Nows and Forevers

I have been thinking a lot about ChatGPT and other AI. I am both fascinated by what is and what can be, and I am also alarmed by the threat to journalism, writing and a lot of other white-collar work. If you aren’t thinking about this seriously, then you are missing something.

This article from Axios agrees.

It won’t be long before it takes a bite out of what many of us do. Just how much of a bite, and whether it’s fatal to our careers, I don’t know.

Case in point: Journalism is the top career that AI is supposed to kill. I think it will kill a lot of the low-value work, which is actually not necessarily a bad thing. Lord knows I could do without writing up basic stories. I think it’s a big leap to think that it will be able to do the kind of work that I do, when I am working to the the top of my license (as they say).

Yet. I would start thinking of what happens next, and what you can do about it. It’s that disruptive.

It does some things well. It wrote a poem for me and it wasn’t bad. The Python script it wrote for me in 10 seconds was faster and better than the ones I did in my sabermetrics class at Boston University a few years ago. About half the headlines I ask it to write on a story I have written are better than the ones I wrote on my own.

I asked it to write fictional stories, and they are garbage right now. I asked it to write a 1000 word story in Welsh and it wrote one, and I could understand it, although it was no better than an 8th grader’s work. I asked it to write a professional bio of me and it got a lot wrong.

None of these things are gonna to stay bad forever.