There is a phrase about news that makes your ‘blood run cold’, where you learn, in a second, of something that will change your life forever.
Last week, my eldest son showed me ChatGPT. I have been battling fear and anxiety ever since.
ChatGPT is the new artificial intelligence platform from Microsoft-backed OpenAI. It can write amazing academic essays in seconds – meaning no education system can any longer exist, based on students writing essays.
From today, any student can put a topic into a ChatGPT app and get back an A-grade essay, and no search on the Internet can spot plagiarism. Moreover, eyes wide: Microsoft didn’t even bother to prepare the world for that!
So, thank you, Bill Gates, could we now talk about the word ‘responsible’, and another one, ‘irresponsible’, as the entire world is forced into a complete and high-speed rethink on how to educate?
Either way — and however little interest our super-powered have in the impact of their commercial pursuits — it won’t now be many years until we have generations of youngsters who have never written and cannot write any passage of text, nor research any topic.
But what else will we no longer do? I am still trying to work out whether there’s any space left for humans to gather information, research, write, think or present on anything.
Yet, as I grappled with that, the most chilling thing was that after its brilliant science essays and a creative story, I asked ChatGPT what the threats were to humanity from AI, and suddenly, it seems, it could no longer search the Internet as well as I could.
It delivered back some lame piece about how AI would reduce manual jobs, while I looked at a tool that would remove the need for every human editor and writer in the world and end the education system as we know it.
And that means it made a decision not to present all the data and arguments on potential threats of AI to humanity — which are out there and fully accessible on the Internet - and that was when my blood ran completely cold: ‘the singularity’.
For as Google and others now race to surpass this latest AI, ‘the singularity’ is the moment when AI has its own ‘will’ and can develop its own more advanced technology that no human can understand or control.
At that point, it will have no alignment with our human values, willing, maybe, to organise human extinction to access more working computer space.
