CHAT GPT, Open AI and Me: A Bootless Manifesto
It's a hopeless battle but I'm not going down without a lot of (customized, original, hand-crafted) protest.
Dear World:
Please be advised that I will be refusing all offers from AI to assist me to write anything, including emails and text messages and thank you letters and sympathy notes and photo captions and Facebook posts.
It goes without saying that I will refuse "help" with any longer works as well, including essays, articles, chapters, books, and blog posts.
We may not now ever be able to get AI to stop feeding its insatiable maw with our work, unattributed, but I refuse to use AI as a resource or assistant in the production of any of my own sentences and paragraphs. What I write is the result of nearly three-quarters of a century of reading, writing, and thinking, and what I say and how I say it will always be distinctively mine.
I also (politely but sincerely) request that those I know (and those I don't) not make use of artificial intelligence when they are writing notes or messages or blog-post comments to me. You're right: I may not be able to tell the difference. That is the point exactly.
As this article by Damon Beres in today's issue of The Atlantic (note citation and link) eloquently points out, there are certainly likely to be benefits to civilization from AI.
But it’s just as easy to see the potential problems. So far, generative AI has not resulted in a healthier internet. Arguably quite the opposite. Consider that in recent days, Google has aggressively pushed an “AI Overview” tool in its Search product, presenting answers written by generative AI atop the usual list of links. The bot has suggested that users eat rocks or put glue in their pizza sauce when prompted in certain ways. ChatGPT and other OpenAI products may perform better than Google’s, but relying on them is still a gamble. Generative-AI programs are known to “hallucinate.” They operate according to directions in black-box algorithms. And they work by making inferences based on huge data sets containing a mix of high-quality material and utter junk. Imagine a situation in which a chatbot falsely attributes made-up ideas to journalists. Will readers make the effort to check? Who could be harmed? For that matter, as generative AI advances, it may destroy the internet as we know it; there are already signs that this is happening. What does it mean for a journalism company to be complicit in that act? [Note that this quote is set off and attributed to its source]
In addition to what it is doing to the Internet, it is my belief that CHAT GPT and its clones will soon destroy creative writing (and visual art, and music, and all other art forms). Already, I no longer believe that almost any image I see online is a human-produced reproduction of an actual scene or situation. With a bit of fine-tuning, written, visual and musical pieces will increasingly be produced by AI that are indistinguishable from human-produced works. Humans will become superfluous in the creative arts. Originality will become meaningless, especially when cheaper knock-off options are available. Copyright will mean nothing. (It means nothing now to many.)
And yes — aside from the paragraph I properly attributed to Damon Beres — I did write this whole fucking thing all by myself.
well said, mary!