A topic everyone is talking about today is Chat GPT. Chat GPT is the latest release from a company called Open AI, which is now being increasingly funded by Microsoft. Open AI is a natural language processing AI system. It picks up on human language from the internet, and it’s been learning how the English language works. Chat GPT is fundamentally better than Google when it is asked a question and this has put Google on red alert!
Chat GPT is designed to mimic an expert in any field. You could ask it to write your wedding vows, you can ask it to write you a menu, a recipe, a shopping list for a dinner party, you could ask it to be a business manager and write a letter and contract based on you being the speaker or author. You can ask it to write an essay on anything – the options are endless. Universities have been asking for this tool to write essays and they are coming out at around a B-minus mark of intelligence. Schools are therefore panicking because now students can use this system to write essays, and so they’re trying to find ways to pick up on whether Chat GPT has written an essay for a student or not. My personal view is actually that this is the wrong way of going about it. I think what we should actually be doing is embracing this technology and allowing people to learn something from this tool that they can have access to at any time. It’s like asking people not to use calculators, it wouldn’t happen because they are a tool that helps us be more efficient and accurate, and Chat GPT is the same.
What we must remember is that this is only version one of the programme. The next version which will come out later this year is 175 billion times better, which makes it that much more intelligent, that much faster, and so you can ask it anything you want and it will be even more accurate than it is already. To generate the text you have to prompt the programme, and tell it what character it’s playing, for example: “you are a mother of four kids and I want you to write a warm, engaging but stern email to your eldest child.” Or it could be a “fitness influencer who has helped millions of people around the world and I want you to write a blog post about your experience of helping women get over anorexia.” It could be absolutely anything you want.
What is important to realise is that every industry where there has been a drastic development like this has become de-materialised, devalued and de-monetised. Look at what’s happened to music, we all now listen to so much music suggested to us by Spotify, or we listen to recommended music for free on YouTube. So in that sense music has devalued. There was a time when speaking to a family member overseas was such a unique and expensive experience. Today, it’s so easy to be on the phone twenty-four hours a day, free of charge and be in constant communication with friends or family. Remember when we used to go and rent DVDs from shops? Today in comparison we have so many choices and we don’t even have to leave the home to rent a movie. All of these older concepts have become devalued because of new developments.
Welcome to the new generation of words. This is what Chat GPT has done for words and eventually writing and everything to do with it will become devalued because we have access to more and more of it. And this is only the beginning of the AI Tsunami which I think is going to take hold in 2023. And this is only the beginning of the AI tsunami. Moving forward we will start to have these kinds of concepts but for pictures or movies. DALL.E 2 is already starting this for images, and this technology is only going to develop further. DALLE.3 will do the same for movies, you can write a brief for your movie script, and out will come a short movie.
So, the big questions we have to ask ourselves are: How am I preparing for so much change? How can I learn about this as quickly as possible so I can start shifting how I add value to the world? It’s both terrifying and exciting at the same time! But the less terrified you are, the more creative you can become with it, and the more you can start using it. We are in RADIAL technological exponential growth this year and we need to not be fearful of it because that will stop us from even engaging with it and therefore moving forward with it in a way that we can benefit from.
We eat potatoes, whether they’re grown by human hands or harvested by machines. At the end of human agricultural times, people were very angry that machines were doing farming and wanted to boycott farms that were using machinery. What we are starting to see now is people boycotting these kinds of AI, but this is just a progression of it, like machine farming was a progression of human farming and we have to change with it rather than trying to stop it. This is not going anywhere. Look at electricity, when that was first discovered lots of jobs were lost because of it and many people’s lives were changed, but imagine if we had tried to boycott it.
So moving forward then… what we have to realise is that as humans, intelligence isn’t our future. Emotional awareness is our future and it’s a muscle that we’ve never been taught how to deal with, and we don’t even know how to make money out of it. But remember in agricultural times, nobody knew that you could make money out of being an accountant or a lawyer because there were no jobs like that, it was all about farming. And so as long as you elevate and evolve into this future you will have a future in this world.
So, welcome to the tsunami of AI in 2023, the most important thing we could do is be adaptable, and optimistic and unlearn old behaviours and wastes of added value. It’s not an easy process, and it’s a scary process, but we are absolutely all in it together and the more excited you are about it, the quicker you can engage with it and the quicker you can start to add value to the world, utilising it, rather than being scared of it.
My podcast co-host Erik Kruger and I have decided to put a course together that will start to teach people how to use this tool – guess what? There are no experts in this, we are also learning! So as we learn, we are going to teach others. One of the questions we want to look at is how quickly you can engage with this technology that works in a way that can elevate and evolve what you do. To sign up for The Expansive Impact of chatGPT on the Future of Work visit: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/8853518743989076569
By John Sanei
