![]() But on the other hand, what it means to be convincing depends on context. On the one hand, yes, ChatGPT is capable of producing prose that looks convincing. The AI can generate credible writing, but only because writing, and our expectations for it, has become so unaspiring.Įven pretending to fool the reader by passing off an AI copy as one’s own, like I did above, has become a tired trope, an expected turn in a too-long Twitter thread about the future of generative AI rather than a startling revelation about its capacities. John Warner, the author of the book Why They Can’t Write, has been railing against the five-paragraph essay for years and wrote a Twitter thread about how ChatGPT reflects this rules-based, standardized form of writing: “Students were essentially trained to produce imitations of writing,” he tweeted. It’s formulaic in structure, style, and content. That’s the fear.īut you may find comfort in knowing that the bot’s output, while fluent and persuasive as text, is consistently uninteresting as prose. “I think may actually spell the end of writing assignments,” wrote Samuel Bagg, a University of South Carolina political scientist. ![]() “You can no longer give take-home exams,” Kevin Bryan, a University of Toronto professor, posted on Twitter. When OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public last week, the first and most common reaction I saw was fear that it would upend education. That fact might comfort or frighten you, depending on your predilections. In short, it wrote a basic, high-school-style five-paragraph essay. The AI wrote another paragraph about accountability (“If ChatGPT says or does something inappropriate, who is to blame?”), and then a concluding paragraph that restated the rest (it even began, “In conclusion, …”). ![]() My friend’s prompt was this: “Create a critique of enthusiasm for ChatGPT in the style of Ian Bogost.”ĬhatGPT wrote more, but I spared you the rest because it was so boring. It is, indeed, a large language model (or LLM), a type of deep-learning software that can generate new text once trained on massive amounts of existing written material. A friend sent them to me as screenshots from his session with ChatGPT, a program released last week by OpenAI that one interacts with by typing into a chat window. I, Ian Bogost, did not actually write the previous three paragraphs. The ability to connect with others through conversation is a fundamental aspect of being human, and outsourcing that to a machine could have detrimental side effects on our society. If people begin to rely on a machine to have conversations for them, it could lead to a loss of genuine human connection. This means that any responses it generates are likely to be shallow and lacking in depth and insight.įurthermore, the reliance on ChatGPT for conversation raises ethical concerns. It is simply trained to generate words based on a given input, but it does not have the ability to truly comprehend the meaning behind those words. Although it may be impressive from a technical standpoint, the idea of relying on a machine to have conversations and generate responses raises serious concerns.įirst and foremost, ChatGPT lacks the ability to truly understand the complexity of human language and conversation. As a critic of technology, I must say that the enthusiasm for ChatGPT, a large-language model trained by OpenAI, is misplaced.
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