ChatGPT prompts excitement and fear about the AI future

January’s a miserable month in the UK, starting with a New Year hangover, slowly traversing four-and-a-half weeks of icy drizzle and dark afternoons and finally handing the calendar baton to an equally dank February. What made this year’s a tad more depressing than usual was early coverage of an artificial intelligence (AI) called ChatGPT.

It’s been categorized as a chatbot, one of those text-messaging software programs that organizations increasingly foist on complaining customers. But it makes the average chatbot look like an ape with a keyboard. ChatGPT (the GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer – go figure) is apparently so good that people assessing its written output cannot tell it apart from a human being’s. This is not merely a chatbot. It is Arnold Schwarzenegger circa 1984, Terminator eyes blazing red and guns aimed at homo sapiens.

The product of a research lab called OpenAI, ChatGPT is the source of excitement and fear in roughly equal measure. The excited include venture capitalists and other self-appointed masters of the universe who smell a money making opportunity from so-called “generative AI,” supposedly poised for breakthrough in 2023. According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is already in talks to sell shares that would value it at about $29 billion. For those who track telecom stocks, this would be $1 billion more than the current market capitalization of Orange, one of Europe’s biggest operators.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, already an investor in OpenAI, is said to be in talks about incorporating ChatGPT into Bing, its search engine, and Office applications. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is replete with posts about ChatGPT’s versatility. It can write student essays, churn out a business plan in record time, easily cobble together a news report (heck, the apes with keyboards can manage that) and even craft a Shakespearean sonnet.

Fear and loathing

The fearful, naturally, include anyone who owes a livelihood to any of those things. We are not just talking about poets, journalists and teachers here. An AI whose writing skills rival a reasonably intelligent person’s would – in the telecom sector alone – affect analysts, business planners, consultants, marketers, public relations specialists, salespeople and strategists, to name but a few roles. For anyone whose job is mainly about writing, ChatGPT threatens to be like the spinning jenny was to the handloom weavers of the eighteenth century.

The comparison is apt because naysayers will be dismissed as Luddites. Ever since English textile workers began smashing up factory equipment more than 200 hundred years ago, people worried about technology have been derided and mocked as “enemies of progress.” But the Luddites (now a pejorative) did not set out to be enemies of progress. For these people, the factory represented not progress but the loss of their livelihoods. Their instincts were no different from those of today’s striking UK postal workers and train drivers.

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