - especially at the lower grades - is to teach critical learning skills . . . not just to achieve the highest possible grade point average.
While as of now it seems unlikely that poets, playwrights and comedians will be replaced by machines, I am truly frightened by the existential threat ChatGPT may well have on Democracy itself. As Nathan E. Sanders, a data scientist, and Bruce Schneier, a security technologist noted in a recent Times report: “ChatGPT could automatically compose comments submitted in regulatory processes. It could write letters to the editor for publication in local newspapers. It could comment on news articles, blog entries and social media posts millions of times every day. . . . Facebook, has been removing over a billion fake accounts a year. But such messages are just the beginning. Rather than flooding legislators’ inboxes with supportive emails, or dominating the Capitol switchboard with synthetic voice calls, an A.I. system with the sophistication of ChatGPT but trained on relevant data could selectively target key legislators and influencers to identify the weakest points in the policymaking system and ruthlessly exploit them through direct communication, public relations campaigns, horse trading or other points of leverage.
If a bot could create a successful autocrat, he or she would look, act, sound and campaign like Donald Trump or George Santos; soulless creatures who are directed by the soulless algorithms of their crafty creators. Their fibs could be told with straight faces, their polling numbers presented as the god’s honest truth. AI has yet to create subtlety or satire, and knows virtually nothing about the effect its words have on human minds.
(Speaking of George Santos [or "Kitara Ravache,” his nom de drag], I came across a marvelous definition of fibs in a P.G. Wodehouse novel last night: “Fibs, my dear [are] artistic mouldings of the unshapely clay of truth . . . “)
Let’s see such gleeful snottiness emerge from a Chatbot!)
Way back in 1932, MGM costarred the 3 Barrymores, Ethel, Lionel and John, together for the first and only time in a film called Rasputin and the Empress. The model for Princess Natasha (played by Diana Wynard) in the movie was Princess Irina Romanoff Youssoupoff. The real Princess Irina filed a lawsuit against producer Irving Thalberg and MGM, claiming invasion of privacy and libel in portraying her as a mistress and, later, a rape victim of Grigory Rasputin (called Prince Youssoupoff in the movie). She won an award of $127,373 in an English court and an out-of-court settlement in New York with MGM, for reportedly $1 million. As a result of the success of Princess Youssoupoff's lawsuit against MGM over this movie, Hollywood studios began inserting the disclaimer "This motion picture is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental" in the credits of virtually every film released since.
Taking a cue from MGM, perhaps in the near future, Congress will pass a law requiring a disclaimer averring something like “BEWARE: That which follows is the creation of Artificial Intelligence. Any resemblance to the human thought process or the truth is purely coincidental.”
Copyright©2023 Kurt F. Stone