Via the Interesting People list
The conventional fear—*It’s coming for our jobs!—*underrated the consequences of artificial intelligence in a very real sense. … No, the arrival of GPT-4 and the language programs preceding it forces us to confront much bigger questions: What is the value of originality? How does language construct meaning? And even, what is the nature of a person?
I think the article almost nails it. What I’m not happy about, but consider nearly inevitable, is that these tools will simply generate so much garbage text that a lot of what we call “the Internet” is simply going to drown in a flood of recombined text. Ted Chiangs “ChatGPT as a lossy JPEG” of internet text, recycled and regurgitated, will overwhelm the real human input.
So my friend went to ChatGPT and had it write a children’s French book about his son’s favorite superhero, specifying the grade level and length.
My oldest child has already used ChatGPT as a language learning tool. That’s a use I hadn’t thought about, but seems to be quite effective.
