I’ve seen lots of stories lately about Artificial Intelligence producing credible, and even quite good, written products.
It seems as though we’re discovering that technology/data/computers can create things that we previously considered ‘uniquely human’.
It’s a little disconcerting. And it will definitely cause us to set different essay-assignments for students!
But here is Seth Godin’s very brief take on this from a recent daily email he sends out (and the title is linked to his page so you can sign up for his work if you care to). I think it’s exactly the right kind of question to be asking ourselves: What is our new, better work?
From Seth Godin:
Attention, trust and GPT3
When AI is smart enough to write an essay, then what happens?
GPT3 is back in the news, because, as expected, it’s getting better and better. Using a simple chat interface, you can easily ask it a wide range of questions (write a 1,000 word essay about Clara Barton) that certainly feels like a diligent high school student wrote it.
Of course, this changes things, just as the camera, the typewriter and the internet changed things.
It means that creating huge amounts of mediocre material is easier than ever before. You can write a bad Seinfeld script in about six minutes.
It means that assigning rudimentary essays in school or average copywriting at work is now a waste of time.
But mostly it reminds us that attention and trust don’t scale.
If your work isn’t more useful or insightful or urgent than GPT can create in 12 seconds, don’t interrupt people with it.
Technology begins by making old work easier, but then it requires that new work be better.
It would help to start teaching / showing students that they even HAVE an inner world, and how to explore that more deeply for themselves.
Not an easy task in the over-saturated digital age. 😏
Yes, it's time for personalized articles, which the new technologies lack.