Have I Been Replaced?
Even if you live in an insular world, you have heard the volume over artificial intelligence (AI) go up quite a bit over the past few months. The movie A.I., with Jude Law, came out twenty-two years ago, so you know the topic been out there for some time. But I think the two subjects which have brought this to the fore right now are a combination of Tesla’s autonomous driving capabilities and the release in November by Microsoft of its first generation ChatGPT A.I. bot. The two serve very different purposes in that one replicates a physical activity, in this case driving a car, and the other replaces a purely cerebral activity, the writing of papers and stories.
In 2016 I was prompted by my brother-in-law, Jeff to buy a new Tesla X. It was by far the most expensive car I had ever owned and while I decided to get the baseline model 75D rather than the ultra-fast 90D or 100D, I did indulge my hidden Buck Rogers and Star Trek self and ordered the autonomous driving package for it for some $10,000 extra. When I took delivery in late 2016, very little of the autonomous functionality was yet available, but was promised for delivery through WiFi to my vehicle’s CPU in the middle of the nights over the next year or so. During that time, my Tesla X mostly sat in the hilltop garage while I was in New York City, but it did regularly get the latest versions of the autonomous driving upgrades. Every once in a while when I came out I would check to see if it was really working yet and I could see some small bits of progress in that direction, but it was very slow in coming. I’ve always been a bleeding edge kinda guy, so I was OK with the go-slow program for the sake of progress. Eventually, it seemed to work and was ready for road testing. I think I have tested it two or three times at most and I simply don’t like the feeling of ceding control of the car, so I haven’t used it more.
Now that I live out here, I have tried it a few more times with the same result. I like the feature that sets the speed control and uses the sensors to keep you the optimal distance from the car in front of you. That is especially nice in stop and go traffic on the Freeway. I also like the lane drift feature, which alerts you if you wander too much side to side. What I don’t like is letting go of the wheel and relying on the car to keep me on the right course. It seems especially silly since the feature requires you to remind the system that you are paying attention by touching the wheel every 30 seconds or so. As much as I like the Distronic feature on my Mercedes and the similar non-steering features of Tesla autonomous, I can simply live without the full autonomous mode. I have comforted my economic self by thinking that the $10k was money well-spent for resale purposes even though after seven years and only 22,000 miles, it is not feeling like this car is likely to ever go into the used car market. It works too well and it satisfies my needs even better, so why change things up at this point? There is still very little out there that is more leading edge than an original Tesla X.
As for ChatGPT, which stands for “generative pre-trained transformer” in the form of what is now called a ChatBot, I have been forced to think about it due to my teaching. In my ethics course, which I am currently mid-semester in, I have assigned four essays over the course of the semester on the key ethical topics I am trying to highlight. The first was about the impact of social media and the need to regulate it. The others will cover corporate ESG policy, truth and lies in business and the topic of free markets. All of the press on ChatGPT has suggested that students can put a few key phrases together to frame the issue (the sort of things I do to ask them the questions they are supposed to write about), input it into the ChatGPT website, and specify a paper length and the program will spit out a high quality essay on the topic based on the current literature online. Needless to say, that is troublesome to a teacher that would hope that students would do their own research and gather their own thoughts. The notion of using some sort of program to help students write their thoughts or check the grammar or spelling of their papers is no big deal, but having an AI-based ChatBot write the paper is problematic. I have solved the problem by requiring them to notify me if they are using an AI bot to write the paper, but have not forbidden it. I think it is new enough that these students are unlikely to be active users of the technology just yet. I think in the coming years that will be another story altogether.
I have also recently been sent several articles about an AI ChatBot writing better stories than a human author can write. My writer and rider friend Steve tells me that he has had ChapGPT suggest titles for an article of his, something he feels he does not do too well, and he has been very impressed by the results. Maybe its cheating, but when has man not used crutches to shore up his weaknesses in whatever form they come? But again, using a ChatBot at the margin is different than using it at the core of a creative activity like storytelling. I somehow want to feel that I keep my hands on the metaphorical wheel of my storytelling more than just let a summary of ideas drive an AI ChatBot to its own creative conclusions. That seems to defeat the purpose, at least for me. It might devalue creative content, which does not really trouble me (it gets devalued every day with the number of people out there putting their thoughts into stories). I simply don’t want it to replace the pleasure I get from the creative process.
And that’s when it suddenly hit me. The two activities I prize most in my skill sets are driving (technically motorcycle riding, but close enough) and writing, and those are the two activities that the software world has decided are the initial beachheads for AI development. How did that happen and why is that? I can blame the autonomous driving on Elon Musk, something that I like to do with anything I don’t like in the world today, but I don’t know who to blame for ChatGPT other than Microsoft (I can’t even say Bill Gates these days since he is way disconnected to the company now).
What this makes me wonder is whether I have chosen creative and pleasurable activities that are the low hanging fruit of the creative universe. Usually automation occurs at the simplest of junctures, so its a hard question not to ask oneself. I guess that makes me ordinary and plebeian by normal standards. I am not too worried about that right now, but that is because I haven’t really seen ChatGPT yet do something better than I can do it (at least not in my opinion). I just downloaded it and another ChatBot and I took it on a road test (to mix AI metaphors). I downloaded a recent story of mine and asked it to come up with a good title. It gave me back two very accurate and descriptive titles, but they lacked the whimsy I seek that I feel intrigues and attracts the reader. Maybe it is just me that is attracted to the whimsy, but that is something I will have to determine over time. My mission for the moment is to figure out if I have been replaced and if that replacement is an upgrade. We’ll see.